Keeping Good Time

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).

"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

• Introduction Keeping Good Time; Part I Education During Wartime; Chapter 1 Wartime Research: The Front Lines; Chapter 2 War Machines and Washing Machines; Chapter 3 On Education During Wartime; Chapter 4 War on Iraq?; Part II Face Up to What’s Killing You; Chapter 5 Going Inside: The Prison Research Visit; Chapter 6 We the People; Chapter 7 Globalism and the Prison Industrial Complex: An Interview with Angela Davis; Chapter 8 “Face Up to What’s Killing You”: Fear and the Prison Industrial Complex; Chapter 9 A Love Story; Part III Making a Difference; Chapter 10 Alternative Graduation; Chapter 11 Sociology After Reconstruction; Chapter 12 Twenty-Two Theses on Social Constructionism; Chapter 13 Theory and Justice; Chapter 14 Making a Difference: Women’s Studies in the Academy; Chapter 15 Theses on Teaching Marx; Chapter 16 Some Thoughts on the Utopian; Chapter 17 An Anthropology of Marxism; Part IV No Alibis; Chapter 18 State of the Art; Chapter 19 Will this Election Matter?; Chapter 20 Corporate Multiculturalism; Chapter 21 More on Positive and Negative Images: The Case of Kara Walker, Artist; Chapter 22 The Sledgehammer and the Dagger: A Conversation Between Leon Golub and Avery Gordon; Chapter 23 Wish Upon a Star; Chapter 24 “No Alibis”: A Community Radio Collaboration; Chapter 25 Something More Powerful Than Skepticism;