This paper will draw on the writer’s on-going relationship to the site of his doctoral study of young people's alienation from school in a de-industrialised UK coal mining community and will discuss the relevance of the concept of precarity to educational ethnography. In a series of publications the author has already begun to question educational ethnography's capacity to respond to the affective turn in social theory in general and, in particular, to the atmospherics and transmissions of affect as they relate to historical geographies of social class and education. With reference to ethnographic materials relating to local inter-generational responses to the death of Margaret Thatcher in 2013 and the thirtieth anniversary of the UK miners’ strike in 2014, this paper considers the affective dimensions of precarity as an aspect of what Avery Gordon (1997) has called a “social haunting” and attempts, in light of that, a writing practice attuned to “Precarity’s forms [as] compositional and decompositional” that “magnetize attachments, tempos, materialities, and states of being... a writing culture lodged in emergence, generativity, and potentiality. (Stewart, 2012: 524) References: Gordon: 1997. Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis. UoM Stewart. K. 2012. ‘Precarity’s forms. In Cultural Anthropology. 27:3. 518-525.