Hauntings Across the Divide: Transdisciplinary Activism, Dualisms, and the Ghosts of Racism in Engineering and Humanities Education

In this paper, we report on an intervention across continents and disciplines that brought together differently positioned students in South Africa and the USA. A collaboration between our classes—an introductory Geographic Information Systems (GIS) class in South Africa and a composition class in the United States—was facilitated and investigated by us. The point of departure of the intervention was to service socially just and anti-racist pedagogies through experimentation. Drawing on posthumanist, feminist, and new materialist theory, we investigate the hauntings of several prejudices and stereotypical tropes that foster racism. We link the concept of hauntology to Plumwood’s (1993) theorization of dualisms. We then draw a cartography of geomatics education in South Africa, focusing on the subjectification of geomatics graduates in particular and engineering graduates in general. We then zoom to our collaboration, and focus on several interactions amongst the cohorts to show instances of hauntings that perpetuate anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and related silences. We find that analysis of dualisms can highlight racist hauntings, and can also provide guidance on how to flatten hierarchies. Our transdisciplinary activism allows us to harness the positivity of difference to trouble binaries. We conclude with some thoughts on pandemic pedagogy in an unequal world.