Conference Agenda

This paper explores how Derrida’s concept of hauntology provides a theoretical and material framework for analyzing the persistence of institutionalized antiblackness in student leadership and coalition building within multicultural spaces. Using a case study of a “multicultural center” within a predominantly white institution, it analyzes the “haunting” effects of institutional memory, policies, and physical spaces that perpetuate harm and disrupt collaboration among student leaders. Ultimately, it argues for institutions to move beyond performative diversity and toward equitable, futurist possibilities grounded in transformative praxis. Delving into the metaphorical and spiritual dimensions of hauntology, this work aims to connect to practices of cleansing, exorcism, and reclamation. These practices are informed by beliefs, ethics, and cultural values, offering a pathway for institutions to confront and dismantle the ghosts of antiblackness while creating new spaces for restorative work. Higher education institutions are often sites where systemic racism and antiblackness persist, even as they claim commitments to diversity and inclusion. These systemic issues are not just rooted in the policies and practices of the present but are also shaped by the lingering “ghosts” of historical harm, exclusion, and erasure. Derrida’s concept of hauntology provides a lens to analyze these persistent specters and their impact on student leadership and coalition-building efforts in multicultural spaces. This paper is an invitation to for those in higher education who are invested in cultivating and sustaining culturally responsive pedagogies and practices within hostile environments to come together to collectively confront the oppressive ghosts that haunt our institutions. Together we will explore strategies for confronting our ghosts within the academy and discover methods for a collaborative “cleansing” of the material and embodied heart and mind spaces from which we work.

In this work, we draw from conversational narratives with preservice science teachers (PSTs) to explore kinship as both an ethical stance and a pedagogical resource. While science teacher preparation often foregrounds content mastery, PSTs’ reflections suggest that their development as inclusive educators emerged through relational memories such as stories, conflicts, and solidarities formed within and beyond the cohort. These ties, described as “my village” or “a network of ideas I can bounce off,” became the ethical infrastructure from which they approached justice-oriented teaching in science classrooms. Their narratives reveal that inclusion is not a default, but a practice learned over time, shaped by coursework where they remembered and shared personal histories (religions, languages, hobbies) and field experiences that taught them to offer accommodations without stripping students of dignity. “I don’t see color” was rejected not as innocence, but as erasure. One PST reframed: “I see it, and this is why I want to be inclusive.” These insights emerged from a dialogic space that valued memory as pedagogy, where humility allowed them to move “beyond surface level,” to listen deeply, and to remember others well. We frame this through Karen Barad’s (2007) relational becoming, where kinship is not a fixed identity but a continuous reconstitution of self-with-others: human and more-than-human. In an era of political polarization and heightened scrutiny over what is taught in schools, these stories offer kinship as a memory-based counter-force: a collective practice of ethical mattering (Authors 2023), remembering, resisting deficit framings, and preparing to confront inequity not through indoctrination, but through lived justice. We invite the field to see cohort kinship as a deliberately cultivated, historically entangled practice that sustains inclusive science teaching.

This conceptual paper draws from our experiences as teacher educators, exploring what healing and justice renewal mean to us personally, with the pre-service teachers we teach, and in the classrooms they will eventually lead. We draw on Barad’s concepts of becoming and diffraction, alongside posthumanism, to reframe pre-service teacher learning as an ongoing process of dynamic self-differentiation—entwined with the reverberations of their ontoepistemological roots. Becoming emphasizes fluidity and multiplicity, viewing identity as continually evolving. Barad’s diffraction involves iterative re-turnings that reconfigure understanding. We also engage Haraway’s response-ability to consider how ethical responsiveness and collective knowing can be cultivated. Using dialogic reflexivity, we analyze narratives from our students to link theory with lived experience, echoing Butler’s (1993) reconfiguration of reality through discourse. Recognizing ourselves and our students as always in process, we share tensions in our praxis and draw from Author et al. (2021) to explore identity and difference in our classrooms. We aim to “work difference” (Ellsworth & Miller, 1996), finding generative connections across diverse perspectives. This framing affirms identity as fluid and transformative, reshaping how justice and liberation are imagined in education. Our work engages the complexities of social foundations in teacher education, focusing on how our beliefs and practices—shaped by personal histories—intersect with those of our students. We examine the tensions that arise when student-centered pedagogy meets entrenched socialization patterns. While not always explicitly focused on justice, the instructor’s commitment to transformation underscores pedagogy’s potential as a site of healing. Ultimately, this paper contributes to broader discussions of equity and justice in education, offering insights into how classrooms can serve as spaces for ethical engagement, personal renewal, and collective transformation.

