Beyond the ghosts: navigating identity, precarity, and haunting in freelance ELT

Freelance English teachers occupy a liminal space in education, simultaneously present and absent, essential yet often invisible. While research has addressed casualisation and precarity in ELT and its impact on the sector or individual factors such as retention, little is known about freelance teachers in adult education settings, navigating diverse employers, contexts and institutional demands, sometimes simultaneously. Such fragmentation shapes both livelihoods and professional identities. This study uses hauntology to investigate how past ideals, unrealised futures, and invisible structures impact freelance English language teachers in Germany. Sixteen teachers participated in 60-minute online interviews. Topics explored included professional background and identity, wellbeing, freelancing dynamics, and professional development. Data were analysed using thematic analysis informed by hauntological concepts and extended to include liminality and communitas. Findings suggest that spectres of stability, belonging, and legitimacy haunt both structural conditions of freelance ELT and the teachers navigating them, creating a ‘double inheritance’ of material precarity and justifying ideologies. Rather than remaining passive recipients of these constraints, participants actively turn to visibility work, professional networks, and identity renegotiation to resist institutional erasure. As institutions increasingly rely on casualised workforces, understanding how professionals ‘haunt back’, creating visibility and meaning at the margins, becomes essential for understanding professional identity formation in ELT toda.