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This paper explores the contextual factors that support the necessity of a diversified curriculum. The author draws on the findings of the author's doctoral research to consider the complexities underpinning the educational narratives of South Asian Muslim women. The paper critically examines South Asian Muslim women's position as migrant daughters and how South Asian Muslim women navigated colonial systems and the practices and behaviours inherent in these. Situated in a racialised inner-city area with a framing by policymakers as one that creates spatial anxiety, participants shared empowered and agentic narratives. These demonstrated a resistance to the othering and stigma that often ensues through stereotyping.

The project adopted a feminist participatory approach and made use of hauntology as both a theoretical and methodological framework. In keeping with this, four participants who had grown up in the area and still lived there were spoken in the form of research conversations, a walking tour and photographs of significant sites.

The paper provides empirical insights into how these four participants encountered education. By frequenting both formal and informal educational settings, these spaces became a crucial third space which alleviated unsettlement though allowing a more embodied occupation with learning. Teachers played a critical role in cultivating appropriate and supportive environments and were described and inferred to be moral agents and figures who assisted participants' navigation of a space, often embodying a more mentor-like disposition. Teachers proved to embody a practical wisdom, acting as anchors for offering spaces in and outside of the classroom that invited occupation and construction. Such spaces at school enabled the encountering of difference through recognising first the similarities with peers. Whether these commonalities were cultural or otherwise, those commonalities provided a firm foundation from which to imagine and push the parameters of the space and identity, and so school was likely another crucial space for hybridity.

The research approach is specific to the context(s), narratives and migratory moment of the participants, and although participants' accounts have been re-storied to honour participants' voices, the accounts may lack generalisability. The paper raises two key implications: first, by recognising educational settings as a third space for students to create a hybrid identity, and second, through familial, community and navigational capitals which have the potential to shift the pedagogical approaches underpinning the conditions created for students.

Pointing out that hybrid identities without the frequenting of space are hauntological is crucial, and hybrid identities cannot reconcile cultural differences because hybrid identities are out of place, and without location, hybrid identities remain troubled and alienated. This is a situation that the author describes as cultural hauntology – a condition which draws on both hybridity and hauntology to illuminate unsettlement long after colonisation. The native culture is never fully banished or forgotten. The native culture exists behind the closed doors of homes, within communities and perhaps even within the demarcation lines of a given geographical area. Cultural hauntology comes about as a deep-seated internal colonisation that appears as traces, marks and murmurs that cannot be deleted. Perhaps what alleviated the extent of what might have been more extreme in cultural hauntology's dissonance, were the teachers, mentors and role models that participants repeatedly referenced as agents that bridged and enabled the participants.

The burnt-out Grenfell tower is a symbol of trauma and sacrificed lives. The brutalist block as a technology of trauma, viewed through its mediated depictions, reveals its condemned predicament between slippages in bureaucracy and governance. Through the formal enquiry into the disaster, the Grenfell victims' trauma is revived, replayed and contained within an archive in which victimhood is captured in a number of stages. The charred remains of the tower as a chronotrope of trauma and of lives cut short yields readings into the politics of social housing, gentrification and social displacement. The testimonials from Grenfell are temporally elongated both through the public review but also in the traces of victims' narratives left on social media in real time through flesh witnessing and as an online repository of death narratives. As a tower of trauma and as the forensic evidence of a disaster, Grenfell is part of the iconography of the ‘blackened’ and their necroaesthetics.

There is a sense of loss among planners, community workers and built environment professionals that the enthusiasm and utopian thinking of the post-war New Towns have largely disappeared. Contemporary planning is struggling with a reality of pro-market ideologies and disempowered local government. The utopian thinking that went into the New Towns was part of a modernist project focused on planning future urban spaces and communities founded not just on new buildings and innovative design but on a social mission – an egalitarian ethos that intended the New Towns to deliver social progress. This essay explores the loss of this ethos using the framework of ‘hauntology’ developed by the cultural critic Mark Fisher.

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate researchers’ understanding of place in general and psychogeography in particular.

Melding hauntology, autoethnography, pseudo-psychogeography and object-orientated ontology, the provocation explores aspects of east Belfast’s “C.S. Lewis Trail”.

Psychogeography, purportedly, is moribund. This provocation contends that latter-day developments in virtual reality, augmented reality, digital real estate platforms and “imaginary worlds” more generally, open up new horizons, and offer more opportunities, for the psychogeographically inclined.

The provocation’s originality inheres in the approach adopted not the research findings.

Giambattista Piranesi's disturbing images of fantasy prisons set out in his Carceri d'Invenzione have had a profound impact on cultural sensibilities. The chapter explores Piranesi's distinctive visual language and situates it in an eighteenth-century penchant for ruins and what they might signify. The macabre fantasy structures bear little relation to actually existing prison buildings, but they do herald a new aesthetic combining both terror and beauty to sublime effect. The chapter examines the relationships between narrative and visual methods by considering that scholarship in art history which has sought to address the relationships between ‘word’ and ‘image’.

Much of it belongs to what was once the ‘new art history’ in the 1970s, and which had become critical of how conventional approaches in the discipline had tended to see art as the visualisation of narrative. For example, Norman Bryson's (1981) study of French painting in the Ancien Régime explored the relationships between ‘word’ and ‘image’ by examining the kind of stories pictures tell, drawing a distinction between the ‘discursive’ aspects of an image (posing questions on visual art's language-like qualities and relationships to written text) and those ‘figural’ features that place the image as primarily a visual experience – it's ‘being-as-image’ – that is entirely independent of language.

The focus on language is symptomatic of the ‘linguistic turn’ that has had such a profound influence on intellectual thought since the 1960s, and this chapter will concentrate on one strand in it. In particular, it will introduce the approach Jacques Derrida developed and defined as ‘deconstruction’, which in some important respects revealed the limitations of language, and seeks to create the effects of ‘decentring’ by highlighting how signification is a complex, often duplicitous, process. The chapter then situates Piranesi's images in an account of landscape, not least since he was a leading exponent of the veduta (a faithful representation of an actual urban or rural view) that had achieved the status of a distinctive and popular genre by the eighteenth century.