Exploring Trauma and Social Haunting Through Community Comics Creation

Social haunting, as defined by Avery Gordon, is the sense that all is not as it seems; that something is happening that cannot be detected by our empirical senses. For Gordon, social ghosts are ‘haunting reminders of lingering trouble’ that notify us that ‘what’s been concealed is very much alive and present’ (Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997: xvi). This chapter draws on findings from two projects informed by the notion of social haunting, and which involved working with two contrasting groups in northern England: the first from a traditional working class community affected by deindustrialisation and the second a group of migrant women who have come to the UK from Bangladesh. While the experiences of these groups differ in many ways, both projects used aspects of comics creation to produce graphic narratives that in some way represent traumatic or unsettling events that have had an impact on participants’ lives.