This conceptual paper interrogates how whiteness is rendered invisible yet communicated through popular discourses surrounding progressive schooling philosophies—Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and Steiner/Waldorf—and how these pedagogies, born of resistance and necessity, are appropriated as markers of capitalist status, including wealth, exceptionality, and protection. Drawing on Hunter Knight’s (2022) work on the production of “innocence” in progressive education, we frame our inquiry with Hasslanger’s (2000) understanding of race as “the social meaning of the geographically marked body,” and Lipsitz’s (2006) notion of whiteness as a resource-hoarding identity investment. Using dialogic reflexivity (Author et al., 2021), we reflect on our diverse experiences with U.S. progressive schooling, in contrast with its post-war philosophical origins and current forms in Italy. Situating the study outside the U.S. illuminates how these pedagogies appear and function across racial and cultural contexts, aiding our understanding of their racialized implications when recontextualized in the United States. Our data includes observations and conversations from teaching an education policy course in Rome, examining how the philosophies’ origins are reshaped through U.S. popular media and discourse. We consider how these pedagogies are racialized over time as part of an ongoing project of whiteness and ask: how does this happen, and what might we learn from tracing their cultural histories? Confronting racism, in increasingly divided times, requires examining how progressive whiteness undermines redistributive efforts and obscures racial discourse. The idiosyncratic “progressive” associated with “nice white parents” (Joffe-Walt, 2020) complicates not only the redistribution of resources but also our ability to address the systemic ideologies upheld by a “possessive investment in whiteness” (Lipsitz, 2006) within progressive education, and those who tie their identities to the modern incarnations of these progressive philosophies.

On the path to rebuilding a sense of hope rooted in nuanced understanding, this paper argues for correspondence as an affective method—one that braids theory and method to invite researchers and participants alike to surrender to the reverberations of history and the emotionality of inquiry. Memory is evocative; it links us through time, bringing emotions both old and new from within and beyond ourselves (Ahmed, 2014; Halbwachs, 1952/1992; Lawler, 2001). Just as we reconcile our memories with the present (Pequignot, 2012), we also reconcile emotions with their origins—shaped internally and by the social spaces we inhabit (Ahmed, 2014). This interplay of memory and emotion informs the historical production of personhood (Holland & Lave, 2009), as we construct identity through the integration of history, memory, action, and cognition (Russell, 2006). Choosing cultural and personal artifacts allows us to make sense of this integration. When we commit memory to paper by hand, the act becomes intimate, affective, and generative, the crafting of artifacts. Handwriting letters demands time with oneself—often uncomfortably so. The recipient is not a physical presence but an emotional one. Unlike conversation, correspondence offers meditative space. We choose, in solitude, what and how to share. This privacy bypasses the self-monitoring often present in face-to-face dialogue, especially when discussing emotionally charged topics (Flemming, 2020; Siraj, 2010). Inquiry inevitably risks pain. Sitting with our own thoughts—and then with others’—requires waiting that feels capacious and uncertain. This indeterminacy can be generative. Letter writing provides refuge: a protected space for reflection, alone or together. Perhaps we owe it to ourselves and those who trust us with their stories, to lean into the affective dimensions of research that resides in the practice of correspondence, where what emerges on the page may reawaken our senses and help us sit with feeling before choosing how to move forward.