Avery F Gordon
Biographic Data
| ID | 3734734 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Avery F Gordon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Avery F |
| FAMILY NAME | Gordon |
| SIGNATURE | GORDON A F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 947 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Radical internationalism and shifts in the global order
As moderator of the panel of speakers on ‘Radical internationalism and shifts in the global order’ at the ‘New Circuits of Anti-racism Conference’, King’s College London, October 2022 (IRR50), the author takes stock of challenging global conditions in terms of austerity and debt, mounting oppositions, capitalist crises and authoritarianisms and post-global ‘war on terror’ moves against Chinese and Russian expansionism. How, she asks, do these cha…
Haunting and thinking from the Utopian margins: Conversation with Avery Gordon
Avery Gordon’s work exceeds the limits of disciplinary boundaries and so does her practice. She uses the term ‘itinerant’ to describe her strategies of inhabiting multidisciplinary spaces and of critiquing the worlds, peripheries and fractures produced by racial capitalism. Gordon moves as an intellectual itinerant, creating multidirectional and interdisciplinary dialogues as a sociology scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whi…
An Anthropology of Marxism
An Anthropology of Marxism offers Cedric Robinson’s analysis of the history of communalism that has been claimed by Marx and Marxists. Suggesting that the socialist ideal was embedded both in Western and non-Western civilizations and cultures long before the opening of the modern era and did not begin with or depend on the existence of capitalism, Robinson interrogates the social, cultural, institutional, and historical materials that were the se…
The subversive pencil: Writing, Prison and Political Status
The article offers a personal recollection of Barbara Harlow and her impact on the author's intellectual development. Harlow's book Barred: women, writing, and political detention (1992) and her later writings on the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay are revisited for their contemporary significance. The author situates Harlow as a unique literary critic whose sustained work was conjunctural reading, translating and writing across geopolitical…
Some Thoughts on the Utopian
I. The Missing Story Utopias have something to do with failure and tell us more about our own limits and weaknesses than they do about perfect societies. Even if one insists (as I do) that you can't fail unless you try to succeed, the idea is an uncomfortable one and seems to redirect objective inquiries (about social and political difficulties, for example) back into psychological vicious circles which turn on the desire to lose, or an innate pe…
Ancient Modes of Proof” and “Current Jural Doings”: Notes on the Work of Colin Dayan
The Hawthorne Archive sends a few fragmented materials to Small Axe about Colin Dayan: a letter, a file note, a commentary on the photographs missing from Dayan's autobiographical writings, and an inventory of keywords. In all, this essay is an emphasis on her ethical-political-practical concern for those made into unpersons by the law and the work of “imagining what can't be verified.”
On 'lived theory: An interview with A. Sivanandan
For a panel discussion on the work of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) and Race & Class, at the Historical Materialism Conference 2013, Avery Gordon talked to A. Sivanandan as to what had guided his politics, thinking and writing on Black struggle, racism and globalism, over the last forty years.1 He describes how the IRR reoriented itself to relate to subject people's experiences, how new theory was developed by him and IRR to speak, not to…
Seize the time: An interview with Stephen Jones
There is a long and substantial history of prisoners' rights movements in the US, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, which was spearheaded by Black prisoners, notably figures such as George Jackson, subsequently murdered by prison guards. They were forging a new politics and understanding of the role of incarceration in a capitalist state, a politics echoed in prisons around the world. On the fortieth anniversary of the Attica uprising, in whic…
The Other Door, It's Floods Of Tears With Consolation Enclosed
Her Shape And His Hand
Not Only The Footprints But The Water Too And What Is Down There
Index
Preliminary Material
Distractions
There Are Crossroads
Introduction To The New Edition
Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
I'm already in a sort of tomb”: A Reply to Philip Scheffner's The Halfmoon Files
This essay is an illustrated montage of some points of engagement with Philip Scheffner's 2007 film, The Halfmoon Files, about the Halfmoon prisoner of war camp in Wünsdorf, Germany. The camp was an important site for anthropometric research and propaganda during World War I. The film is a ghost story and conjures a number of connections to related stories and to questions of racism, imprisonment, and war that my essay offers in response. My titl…
Night Crossings
July 01 2006 Night Crossings Anselm Franke, Anselm Franke Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Avery Gordon, Avery Gordon Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Natascha Sadr Haghighian Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Tom Holert, Tom Holert Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Ines Schaber Ines Schab…
Abu Ghraib: Imprisonment and the War on Terror
The exposure of torture and sadistic treatment of prisoners in US-run prisons in Iraq and elsewhere in the 'theatre' of the war on terror has shed light on the nature of military imprisonment today. However, the actions and policies of military prison guards reflect accepted civilian prison norms. Excessive force, civil disability and the loss of internationally guaranteed rights, and indefinite detention are central means by which the wars on bo…
The Black radical tradition and the academy: The future of radical scholarship
