This paper raises issues pertinent to European educational ethnography in two UK Arts and Humanities Research Council projects. The author is PI for the one of these, Working with social haunting,  and a Co-I for the other, (R)agency: Lived practices of anger. Both projects bring an interdisciplinary lens to the affective dimension of social life: its ‘structures of feeling’, in Raymond Williams’ still fruitful articulation (Williams, 1977). Bright’s contribution to the projects deploys an ethnographic approach and the framework of a ‘social haunting’ (Gordon, 1997) to investigate how contested pasts construct, and are themselves (re)constructed, within affective communities (Walkerdine and Jiminez, 2012) through “barely visible or highly symbolised” means (Gordon, 1997: 50)

According to Gordon, a social haunting “…registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present” and is “one prevalent way in which modern systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life”. Articulating a social haunting requires “an ethnographic project [that writes] a history of the present” by “imagining beyond the limits of what is already understandable” (195) and therefore troubles forms of knowledge production, suggesting a hybrid inquiry directed toward the “blind field” of disciplines. It is as much attuned to the felt as to the known and involves "a lateral move…a sideways step into what normally gets stepped over” (Stuart, 2010). This paper considers how ‘arts-attentive’ ethnography might be key to developing such an inquiry.

Bright’s work in the English coalfields has shown how structures of social life – schooling, in particular – are experienced by working class young people in ways that are shaped by these “ghostly matters” (Gordon, 1997). Consequently, any investigation of those experiences challenges the boundaries of educational ethnography as a project of the understandable. Working with social haunting is currently investigating communal being-ness in two ‘communities of value’: the Rochdale Pioneers Museum of the Co-operative movement and the South Yorkshire Community Branch of UNITE (the trade union) in the South Yorkshire coalfield. Working with these partners in an innovative co-production space playfully called a ‘Ghost Co-Lab’, the project draws on theoretical insights from Cultural Studies, History, Architecture, Creative Arts Practice, and Social Theory and uses multiple forms of representation – poetry; radio art; comic strip; critical performance ethnography. The aim is to work beyond the limits of the understandable by generating a hybrid montage “of criticism and discovery” (Taussig, 1987: 445) capable of registering those affective atmospheres (Anderson, 2009) that proliferate at the “cusp of semantic availability” (Williams, 1977) and are apprehended via an intuitive and affective register that is something “like a sixth sense” (Stewart, 2010).

R/Agency, similarly works at the boundaries of disciplines and the borders of research/performance. It is a multi-disciplinary network, drawing together a team of researchers working in a number of different fields – both creative and critical – and a series of research activities and case studies that together form an investigation of what the role and potentialities of anger might be in communities. Bright’s role in R/Agency is primarily as a performance ethnographer/auto-ethnographer convening and performing a project theme called In Angry Tongues: creative practices of anger in politicised poetry, song writing and performance.

The overall focus will be on the theoretical and practical productivities and tensions that these kinds of approaches suggest for educational ethnography and will detail how ‘classic’ educational ethnographic methods might fruitfully be expanded, particularly by means of arts-based approaches, critical performance ethnography and auto-ethnography. This will be of general interest to the international community of educational ethnographers.

Anderson, B. 2009. Affective atmospheres. In Emotion, Space and Society. 2. Gordon, A. 1997, Ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination. Santa Barbara: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota. Stewart, K. 2010. Atmospheric attunements. In Rubric, 1. Taussig, M. 1987. Shamanism, colonialism, and the wild man. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Walkerdine, V. 2010. Communal being-ness and affect: An exploration of trauma in an ex-industrial Community. In Body and society 2010. 16: 1. 91-117. Walkerdine, V. and Jimenez, L. 2012. Gender, work and community after deindustrialisation: A psychosocial approach to affect. Houndhills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, R. 1977. Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.