Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People

by Gordon,Avery

• ISBN13: 9781594510151
• ISBN10: 1594510156
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2004-03-15
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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 Biography

Avery Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Keeping Good Time	1	(6)
I EDUCATION DURING WARTIME
Wartime Research: The Front Lines	7	(5)
War Machines and Washing Machines	12	(6)
On Education During Wartime	18	(9)
War on Iraq?	27	(8)
II FACE UP TO WHAT'S KILLING YOU
Going Inside: The Prison Research Visit	35	(5)
We the People	40	(6)
Globalism and the Prison Industrial Complex: An Interview with Angela Davis	46	(11)
Face Up to What's Killing You: Fear and the Prison Industrial Complex	57	(6)
A Love Story	63	(8)
III MAKING A DIFFERENCE
Alternative Graduation	71	(4)
Sociology After Deconstruction	75	(4)
Twenty-Two Theses on Social Constructionism	79	(20)
Theory and Justice	99	(7)
Making a Difference: Women's Studies in the Academy	106	(4)
Theses on Teaching Marx	110	(3)
Some Thoughts on the Utopian	113	(20)
An Anthropology of Marxism	133	(14)
IV NO ALIBIS
State of the Art	147	(2)
Will this Election Matter?	149	(3)
Corporate Multiculturalism	152	(8)
More on Positive and Negative Images: The Case of Kara Walker, Artist	160	(3)
The Sledgehammer and the Dagger: A Conversation between Leon Golub and Avery Gordon	163	(11)
Wish upon a Star	174	(6)
``No Alibis'': A Community Radio Collaboration	180	(7)
Something More Powerful Than Skepticism	187	(20)
Exercised	207	(6)
Acknowledgments	213	(2)
Notes	215	(22)
Index	237	(14)
About the Author	251