Avery Gordon: The Hawthorn Archive and the Utopian Margins
Talk
12th September 2024
17:00-19:00
Museum of Impossible Forms (Aallonhalkoja 9 L1, 00540 Helsinki)
The Museum of Impossible Forms is honored to host a talk by Avery F. Gordon. Renowned for her work on radical thought and practice, Gordon writes on topics such as captivity, enslavement, war, and other forms of dispossession, focusing on ways to dismantle these systems. In addition to her frequent collaborations with artists, she is the former keeper of the Hawthorn Archive.
The Hawthorn Archive gathers the histories and practices of those who have long challenged the modern racial capitalist system from the utopian margins. As the philosopher Ernst Bloch declared, “All given existence and being itself has utopian margins which surround actuality with real and objective possibility.” In her talk, Avery Gordon will discuss the Hawthorn Archive, explore some of what haunts the utopian archive as we know it, and consider the utopian margins where running away, marronage, vagrancy, rebellion, soldier desertion, and other often illegible forms of escape, resistance, and alternative ways of life predominate.
Bio:
Avery F. Gordon was a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for thirty years and is currently a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck School of Law University of London since 2015. In 2012, she was the Anna Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and in 2020 she was awarded the Bode Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the American Studies Association. She is the author of The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (2018); The Workhouse: The Breitenau Room (with Ines Schaber, 2015); Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997/2008) and Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People (2004) among other works. She served on the Editorial Board of the journal Race & Class.
https://averygordon.net/hawthorn-archive
