FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

Keeping Good Time will be of great interest to activists, feminists, sociologists, students and everyone concerned about how to beat the odds in influencing the shape of social and culture change. Readers will find their thinking changed by the author's perennial quest to "develop insights gained in confrontation with injustice."

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￯﾿ﾽ. 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￯﾿ﾽ. 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

Author Bio: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) and coeditor of Mapping Multiculturalism and Body Politics, among other works. She is also the cohost of No Alibis, a weekly public affairs radio program on KCSB FM.

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