ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses ethnographic research that focuses on the entanglement of affect and imagination in working-class experience. In doing so, it specifically tells the story of a ‘social haunting’ of the English coalfields during the period of deindustrialisation. A summary account of the notion of social haunting is given and a review is provided of how that idea has been as been operationalised in a series of recent UK research council-funded projects led by the author. Most significantly, the chapter provides a detailed account of the theory and practice of the ‘Ghost Labs’ developed as part of that body of work. There is a detailed reflection of how the Ghost Lab methodology actually unfolds and a description of how the Labs’ distinguishing feature – a capacity to enable ‘a poetics of forces and intensities’ – allows social ghosts to be transformed by means of a repertoire of autonomous working-class affective practices. This process is illustrated through three vignettes that indicate how privately experienced, and often disturbing, aspects of a social haunting can be made available for re-imagination in common and held, thenceforward, as a renewed and positive collective bond.
