Haunted classrooms: materialities and imaginaries of embodied and embedded encounters with the dead

This paper analyses a research-based transdisciplinary pedagogy project at University College Cork, Ireland. We invited students to engage with peers across traditionally non-cognate subjects – theatre and archaeology aiming to queer encounters with the dead by challenging subject boundaries and cultures, thereby allowing students to recognise and potentially transgress disciplinary norms, while offering new imaginaries of the dead and corollary implications for the living. These encounters open relational spaces in our classrooms, which resist the rending of human as object and make space for the ways in which working with bones shimmer across a range of registers, allowing for affects, including mourning, to emerge and inform our understandings of place, time, and culture, more typically eschewed in traditional settings of the university. Our students found that the interaction reinforces how it is the performativity of everyday actions that moulds bodies, skeletons and lives. Reading these traces through an embodied and expansive lens in this way, provoked by the trans-disciplinary approaches, offers new queer horizons for students’ own experiences and approaches to learning. This emerges in sharing across personal, political, and cultural modes of storytelling that are at the heart of both archaeology and theatre. The paper includes anonymised comments from students.