Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People / Edition 1

by Avery Gordon, Angela Davis

Overview

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 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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594510151
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/15/2004
Series:	Great Barrington Books
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Avery Gordon, Angela Davis

Table of Contents

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;

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher