This text is a foothold for any scholar, teacher, or community member who has felt isolated by contradictions. It is a text for those who think in stories and make connections between paradoxical poles. At first, I was intimidated by the cacophony of stories and theories Regenspan uses to articulate her main objectives. However, halfway through the book, I started to see how these resources can uniquely support critical pedagogy, and I wrote down names of novels, films, and articles for my future lesson plans. The main question in this text is: how does one reconcile the personal with the political? Regenspan uses auto-ethnography fusing narrative with theory for a spiritual and philosophical entanglement with binaries: “the personal and the political,” “the particular and the general,” and “the psychoanalytical and the structural” to name a few. As a theoretical tool to maintain productive tension, she uses Avery Gordon’s (2008) idea of haunting to examine various absences in both formal and informal education. She also uses Bill Readings’ (1996)The University in Ruins to expose contemporary dangers of corporatizing knowledge through a commitment to market ideology.The text as a complete work shows how a productive use of tension underlies Regenspan’s two major commitments. First, she has a commitment to a global egalitarian project1 (Peterson, 2010) through a peaceful obligation to self and to others. She states explicitly that she “has no faith in violent revolution” (p. xxiv) but rather a commitment to democracy and the extension of democratic goals into the definition of what it means to be a teacher. Second, she implicitly suggests throughout the text that there cannot be a global egalitarian project without some form of spiritual foundation and education. She leaves the definition of “spiritual” open to readers but maintains a distance from religious dogmatism of any sort. Spiritual commitments to education, she argues, have been fragmented by neoliberal education and in turn manifest in structural violence and negatively impacting the mental health of students and teachers.The first chapter uses a series of narratives to show how “mind-body wholeness” (Dewey, 1961-1991) is rejected in contemporary education. She critiques higher education’s commitment to the vague notion of excellence that fragment people and thought by isolating and individualizing people and systems (Readings, 1996). Regenspan closes the chapter with a powerful example of how she taught The Communist Manifesto during the 2008 financial crisis while avoiding stereotypes about “totalitarian revolutionary communism” (p. 16) yet still critiquing the current situation. Each story, but this one in particular, exemplifies a pedagogy that pushes students to reconsider their commitments to market ideology and instead consider working toward a global egalitarian project. She concludes with two suggestions: one, educators should embrace critical hopefulness while avoiding signifiers of objectification used in binaries, and two, educators must prompt students to pay attention to distractions (or hauntings) and follow where they might lead.Chapter two illustrates the tension between community learning and instrumental knowledge at the intersection of a teacher-activist identity. She distinguishes between “personal growth in the context of community” and “instrumental knowledge” (p. 24), where the latter is focused on market ideology, personal gain, and excellence (Readings, 1996). To illustrate this, she narrates her experience teaching a course called Social Action as Curriculum, taught a few years before and after the attack on the World Trade Center. The course organized a community mural project and English tutoring for Iraqi men and women. Both projects help her recount the ever present tension between being both an activist and a teacher and the opposition this raised in her department and community. Even as she continued to teach the course post 9/11, she felt disappointed because the course was no longer what Dewey calls “a conjoint communication experience,” or an experience where individuals with conflicting opinions and experiences work together in a community. She concludes the chapter by reiterating how all these experiences, but especially the demise of her course, haunt her. The absence of the course parallels the absence of public discourse around collective responsibility to one another.In Chapter 3, Regenspan gives the best description of how haunting might be used as a tool for pedagogy, borrowing for this purpose the term hauntagogy from her colleague Mark Stern. Hauntagogy challenges the notion that “there are two sides to every story,” a philosophical stance that is often ingrained into students through years of schooling. She extends this to critique the traditional political binary that most of her students use: conservative v. liberal politics. She argues that this ideology can be used as a tool to justify wrong practices without question. The practice of hauntagogy may require excluding information because students are not able to be haunted by the reality of the situation. To illustrate her meaning she describes how photographer Alfredo Jaar buried his photographs that documented the horrors of the Rwandan genocide because the American public was not in a position to experience the full trauma through photography. The purpose of hauntagogy is to justly connect personal hauntings with structural social inequality. She closes the chapter by asking “how to best connect global accumulation practices that have been normalized for our students with the damage those practices have done” (p. 62). Hauntagogy, she argues, can help students and teachers face the ghosts of Western imperialism and colonization.In Chapter Four, Regenspan shows how haunting, affect, and contradictions all connect. She argues that emotion marks haunted instances of social contradiction. Though many hesitate about the use of emotion in education, Regenspan uses affect to mark contradictions rather than absolute solutions; the response, then, lies within the ability to feel the