From 1924 to 1928 in Vanløse, a working- class suburb of Copenhagen, a pedagogical experiment was carried out. Inspired by the new pedagogical ideas about less authoritative and more progressive education that were emerging and circulated in Denmark, Germany, Italy, and the UK (Korsgaard et al, 2017, 281 ff; Nørgaard, 2022), a group of teachers were granted permission to try out these new pedagogical ideas. The local government of Copenhagen issued an exception for a specific year group, exempting them from the standard curriculum and year plans during the initial four years of schooling. Instead, the school declared that teaching would be in accordance with principles carefully designed to resonate with the nature of children and their natural desire for activity and learning.

In the fall of 1924, two classes of 36 pupils started in this experimental schooling. Unlike all other classes overseen by the local government of Copenhagen, girls and boys were taught together. Teaching was to be organized in accordance with the interests of the children and their natural manner of engaging in different activities.

Inheritance has to do with listening to the past and being touched and affected by it. Inheritance is not simply receiving an artefact or a message, but receiving an injunction to be touched by the questions that the inheritance opens (Barnwell, 2025). In the sense that we do not inherit something whose existence or qualities are settled or fully known, to inherit is an event that unsettles the taken for granted and leaves us wondering. The past is no longer known and determined, as inheritance is an event that opens the past anew. In this book, inheritance has done analytical work of opening the past to re- discovery and producing new connections between pasts, presents, and futures.

With the concept of inherited time, I sat out to challenge the short memory often found in organization, strategy, policy and also sometimes in research of these phenomena. With this concept, organizations and work are situated in longer temporalities. It pushes questions about the importance of the thinking, practices, and experiences that came before and the rich pasts that inform vocational work. Thinking with inheritance draws attention to the politics and power at work when policies describe certain pasts as over or outdated, thus delegitimizing them, and it reopens questions about the potential value of past experiences. Indeed, inherited time challenges linear time and the manners in which linear time portrays the past as less sophisticated and less developed than the present. It can also set in motion wonderings about whether there is still an untapped virtuality (Pollock, 2016) of past events in the history of educational vocations that calls on us to re- discover them.

Feminist theory and practice offer a distinctive and productive set of perspectives for understanding existing and future work and organizations in novel and interesting ways, as well as producing knowledge that has broad societal and environmental relevance. Our aim is to centre critical questions of social justice, domination, and oppression and the politics of knowledge that may create new inequalities in organizations and which are integral to better understanding social transformation in sites of formal and informal work, employment, and organizing. The books published in this series offer a critical approach to organizations as sites of ethical and political feminist practice. This reflexive approach means exploring the joy and potential, alongside the challenges, of feminist work for academics, activists, and practitioners, especially in management and organization studies.

A central purpose of the series is to consider the intersections between feminist academics/ activists and their scholarship, and the impact these approaches can have on organizations. We invite reflexive, critically engaged proposals that reflect on the political potential, contradictions, and implications of taking action, speaking out, and being an intellectual activist, especially when there is increasing hostility across multiple national contexts to openly discussing gender, differences, and issues of diversity, equality, and inclusion. Feminist scholarship is on the line, and responses to preserving and advancing such research are more important than ever.

The series publishes interdisciplinary books that explore a range of issues around feminism, feminist theory and philosophy, transnational feminisms, intersectional and decolonial feminist approaches, and methodologies as they can be applied to various contexts of work and organization.

While, we often associate history writing with efforts to discover and present the past ‘as it was’, in this chapter, I explore the past as a hauntological phenomenon. I am curious about how pasts can speak to concerns that are muted today or at risk of being forgotten. I am searching for ways of telling history in a genre of haunting, producing encounters with the past not simply as something that was, but as something that holds a capacity to challenge present orderings and maybe even animate alternative futures of work in education.

The previous chapters and the scenes of inheritance between them constitute a web of moments, events, and forces that can be read through routes other than chronological time. I have already anticipated a hauntological reading through the non- linear structure of the chapters and scenes of inheritance, which constitutes abrupt time travels between contemporary settings and pedagogical experiments and events in the 1920s and 1960s. However, in this chapter, I push even further towards a way of telling history in a hauntological register by staging encounters between moments from different times and places to experiment with the performative effect of such encounters. More specifically, I evoke from these encounters what I term ghostly figures. Ghostly figures are analytical constructions produced by the staging of new constellations of moments and events. Ghostly figures might be made to speak about not a past that has ended, but the unexhausted potential of different moments to challenge the present and set in motion alternative futures.

In the context of a research project exploring policy transformation, I arrived at a local primary school, and found my way to the assembly hall. The hall was not full of children, but of all the principals from the schools run by the local government. The principals were seated in smaller groups around circular tables. They were summoned to one of the monthly strategy seminars arranged by the top management in the local government to discuss the implementation of a new comprehensive assessment system based on quantitative and qualitative data on pupils’ performance, general wellbeing, and attendance as well as teachers’ self- assessments of teaching, data on parent satisfaction, and so on. The sound of many voices filled the room, and it was impossible not to notice the enthusiasm of the managers. Around the tables, they were eager to display their dedication to the new assessment system and to voice their regrets that some staff members had not yet understood the importance of implementing it. However, at one point, a manager at one table paused and then, out of context, stated: ‘Actually, when I think about all the adverse consequences this will have for our children in the future, it sends a cold shiver down my spine.’

The refrain of this chapter is in those words: ‘it sends a cold shiver down my spine’. The statement conveys such a clear and unmistakable corporeal experience, yet it is not easily interpreted. There is no certain or obvious way of explaining why the principal felt a shiver down her spine at that point in the larger change process or at that point in the conversation.