We Will Have Been Living Otherwise: Archiving in the Future Perfect Tense
We tend to think of the archive as a repository of memories, things, and documents from the past, or, as a technique that turns or arrests the present into a past. What kind of archive safeguards or keeps company with or “summons,” to use Chimurenga Library’s words, a past that the present hasn’t yet caught up with? Can such a past or such an archive be summoned to haunt the present as an alternative? These are the questions that Avery Gordon will explore in this year’s Helen Pond McIntyre ‘48 Lecture.
Avery F. Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Visiting Professor at Birkbeck School of Law University of London. She is the author of The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (Fordham University Press 2018), The Workhouse: The Breitenau Room (with Ines Schaber) (Konig 2015), Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed. 2008), and Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People (Paradigm, 2004), among other books and articles. Her work focuses on radical thought and practice and she writes about captivity, enslavement, war and other forms of dispossession and how to eliminate them. She serves on the Editorial Committee of the journal Race & Class and is the co-host of No Alibis, a weekly public affairs radio program on KCSB FM Santa Barbara. She remains associated with the Hawthorn Archive.
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