Avery F. Gordon

American sociologist and writer, known for Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination and The Hawthorn Archive. Her work examines haunting, power, race, gender, incarceration, and abolition, and she has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.

  1. 1. Ghostly Matters

    Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

    This study argues that haunting is a social phenomenon through which suppressed histories and violences—such as slavery, colonialism, racial terror, and state repression—make themselves felt in the present. Blending sociology, critical theory, and literature, it develops a method for noticing how power produces absences and how ghosts signal unfinished business that demands ethical and political accountability. Through readings of fiction and historical cases, it shows how the hidden and the missing continue to organize everyday life and shape social relations. Ultimately, it proposes haunting as a way to reckon with what official narratives deny, opening possibilities for more just futures.

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