Abstract

On May 3, 2022, I was visited by three ghosts: the ghosts of witches past, witches present, and witches future - a trinity of temporally separate entities that also transcend temporal boundaries. That is the nature of a ghost, after all - they arrive from other times with “intimations, hints, suggestions, and portents” (Gordon, 1997, p. x). I am [AUTHOR’S NAME], and I am a white cis woman, a haunted historian, and a witch. In 2022,I set out to make political theatre with the ghosts of the murdered Pendle Witches to share with the public the “repressed and unresolved social violences” that were making themselves known to me. That is how sociologist Avery Gordon defines being haunted, as “an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known” (1997, p. xvi). Drawing on this conception, I claim that haunting is the public pedagogical method used by ghosts to educate the public about lingering and ongoing social violences in order to prompt the living to work towards social justice (Sandlin, 2011; Desai, 2020). We are all haunted but have been taught to ignore, write off, or fear such experiences. In this paper, I will expound upon the ghosts and their hauntings as a form of public pedagogy, demonstrate why theatre - embodied storytelling - is a suitable artform for accessing and activating hauntings, and then reanimate my hauntingly educational interactions with the ghosts of witches past, present, and future through the process of creating a play about witches as Roe v. Wade fell.

Keywords: ghosts; hauntings; public pedagogy; theatre; women

How to Cite:

Davis, N. K., (2025) “Haunting as public pedagogy: Creating theatre with ghostly witches as Roe fell”, Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education 42(1), 61-80. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jcrae.7627