In settings where policies emphasize the urgent need to change and stress the importance of moving away from problematic pasts and towards brighter futures, what happens to the ideas, values, roles, and practices that become superfluous or outdated? Pushed to the margins of what can count as vocational knowledge or legitimate concerns, might such repressed elements linger as a shadowy form of memory of things that used to be important? And if from time to time what has been submerged or disavowed from policies and sanctioned narratives resurfaces, what might such moments of haunting be like? In what forms might these mute inheritances be registered?

In this chapter, I am interested in those haunted moments in vocational work where it suddenly becomes possible to encounter that for which workers have been deprived of a language, now operating at the limits of what is taken to be understandable (Blackman, 2019a). Whereas in Chapter 3, I mapped the processes through which certain vocational concerns, practices, and forms of knowledge were delegitimized and pushed out from what counts as professional discourses, in this chapter, I explore the ways in which such concerns sometimes make themselves felt, oozing into meeting rooms or conversations despite the organizational or managerial techniques in place to keep them out. I am interested in the situations where it becomes possible to testify to those things that have been pushed out of language and knowledge as well as in the performativity of encounters with what is no longer legitimate concerns. What might be the political potential of encounters with ghosts?