How educational research is conducted has material consequences, particularly for historically marginalized communities, and we therefore have an ethical responsibility to interrogate the ways in which we construct and present truth in research. One way in which educational research can progress in its efforts to find truths with the power to disrupt multiple forms of oppression is by adopting research frameworks and practices that attend to the lingering impacts of past violence (as well as of past formulations of what is true), even or especially when such episodes appear “over-and-done-with” (Gordon, 1997/2008, p. xvi) and the lines running from past to present are obscured. Multiple scholars have turned to the idea of hauntings and the spectral or ghostly as one way of conceptualizing these oft-overlooked traces of what was. In this presentation, I demonstrate how key tenets of hauntology, as a theoretical framework first developed by Derrida (1993) and later extended by Barad (2010), might be applied to research on science curricula and teaching in order to aid researchers and educators in uncovering how forgotten or disavowed ideas and figures from the history of science can appear as simultaneously overlooked and actively impacting what students learn. Hauntology extends beyond other new materialist theories is in its use of the spectral to trouble the notion of materiality itself. Where new materialism argues for a need to take the material world seriously, hauntology suggests that often it is figures about which it is difficult to say with certainty if they are materially present or not that exert the greatest influence, precisely because their ghostly nature makes their influence difficult to detect and address. Given the underutilization of science history in teaching students the nature of science as a human practice (Milne, 2013), hauntology can help researchers in science education re-conceptualize science history not simply as an absence in much of the K-12 science curriculum, but as an absent-presence that effects what students learn about science not only by not being explicitly included, but also by the way in which this history lurks, barely detectable, behind the tools and ideas that are taught. I use the example of the eugenics movement’s spectral influence on scientific tools typically used in teaching heredity to explore both how problematic episodes from history may be exerting an unseen influence in science classrooms and what ethical obligations might emerge from recognizing these ghosts.

Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/ continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today 3(2), 240-268. Derrida, J. (1993/1994). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. London: Routledge. Gordon, A. & Radway, J. (1997/2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Milne, C. (2013) Creating stories from history of science to problematize scientific practice: A case study of boiling points, air pressure, and thermometers.