Avery F. Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London and Keeper of the Hawthorne Archives. She is the author of Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (2008) and other works. She writes about captivity, war, and other forms of dispossession and how to eliminate them.