contradiction. For her, literature is an interdisciplinary tool that can transcend the fragmented nature of disciplinarity and bifurcation by eliciting emotion. Using the novel Animal Dreams, she shows how students learn to unify art with science and the personal with the political. She reiterates how global inequality leads to haunting, whether individuals experience that haunting or not.Chapter 5 expresses the power of literacy. Before learning to read, Regenspan’s daughter became hysterical because she could not code and decode symbols to communicate. Regenspan recognizes this as her daughter's fear of being excluded from the culture and codes of power, so she responds by explaining that mastering tools for communication will come with time and is different than having a valuable story to communicate to others. Regenspan connects this to the testing culture of education and the mechanical literacy emphasis that she fears makes children develop literacy skills only as an economic tool for subjective autonomy (Readings, 1996) rather than for connection, communication, and identity. Haunting, in this context, helps Regenspan navigate the deep contradictions of students’ “complex personhoods” (p. 91). This process is currently restricted by “patriarchal market relations” (p. 100) that perpetuate “subjective autonomy as the terms of their growth and development” (p. 3). By way of example, she shows how three teachers carefully craft history lessons to help students and teachers collectively learn that some stories have one side and others have many sides.In Chapter 6, Regenspan describes how teaching the novel This Side of Brightness can help students understand “complex personhood.” This is a form of wild education (Britzman, 2009) that challenges students to affectively connect and come to love un-loveable characters, thereby pushing students to be haunted by structural inequality and generational transmissions of trauma. The text is a multigenerational account of an African American’s family encounters with generational transmissions of trauma in New York City. Historical fiction, like This Side of Brightness, allows for affect and imagination to be taught alongside history, which opens up possibilities to understand the nuances of historical relationships. Regenspan describes how practices in psychoanalysis may be abundant resources for exploring the inner depths of personal lives as they connect with political structures, but she warns that too much attention to the personal may lead to narcissism. Therefore, she proposes that one must always maintain a healthy tension between critically analyzing cultures of power and reflecting on personal affect. Her goal in teaching this text is to help students come into agreement that every human is “worthy of the same weight of material and spiritual resources as we are” (p. 119). She concludes by naming an idea that has been loosely alluded to throughout the book: forgiveness with a hopeful tension that requires students to sit in an uncomfortable realization of the oppressive social systems they participate in.Chapter 7 uses a series of “ghost stories” to show how political consequences manifest in personal relationships. In the first story, she narrates her husband David’s childhood attempt to write a happy ghost story to make sense of grandmother’s death and how it was shut down by his mother. She compares this to the technocratic practices that restrict students to a conservative and “suffocating reality principle” (p. 128), meaning that they must see themselves and their schooling only in the narrow structure of capitalism. Instrumentalized education, in turn, obliterates the ability of students to be empathetic. Regenspan borrows a second example from the Yup'ik community’s experience with intergenerational trauma, illustrating the ghosts that continue to follow after overt colonization and genocide. According to community member Harold Napolean, the community buried the tragedy because they don't have the language to understand or communicate what happened to them.Regenspan fears students are internalizing market ideologies so quickly that communities lack the words to even articulate the situation and instead respond to their dying spirit with denial and addiction.Regenspan closes with a poem reminding readers that this is not just a theoretical journey, but also a personal one where she grapples with the limits of both psychoanalysis and Marxism in her own life and work. She retheorizes what it means to be born into dependency in current social and political structures, but she ends with the hope of reconciliation through the use of haunting in education. This is an excellent theoretical and practical text for educators committed to global egalitarian projects and various forms of spiritual education. My one major critique is a caution for her to proceed with care when connecting contemporary corporatization and neoliberal education to Indigenous experiences. These connections are complex and require a robust analysis of how dominant social structures relate to Indigenous communities. One such complexity, I believe, is the spiritual nature of Indigenous communities, which is frequently misrepresented in academic discussions, writing, and education. I commend Regenspan for making bold connections between spiritual, mental, and political aspects of education. This is a deep engagement with what it takes to reconcile “the particular” and “the general” using spiritual education, but it avoids popular romanticizing around structural inequality. Though I struggled to capture the multiplicity of her complex thoughts trapped between the rigid lines of academic writing, I found the text challenging, educative, and exciting. Her writing is like a quilt, sewing together pieces that would not otherwise fit, with squares she pulls from her own bag of life experiences and knowledges. As a finished project, it is artfully messy, a little unorthodox, but as all quilts do, it works.This research is funded by the National Science Foundation Grant No. (DGE-1247399).
Kelsey Dayle John (Thu,) studied this question.