What can humour and augmented reality do on-site? Towards a creative hauntology

This article asks fundamentally what role humour and AR play in decolonization initiatives affecting citizens of different kinds in their perception of historical and present-day colonialism. The point of departure will be a humorous augmented reality city walk that was developed by us as researchers to practice hauntology using augmented reality in a ‘polar’ neighbourhood in Aarhus in Denmark. My focus will be on how the humour and AR is received and responded to through an analysis of the creative productions of three high school classes. My ambition is to perform a comparative analysis between student groups having diverse ethnic backgrounds to detect the educational ways the tactics used in the walk influence the students and their responsibility towards colonial issues differently, and to see how the students felt differently implicated by the site itself, the affordances of the digital design and the modality of humour. Theoretically I aim at combining a hauntological framework with political theory approaches.