Avery F. Gordon konzentriert sich auf radikales Denken und Handeln. In den letzten Jahren hat sie über Gefängniswesen, Krieg und andere Formen der Enteignung geschrieben und wie man diese beseitigen kann. Ihre Arbeit untersucht, wie die Soziologie zum Verständnis und zur Überwindung dieser Probleme beitragen kann. Gordon bietet eine einzigartige Perspektive auf Machtstrukturen und deren Auswirkungen auf Individuen und die Gesellschaft.
Ines Schaber zeigt ihre zusammen mit der Soziologin Avery F. Gordon zur dOCUMENTA (13) konzipierte Installation „The Workhouse Room 2 (2012)“, die sich mit der Geschichte des ehemaligen NS-Umerziehungslagers Breitenau beschäftigt. Teile der Installation befinden sich dauerhaft in der Gedänkstätte Breitenau.
In this notebook, sociology professor Avery F. Gordon offers a portrait of Breitenau, a twelfth-century Benedictine monastery located twenty kilometers south of Kassel. Turned into a workhouse in 1874, Breitenau became a Nazi concentration camp in the Second World War, then a girls' reformatory until the 1970s, and is now an open psychiatric residential treatment facility and a rehabilitation center, as well as a Gedenkstatte memorial and research center. Here, Gordon, with the help of the memorial's cofounder and director Gunnar Richter, recalls Breitenau's function as a place for the enclosure of "disobedient social subjects," developing "a kind of encyclopedia of the prisoner."
"In this book, Avery F. Gordon considers the cultural experience of haunting. Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela, Ghostly Matters demonstrates that past or shadowy social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Ghostly Matters scrutinizes the evidence of things barely seen for what they can tell about the relationship between knowledge, power, and experience. Gordon illustrates how haunting more fully registers phenomena like torture and slavery than do other modes of social experience. Genuinely cross-disciplinary and truly innovative, written with a power to match its subject matter, Ghostly Mutters offers a way of looking at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief or shadowy manifestations."--BOOK JACKET