Description
Avery Gordon's first book, Ghostly Matters, was widely acclaimed as a work of striking sociological imagination and social theory. Keeping Good Time, her much anticipated second book, brings together essays by Gordon that were 'written to be read aloud'. Her eloquent voice in this book further establishes her place among literary sociological writers of a new generation. Keeping Good Time explores the meaning of being a politically engaged scholar during deeply troubled times. The book's essays consider the role of education during war time, the costs of imprisonment and repression, the power of utopianism in an age of globalization, the complexities of gendered racism, the politics of culture, and the practice of theory as it emerges from everyday life.
Author Info
Avery Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press) and co-editor of Mapping Multiculturalism and Body Politics, among other works. She is also the co-host of No Alibis, a weekly public affairs radio program on KCSB FM.
Reviews
"Keeping Good Time is a politically engaged meditation in the truest, deepest sense. In these trenchant essays, Avery Gordon rigorously excavates the nature of the historical present, even as she commits herself to the enormous project of imagining the languages necessary to realize an entirely different future.... She looks to the subjugated knowledges of the world's ragged and excluded as well as to the utopian arts of our culture's storytellers.... This book should be read by all who long for a more just world in which constant warfare, manufactured fear, and pervasive forms of human imprisonment would be unnecessary."
Janice Radway, Duke University
"In these graceful essays written to be read aloud, Avery Gordon lays down a simple provocation: take sides. Keeping Good Time helps us be partisan, by charting examples where we can find "in confrontations with injustice precisely the diagnostic insights and the imaginative means to render society adequate to human life."
Ruthie Gilmore, University of Southern California and the California Prison Moratorium Project
Contents
EDUCATION DURING WAR TIME.
War-time Research: The Front Lines.
War Machines and Washing Machines.
On Education During War Time.
War on Iraq?
FACE UP TO WHAT'S KILLING YOU.
Going Inside: The Prison Research Visit.
We the People.
Globalism and the prison industrial complex: an interview with Angela Davis.
Face up to What's Killing You: Fear and the Prison Industrial Complex.
A love story.
MAKING A DIFFERENCE.
Alternative Graduation.
Sociology After Deconstruction.
Twenty-Two Theses on Social Constructionism.
Theory and Justice.
Sociology After the Crisis.
Making a Difference: Women's Studies in the Academy.
Theses on Teaching Marx.
Some thoughts on the utopian.
An Anthropology of Marxism.
NO ALIBIS.
State of the Art.
Will this Election Matter?
Corporate Multiculturalism.
More on Positive and Negative Images: The Case of Kara Walker, Artist.
The Sledgehammer and the Dagger: A Conversation between Leon Golub and Avery Gordon.
Wish upon a star.
No Alibis: A Community Radio Collaboration.
Something more powerful than skepticism.
Exercised.