In Chapter 3, Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen and Dorthe Staunæs grapple with how race and racialisation emerge as ghostly matters in diversity politics of higher education. The authors write in the context of higher education in Denmark in which racial ontologies are simultaneously present and absent. Universities in Denmark are white spaces, hence the authors strive to examine the spectre(s) of whiteness as they return to haunt higher education spaces. Using the idiom ‘the elephant in the room’ and the position of elephants in colonial archives, Hvenegård-Lassen and Staunæs turn to a diffractive methodology to explore issues of race and racialisation in predominantly white university spaces. Their diffractive methodology is worked through a series of moves back and forth from the empirical to the historical and the theoretical trying to materialise the idiom of ‘an elephant in the room’ within the halls of a Danish university. This methodology, which is called idiomatic diffraction, helps the authors to investigate and specify how racial relations materialize and haunt affectively in the contemporary state of Denmark, specifically the university. Hvenegård-Lassen and Staunæs suggest that a methodology of idiomatic diffraction may supplement our understanding of the ways in which race-specific configurations are constituted and sedimented in mood politics of higher education.
Originalsprog
Engelsk
Titel
Higher Education Hauntologies : Living with Ghosts for a Justice-to-come