publications
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“Notes toward a Methodology of Haunting”
Memory Studies, 2025
Kara Granzow, Amber Dean, and Angela May
One of the most impactful works in the field of trauma and memory studies is sociologist Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. But for all the popularity of Ghostly Matters and Gordon’s notion of haunting, little scholarship has considered the concept’s methodological implications. Drawing on Indigenous studies scholars, many of whom have themselves expanded Gordon’s approach to haunting, this article sets out to do so.
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Haunting as a Methodology: An Annotated Bibliography
www.colonialstampede.ca, 2023
Angela May
I created this annotated bibliography while working as Research Assistant for Settler Colonial Place-Making in Alberta: Sexualized Violence, Extractivism, and Cowboy Culture. Given the popularity of haunting as an academic concept in recent decades, this annotated bibliography traces the development of haunting, as it has been theorized and engaged methodologically. It asks: what might engaging haunting as a methodology actually mean?
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“Beyond Pain Narratives?: Representing Loss and Practicing Refusal at the Astoria Hotel”
Urban History Review, vol. 48, no. 2, 2021
Angela May
Across conversations in the academy and in public discourse (news, social media, etc.), communities such as the Downtown Eastside are routinely portrayed as being in pain—to the exclusion of stories about how these communities are also strong, hopeful, loving, innovative, and so on. This is a problem because it presents communities as though they are only, simply, and inherently broken—which they are not. And yet, we still need to find ways to talk about and reckon with pain, particularly of communities whose pain has long been oversimplified and/or misunderstood. This paper sets out to start a conversation about how we might do so.
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“A Matter of Life and Death: Exploring the Necropolitical Limbo of Kingston’s Housing Crisis in the Era of the COVID-19 Pandemic”
Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research, vol. 10, 2021
Sophie Lachapelle and Angela May
During the COVID-19 pandemic, in response to insufficient housing in the city of Kingston, Ontario, unhoused people formed an encampment in Belle Park. Not long after the encampment was formed, city by-law officers, police, and public health officials worked in tandem to evict campers from Belle Park. This paper examines these dynamics and draws on critical theory to argue that public health can administer ‘care’ in carceral ways to the advent of a kind of necropolitical limbo, an in-between-life-and-death-world. While the paper is predominantly theoretical, the concern is real-world: what happens when the threat of death looms so large that it pervades everyday governance?