Avery F. Gordon was Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara for thirty years, Visiting Faculty Fellow in the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College University of London (2008-2013) and is currently Visiting Professor at Birkbeck School of Law University of London. In 2012, she was the Anna Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. 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); Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People (2004) and Mapping Multiculturalism (1997), among other books and many essays 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 has been the co-host of No Alibis, a weekly public affairs radio program on KCSB FM Santa Barbara since 1997. She is the former keeper of the Hawthorn Archives, which records the living history of a group of runaways, secessionists and in-differents who form autonomous zones and settlements.