What can humour do on-site ?:Towards a creative hauntology

This article asks fundamentally what role humor plays in decolonization initiatives and how the humor affects citizens of different kinds in their perception of historical and present-day colonialism. The point of departure will be a humorous city walk using AR in a ‘polar’ neighborhood with street names of Nordic polar explorers and Danish missionaries to Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) in the northern parts of Aarhus in Denmark. My focus will be on how the humor in the walk is received and responded to through an analysis of the creative productions of three high school classes. The students were asked to produce diary entries, podcasts, digital postcards, satire videos or uncover stories and marginalized voices from other neighborhoods that could need attention. My ambition is to detect the educational ways the tactics used in the walk influence how the students position themselves and how they experience and perform their responses through their aesthetic productions (productive discomfort, self-reflexivity, relief etc.). <br/>Theoretically I aim at combining a hauntological framework (Derrida 1993, Gordon 2008, Cho 2008, Knudsen 2018, Singh 2022) with political theory approaches. Do the students position themselves as political subjects in their responses to the humorous calling forth of ghosts from the past? (Wedderburn 2021, Leddy 2018). The article will especially discuss how the student responses to the AR-walk could be considered as acts of citizenship comparing the distinctions and overlapping features of the concept of responsibility-taking in Gordons hauntological approach with the answerability in Isin’s dialogical understanding of citizenship (Isin 2015). <br/>