This paper explores how a pedagogy of hauntology might be enacted in a higher education curriculum, taking into account the ghosts of South Africa’s apartheid and colonial past. To do so, the paper focuses on the ways in which Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping and analysis reveal the absent/presences of the there/then, here/now and the effects of the past/present on people's lives and the land. Situated in engineering education in a South African university of technology, the paper shows that GIS can be used to animate hitherto occluded injustices of the past by means of a micro-instance of activism in the form of a storytelling intervention. By telling the story of apartheid violence related to District Six in Cape Town through the lens of GIS, we demonstrate how the affectivity and materiality of forced removals and violent dispossession become revivified through useful pedagogical concepts such as sensibility towards nonlinear time, in/determinacy and dis/continuity to address the specters of the past/present.
Michalinos Zembylas, Vivienne Bozalek, and Siddique Motala (Sat,) studied this question.