Topic and research question

This paper explores the transformation process public schools in a Danish context are undergoing. The very core of the school is altered through various organizational and managerial technologies which imply new ways of organizing, leading and cooperation. These transformation technologies are aiming at breaking up usual ways of practice and create new voices about progressive schools, but they do also create tensions and increased affective intensities. However empirical work shows that these transformation technologies at the same time submerge other eluded voices which have an unforeseen impact on the transformation process and a co-constitutive power. The paper explores how these eluded voices from my empirical work can be read through post human concepts like affectivity and hauntology and explored methodologically through a performativity perspective, in order to shed light on how they disturb the school leaders attempt to enhance change and implement the school reform. The approach of affectivity and hauntology allows me to study the non-narrativezable, the contradictory fragments, the submerged narratives and affective traces, which still has an impact on the transformation process (Blackman 2012, 2015; Cho 2007; 2008; Trivelli 2015). The ambition of this paper is to contribute to the field of non-representational methodologies working with the affective hauntology in order to offer insight into the mere troubled part of the reform process (Brøgger 2014; 2015; Pors 2016).

Conceptual and theoretical framework

In order to frame eluded voices, the paper draws on the concept hauntology understood as an ‘absent presence’ (Derrida 1994). It draws attention to that every concept is haunted by its mutually constituted excluded other (Barad 2010), and in an awareness of the ‘absent’, the present in the school can be rendered meaningful (Vass 2015). The absent can be understood as past or future submerged voices. The concept hauntology offers an analytic understanding of the temporal dimension in the process, of what was and is yet to come. The school reform is often seen upon as a linear transformation process, but the process also implies a constant orientation towards past and future practices and a collapse of a linear orientation of time and space.

The transformation process is a transition between old and new practices, where usual practice is disrupted, and it gives rise to an increased affective atmosphere, which feeds frustrated and submerged voices. Therefore the paper also draws on the concept affect in order to understand, how different bodies in the school are affectively targeted and modulated, how they affect the social life in the school, how they give rise to/submerge absent voices, and how they affect the intended transformation process in unforeseen ways (Bjerg and Staunæs 2011; Massumi 2002; Blackman 2012). According to Derrida a ghost is always a revenant (Derrida 1994), so the more absent and submerged the voices of the ghost becomes, the more it haunts and disturb; it feeds the ghost. Hauntology makes it possible to explore what voices in my empirical material are submerged but still haunt, what voices are dominant, and how do they become a co-constitutive affective force in the social life and space in the school (Brøgger 2015).

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