The presentation, in which I plan to argue the current need of the sustainable pedagogy of place, including a haunted place, will be framed by Derrida’s hauntology (the word ‘hauntology’ as a play on the word ‘ontology’ which sounds like hauntology in French). Whereas traditional ontology provides taxonomies of things that exist, hauntology is an ontology of a specter, a being whose existence is not clearly defined, and its presence – like its absence – is uncertain regarding time and space / place. My earlier study and discoveries about the sense of the public (Mendel, 2022) mean that, on the one hand, one wants to free the present from the haunting. On the other hand, one wants to reclaim the sense of the public that comes from the past. In both cases, the conversation with the inheritance from past generations – which is the specter of the ‘public’ – takes place in the present and for the future in the name of justice. This ethical postulate underlies Derrida’s thought. As he wrote about ‘Specters of Marx’, ‘one must, magically, chase away a specter, exorcise the possible return of a power held to be baleful in itself and whose demonic threat continues to haunt the century’ (Derrida,1994: 120). To do this we should learn justice ‘from the ghost’ (221). Derrida, recommending sensitivity to the specters, learning from them, and talking to them [‘It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it (xix)], warns against seduction. Obsessions established ideas and ideologies are expression of the fact that we have been seduced by the specters and they, instead of us, speak using our voice. To better understand this aspect of Derrida’s thoughts, you can refer to the author of Real Cities, Steve Pile, who accurately reconstructed Derrida’s model of haunting and the ghost. For Pile,

to create an equitable, fair, and democratic city, we must take into account the dead, but not become possessed by them . . . We cannot ignore the dead, otherwise we may never learn from them, nor will we honour them. But nor can we endlessly and melancholically entrapped in the relentless, drowning flow of their history. London’s ghosts have, on occasion, proved to be a liability. What is true for London, is also true for New Orleans, Berlin, Singapore, Paris, New York and, possibly, every other city too. Cities cannot simply give up the ghost. Even the physical structures themselves – or the gaps they leave behind when they ‘pass on’ – can become ghosts’ (2005: 160–161).

On the one hand, the hauntology particularly addresses the non-humans, the specters, which act in specific time (out of joint) and place (haunted). On the other, haunting belongs to the human thought about the structure of every hegemony. Time and place are at the center of (re)thinking hauntology and its political, social, and materialist implications (cf. Bozalek et al. 2021: 1). Doing this via educational thought, which I propose, might make it useful in a practical dimension, more and more important in light of the ongoing crisis of life on Earth.

In my empirical study, I was looking for traces of the existence of local ghosts in the statements of interviewed inhabitants of Gdansk. In the thematic content analysis of the interviews, I was interested in discontinuities, ‘bends’ of local memory, in which specters could reveal their actions. The results led to prospective conclusions, including the recommendation of the concept of sustainable pedagogy of place, sensitive to ghosts and haunted places.

The starting point was a question: are there traces of specters in the content of the interviews referring to the local space (Gdansk) and if there are, what are they and what role do they play in this content? Searching for answers I revisited the data of qualitative part of the research project: Identity of contemporary Gdansk inhabitants: what are we, what would we like to be? (Ciechorska-Kulesza et al., 2019). I worked for this project as scientific consultant. Based on the analyzes of the collected empirical material (1000 participants), groups of Gdansk’s residents were identified that show similarity to each other in terms of three independent variables: (1) structural location (social position), (2) origin (in this case, the size category of the place of origin was used) and (3) declared activity, opinions and behaviors related to the civic and social sphere. Based on these variables (via cluster analysis method) and the results of a qualitative study based on 30 in-depth interviews, 6 profiles of inhabitants were determined, differing basically: lifestyle, declared values, patterns of cultural activity or attitude to Gdansk: Young Townsmen, Pragmatic Students, Withdrawn Shipyard Workers, Retiring Pioneers, Aspiring Professionals, and Analog Activists. In my revisit, in which the research material consisted of interviewees' statements structured in 6 identity profiles, I used the qualitative content analysis method (QCA). In the QCA researchers are more interested in the meanings associated with messages than with the number of times message variables occur (Frey et al., 1999: chapter 9). In my QCA I used a 5-element approach inspired by Szczepaniak's proposal (2012: 110): 1/ Selection of empirical material (in my ‘revisit': the fragments of interviews structured in 6 identity profiles) 2/ Repeated analytical reading (selecting fragments that are interesting in my searching for 'working' ghosts) 3/ Creating a categorization key (a process of aggregating similar threads while trying to capture the maximum thematic diversity) 4/ Defining the categories in the key (the way in which they were distinguished) 5/ Building tables with quotes and their research reconstruction (important for me as a researcher who wants to provide the recipients of information about my research with some empirical material, without having to refer directly to the entirety of the texts).

It is clear that - after Pile (2005) – ‘various pasts’ coexisting in Gdansk and places in it ‘haunted more than others’ affect every interviewed Gdansk resident. To give an example, writing about Young Townsmen, Aspiring Professionals or Analog Activists, I described the negative dimensions of their relationship with ghosts and places that could be considered haunted. These negatives were related to the gentrifying effect of being overwhelmed by ‘noble Gdansk’ (one of the most saturated, descriptive categories). Seduced by the deceptive charm, they lose sight of 'the rest of the world' and need an education focused on 'justice to come'. The sensitivity to the more-than-human world (of which specters are a part), practiced in this education, could not only protect against the seduction that feeds on the exuberant human ego, but also open to a better world. As Carsten aptly notes: (…) the future of nature (and therefore of humanity) will be substantially different from the past. The Anthropocene marks the termination of the stable climatological conditions of the Holocene during which agriculture, civilization and industry developed and flourished (…). Under such circumstances, the hauntological task of pedagogy involves more than mere chronicling; its purpose is to forge a real justice-to-come; in other words, more inclusive and tangible ways of imagining a future that is not bound up in destructive fantasies of progress and human mastery. If there is to be any future, therefore, (…) pedagogues will urgently require new ways of conceptualizing in their curriculums, teaching practices and research outputs the more-than-human natural histories. (Carstens, 2021: 123). Thanks to such hauntological pedagogy we will be able to learn to converse with the more-than-human spectres that are now haunting us. Therefore, I finally present the prospective conclusions regarding the need for sustainable pedagogy of the place, sensitive to haunted places.

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