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Week Two: Feminist Research Practice - Introduction to Ghostly Matters

Gordon, Avery. 2008. “Introduction to the New Edition.” In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2nd edition, xv – xx. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Book addresses "modern forms of dispossession, exploitation, repression, and their concrete impacts on the people most affected by them and on our shared conditions of living." p.xv

The book comprehends "the terms of an always already racial capitalism and the determining role of monopolistic and militaristic state violence." p.xv

"Haunting is not the same as being exploited, traumatized, or oppressed, although it usually involves these experiences or is produced by them." p.xvi

The term haunting is used to describe "those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what's been in your blind spot comes into view." p.xvi

"Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way... we are notified that what's been concealed is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed toward us." p.xvi

Haunting produces a feeling of "something-to-be-done." p.xvi

The book was written with the intent of finding "a method of knowledge production and a way of writing that could represent the damage and the haunting of the historical alternatives and thus richly conjure, describe, narrate, and explain the liens, the costs, the forfeits, and the losses of modern systems of abusive power in their immediacy and worldly significance." p.xvii

"the theft of culture and of the means for creating autonomous, sustainable life, the attachment to epistemologies of blindness, and the investment in ontologies of disassociation remain the key problems of our time." p.xix

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