2025 Theses Doctoral

Haunting Whiteness in Teaching

Neufeld, Madeleine

Teaching is haunted by whiteness, and it also bears the capacity to interrupt it. This study makes a cut into the ghostly resonances of teaching and its normalizing practices by following the residue of the material-affective-embodied ways of whiteness in teaching and imagining it otherwise. Dwelling with these ghosts can etch the ways whiteness is baked into the everyday spaces, times, and practices of teaching through its atmospheric and ordinary violences.

Drawing on affect studies, critical posthumanism, Black studies, and hauntology, I ask: What aspects of teaching are haunted by atmospheres of whiteness? How do racialized hauntings materialize in the after hours of school? Over the course of nine months, I conducted case studies at two urban public high schools with six teacher participants. I pursued the racialized hauntings by spending time with teachers in the after hours of the school day, when classes had ended, and the sticky events lingered.

Through practices of interviewing, shadowing, arts-based artifact creation, and poetic inquiry, I rendered haunting atmospheres of whiteness in three sites: the palimpsest school space that held the leftovers of white flight, materialized in the carceral and ill-fitting spatialization; windowless classrooms that flickered inter(n)ment in the holding spaces; and the after hours that surfaced the racialized remains of the day alongside the attenuation of the teacher body. White teachers in the study were agentive and injurious in atmospheric whiteness, but also worn down by its frictions. Whiteness worked to rub smooth its violence and fix the past as fully past, but the racial hauntings belied this erasure. Attending to these ghosts invites the spectral speculative to imagine and sustain affirmative possibilities for teaching, working against the slow death of a haunted profession.

This dissertation study contributes to research on teaching and research on whiteness and teaching that inquires beyond the bounds of the sovereign subject, as well as non-representational and speculative research methodologies.