Developing Organs for the Alternative: A Conversation with Avery Gordon

This episode’s guest is Avery Gordon, author and Professor Emerita of Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara. In this episode, we are in conversation with Avery about her book The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins. Avery shares about this unconventional archive, which contains a selected history of "radicals, runaways, deserters, abolitionists, heretics, dreamers and liberationists." Avery talks about the development of the archive, the radical histories and imaginings that live within it, and what it might mean for us today to collectively develop "organs for the alternative," refusing to live on the terms of the powers that be and becoming "unavailable for servitude, back stiff with conviction." 

Resources

-The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins

-Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Episode Transcription available here

Host: Ry O. Siggelkow

Producer: Adam Pfuhl

Podcast Engineer: Michael Moua

Music: Kavyesh Kaviraj

Episode Recorded on February 15th, 2023

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