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March 19, 2026Capacious:4 citations

A Pedagogy of Hauntology: Decolonizing the Curriculum With GIS

MMMichalinos Zembylas, Vivienne Bozalek, and Siddique Motala

Key Points

  • The paper aims to explore how hauntology can be integrated into higher education curricula to address historical injustices.
  • Utilized GIS mapping to analyze the historical context of South Africa's apartheid and colonial past.
  • Conducted a storytelling intervention focused on the District Six area of Cape Town.
  • Examined the effects of past injustices on current land and community dynamics.
  • GIS mapping effectively revealed the hidden narratives of apartheid injustices.
  • The storytelling approach engaged students in reflecting on historical impacts in their present lives.
  • Concepts like nonlinear time and dis/continuity were highlighted as essential in understanding the past's effects.

Abstract

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.

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Michalinos Zembylas, Vivienne Bozalek, and Siddique Motala (2020) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/69bb91c7496e729e6297f253https://doi.org/10.22387/cap2019.35
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