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Gordon, Avery 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting & Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Avery Gordon is a professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a visiting faculty fellow at the Centre for Research Architecture, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, University of London. She obtained her Ph.D. at Boston College. Her work focuses on radical thought in action over the last few years, and she has written on captivity, war and other forms of dispossession and how to eliminate them.

This text was published in 1997 and a second edition was released in 2008 with a new introduction, both by the University of Minnesota. Its topical areas are listed as “postmodernism--social aspects," "sociology--philosophy," and "marginality, social." Gordon's text was published with assistance from the Margaret S. Harding Memorial Endowment honoring the first director of the University of Minnesota Press.

Much as a reckoning with ghosts, Avery Gordon’s analysis of social science as a field and its knowledge production is at once painful, unsettling, and difficult; however, as she insists throughout, we need not be frightened of the ghosts we (social scientists) so painstakingly strive to discipline and in its worst forms, stifle.

Gordon begins by tracing the haunting of Sabina Spielrein that is both personal to Gordon and to the institution of psychoanalysis. Spielrein transferred from one invisible field, madness, into another, psychoanalysis, yet still she was moved to the shadows, rejected by Freud and Jung despite her immense contributions to the field in thinking about repetition, death, and the decline of civilization.

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Gordon calls on social scientists to consider a different way of seeing that is less mechanical and that negotiates the unsettled relationship between what we see and what we know. As she asserts, "The blind field and its fundamental imbrication in the visible field is what we are aiming to comrpehend. The blind field is what the ghost's arrival signals" (107). It calls on us to see both what is hypervisible and what is missing in visualizations, whether photographs or other materials that emphasize the visual sense. How might get at a knowledge that also acknowledges?

The text calls on us to reconize the "ghosts" that characteristically attach themselves to the ethnographic places that produced them in the first place as "haunting reminders of lingering trouble" (xix). According to Gordon, there are "place[s] where things stand gaping" within ethnographic fieldsites, and these might bring us to question the limits of representation and how we present the world. While the ghost represents loss and paths not taken, they also speak to the future possibility and hope of a place.

How can we examine the toxicities that are not visible to the eye, or those that are so hypervisible that we do not notice their existence? How do we begin to read the signs that might point to the toxic? How do we take note of the toxics that imbue the everyday interactions people have with one another and the places they reside and work? How might visualizations of toxics and toxic places help us to see that which we have doubted but still suspected? 

How can experimental and installation ethnography tell stories? How might experimental and installation ethnography aid us in interpreting anew the signs of particular events so as to grasp them and present them, particularly to get to the "ghost story," the likes of which may be embedded in the flickering of a moment?