What is the essence of radical scholarship? How does it relate to subjugated knowledge and those experiences historically dismissed as of little account? Its relationship to truth telling and its attempt to extend the boundaries of what is known and knowable are here discussed in relation to Robinson's lifetime work. It is grounded both in a refusal to compromise and, in Robinson's phrase, in 'the recovery of human life from the spoilage of degra…
Cedric Robinson's anthropology of Marxism
In meditating on the significance of Robinson's body of work, particularly An Anthropology of Marxism, Gordon discusses the profound originality of his enterprise. At its heart lies a rigorous deconstruction of the terms of western civilisation which exposes the philosophical and historical compromises made by Marxism and Liberalism with the tenets of bourgeois rationality. The blindness within Marxian thought to socialist and radical traditions …
Hyperreality and Global Culture
This book explores a world where the boundaries between reality and representation have become blurred, a world where LA Law is used to train lawyers. Drawing on examples from around the globe, Nick Perry presents a fascinating and entertaining analysis of both familiar objects and situations as well as the more unusual and absurd. Meals served in British pubs, motor-cycle gangs in downtown Tokyo, Australian movies, are just some examples used by…
Debate Making Pictures of Ghosts: The Art of Gary Simmons
(1999). Debate Making Pictures of Ghosts: The Art of Gary Simmons. Social Identities: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 89-124
Globalism and the prison industrial complex: An interview with Angela Davis
Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
The Work of Corporate Culture: Diversity Management
Avery Gordon Corporations have discovered culture over the last ten to fifteen years. I have recently begun research in order to ask what this discovery is about and why it is happening now. This research does not yet include an empirical study of actually existing corporate cultures in all their systematic singularities, but rather pursues study of what the idea of culture is doing for business. While such a fieldwork project would no doubt teac…
Globalism and the prison industrial complex: An interview with Angela Davis
Abu Ghraib: Imprisonment and the War on Terror
The exposure of torture and sadistic treatment of prisoners in US-run prisons in Iraq and elsewhere in the 'theatre' of the war on terror has shed light on the nature of military imprisonment today. However, the actions and policies of military prison guards reflect accepted civilian prison norms. Excessive force, civil disability and the loss of internationally guaranteed rights, and indefinite detention are central means by which the wars on bo…
White Philosophy
Feminism, Writing, and Ghosts
It all began with an abstract, a promise and good reasons for being cautious of the abstract. But now the story is told and that makes all the difference. This essay is a meditation on methodology in the postmodern social field. The story is told through a detour generated by a woman, Sabina Spielrein, who was not in a photograph she was supposed to be in. Spielrein was a patient of Carl Jung's and later became an analyst herself, writing a very …
On 'lived theory: An interview with A. Sivanandan
For a panel discussion on the work of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) and Race & Class, at the Historical Materialism Conference 2013, Avery Gordon talked to A. Sivanandan as to what had guided his politics, thinking and writing on Black struggle, racism and globalism, over the last forty years.1 He describes how the IRR reoriented itself to relate to subject people's experiences, how new theory was developed by him and IRR to speak, not to…
Cedric Robinson's anthropology of Marxism
In meditating on the significance of Robinson's body of work, particularly An Anthropology of Marxism, Gordon discusses the profound originality of his enterprise. At its heart lies a rigorous deconstruction of the terms of western civilisation which exposes the philosophical and historical compromises made by Marxism and Liberalism with the tenets of bourgeois rationality. The blindness within Marxian thought to socialist and radical traditions …
Criminological Displacements: A Sociological Deconstruction
This text re-presents a deconstructive sociological reading of Michel Foucault's several investigations of the genealogy of the human sciences. We take the sociological history of criminology as an exemplar of the relation between the form and content of Western social science theorizing and the historically material pleasures associated with the production of a certain knowledge of “Other”ness within the intellectual marketplace of modern Wester…
Haunting and thinking from the Utopian margins: Conversation with Avery Gordon
Avery Gordon’s work exceeds the limits of disciplinary boundaries and so does her practice. She uses the term ‘itinerant’ to describe her strategies of inhabiting multidisciplinary spaces and of critiquing the worlds, peripheries and fractures produced by racial capitalism. Gordon moves as an intellectual itinerant, creating multidirectional and interdisciplinary dialogues as a sociology scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whi…
I'm already in a sort of tomb”: A Reply to Philip Scheffner's The Halfmoon Files
This essay is an illustrated montage of some points of engagement with Philip Scheffner's 2007 film, The Halfmoon Files, about the Halfmoon prisoner of war camp in Wünsdorf, Germany. The camp was an important site for anthropometric research and propaganda during World War I. The film is a ghost story and conjures a number of connections to related stories and to questions of racism, imprisonment, and war that my essay offers in response. My titl…
Some Thoughts on the Utopian
I. The Missing Story Utopias have something to do with failure and tell us more about our own limits and weaknesses than they do about perfect societies. Even if one insists (as I do) that you can't fail unless you try to succeed, the idea is an uncomfortable one and seems to redirect objective inquiries (about social and political difficulties, for example) back into psychological vicious circles which turn on the desire to lose, or an innate pe…
