Haunting and thinking from the Utopian margins: Conversation with Avery Gordon

Abstract

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, while also collaborating with artist. Since 1997, Gordon speaks as a public intellectual on her KCSB FM radio programme, ‘No Alibis’, co-hosted with Elizabeth Robinson. She is also a visiting professor at the Birkbeck School of Law, University of London. In the tradition of critical thinkers, Gordon’s work starts from a sense of urgency, exposed and developed in different ways in her major works, including her path-breaking book Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press), her teaching and writing on prisons and the carceral system, and her most recent book The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (Fordham University Press). In January 2018, we invited Gordon to Santiago, Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights, to deliver the talk, ‘Pensar desde los Márgenes Utópicos/Haunted Futures: The Utopian Margins’. Gordon also took a guided visit through Chile’s Estadio Nacional Memoria Nacional/National Stadium National Memory site. Here is an extended conversation on the topics that frame her work, like ghosts, haunting and utopia, and on questions that emerge from the memory studies field and that are of concern to our special issue.