The Black radical tradition and the academy: The future of radical scholarship
What is the essence of radical scholarship? How does it relate to subjugated knowledge and those experiences historically dismissed as of little account? Its relationship to truth telling and its attempt to extend the boundaries of what is known and knowable are here discussed in relation to Robinson's lifetime work. It is grounded both in a refusal to compromise and, in Robinson's phrase, in 'the recovery of human life from the spoilage of degra…
Debate Making Pictures of Ghosts: The Art of Gary Simmons
(1999). Debate Making Pictures of Ghosts: The Art of Gary Simmons. Social Identities: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 89-124
Sociology Since Midcentury: Essays in Theory Cumulation
Workers' Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experience
Criminological Displacements: A Sociological Deconstruction
This text re-presents a deconstructive sociological reading of Michel Foucault's several investigations of the genealogy of the human sciences. We take the sociological history of criminology as an exemplar of the relation between the form and content of Western social science theorizing and the historically material pleasures associated with the production of a certain knowledge of “Other”ness within the intellectual marketplace of modern Wester…
Feminism, Writing, and Ghosts
It all began with an abstract, a promise and good reasons for being cautious of the abstract. But now the story is told and that makes all the difference. This essay is a meditation on methodology in the postmodern social field. The story is told through a detour generated by a woman, Sabina Spielrein, who was not in a photograph she was supposed to be in. Spielrein was a patient of Carl Jung's and later became an analyst herself, writing a very …
White Philosophy
The Work of Corporate Culture: Diversity Management
Avery Gordon Corporations have discovered culture over the last ten to fifteen years. I have recently begun research in order to ask what this discovery is about and why it is happening now. This research does not yet include an empirical study of actually existing corporate cultures in all their systematic singularities, but rather pursues study of what the idea of culture is doing for business. While such a fieldwork project would no doubt teac…
Body Politics: Disease, Desire, and the Family
Disease, war and the family the politics of the Gay Plague - AIDS as United States ideology fatal abstraction - the death and sinister afterlife of the American family not in our name - women, war, AIDS the meaning of property - real estate, class position and the ideology of home ownership homelessness and post-structuralist theory orphan's dreams - panic wars and the postmodern drugs, hysteria, pain - a short history of the parasite cafe James …
Postmodernity
Mapping Multiculturalism
Debate Making Pictures of Ghosts: The Art of Gary Simmons
(1999). Debate Making Pictures of Ghosts: The Art of Gary Simmons. Social Identities: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 89-124
Globalism and the prison industrial complex: An interview with Angela Davis
Hyperreality and Global Culture
This book explores a world where the boundaries between reality and representation have become blurred, a world where LA Law is used to train lawyers. Drawing on examples from around the globe, Nick Perry presents a fascinating and entertaining analysis of both familiar objects and situations as well as the more unusual and absurd. Meals served in British pubs, motor-cycle gangs in downtown Tokyo, Australian movies, are just some examples used by…
The Black radical tradition and the academy: The future of radical scholarship
What is the essence of radical scholarship? How does it relate to subjugated knowledge and those experiences historically dismissed as of little account? Its relationship to truth telling and its attempt to extend the boundaries of what is known and knowable are here discussed in relation to Robinson's lifetime work. It is grounded both in a refusal to compromise and, in Robinson's phrase, in 'the recovery of human life from the spoilage of degra…
Cedric Robinson's anthropology of Marxism
In meditating on the significance of Robinson's body of work, particularly An Anthropology of Marxism, Gordon discusses the profound originality of his enterprise. At its heart lies a rigorous deconstruction of the terms of western civilisation which exposes the philosophical and historical compromises made by Marxism and Liberalism with the tenets of bourgeois rationality. The blindness within Marxian thought to socialist and radical traditions …
Night Crossings
July 01 2006 Night Crossings Anselm Franke, Anselm Franke Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Avery Gordon, Avery Gordon Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Natascha Sadr Haghighian Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Tom Holert, Tom Holert Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Ines Schaber Ines Schab…
Abu Ghraib: Imprisonment and the War on Terror
The exposure of torture and sadistic treatment of prisoners in US-run prisons in Iraq and elsewhere in the 'theatre' of the war on terror has shed light on the nature of military imprisonment today. However, the actions and policies of military prison guards reflect accepted civilian prison norms. Excessive force, civil disability and the loss of internationally guaranteed rights, and indefinite detention are central means by which the wars on bo…
The Other Door, It's Floods Of Tears With Consolation Enclosed
Her Shape And His Hand
Not Only The Footprints But The Water Too And What Is Down There
Index
Preliminary Material
Distractions
There Are Crossroads
Introduction To The New Edition
Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (11 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Art (5 works) · Art history (5 works) · Criminology (5 works)