Why do we keep gifts that we don’t want, or can’t currently use? What role do these play in our relationships with others, with time, and perhaps even our future selves? Sophie Woodward discusses the richly creative research project that took her into strangers’ homes, drawers and cupboards, and led her to consider the gifts that lie “dormant” in our homes. Such items might appear “meaningless” or inactive, Sophie shows, but are far from dead or unimportant: “stuff” matters. 

Via examples of gifts ranging from inconveniently big plastic toys to alcohol repeatedly gifted by relatives, Sophie explains how, beyond theories of gifts from thinkers like Marcel Mauss on the function of exchange, or Theodor Adorno on the perfect gift, it’s worth a deeper focus on the recipient – people, she observes, have an obligation not just to receive gifts but also to keep them, at least for a certain amount of time.

Plus, we ask: is it ok for recipients to pre-empt and refuse gifts before they’re given, or is gifting the prerogative of the giver? What can we do to reduce material overwhelm? We also celebrate Jane Bennett, who considers the powers of things, beyond the meanings we attribute to them.

A thoughtful and exploratory conversation, crucial in a time of climate emergency, waste, and cost-of-living crises.

Guest: Sophie Woodward; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Sophie Woodward

• Dormant Gifts: Animating the Imagined and Narrated Pasts and Futures of Gifts (2025)
• Live methods and live things: Cultivating attentiveness to dormant things to develop a vital sociology of the everyday (2025)
• Clutter in domestic spaces: Material vibrancy, and competing moralities (2021)
• Object interviews, material imaginings and ‘unsettling’ methods: interdisciplinary approaches to understanding materials and material culture (2015)
• Sophie’s profile at The University of Manchester and the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• New Materialism – Nick J. Fox (2020)
• Shrinking domesticity – Mel Nowicki, Tim White, Ella Harris (2022)
• Discover our lesson plans for use in the classroom!

Further resources

• “The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies” – Marcel Mauss
• The Opposite of Forgetfulness: Adorno on Gift-Giving – from Stuart Jeffries’ “Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School”
• “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things” – Jane Bennett

Read more about Jane Bennett.

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“What is the effect of receiving something from someone who is not your biological kin?” Anthropologist Delwar Hussain introduces his new project on Queer Inheritance, born when a friend welcomed Delwar and his partner to enjoy items belonging to her late uncle – a man they had never met. This led Delwar to wonder: how are queer people today preparing for their deaths? How, with this in mind, can we think of “inheritance”? And what does the “good death”, of which inheritance is a key part, mean to queer people?

While the word “inheritance” often leads us to thoughts of taxation and legislation, class and inequality, finance and family feuds, this episode heads in a different direction. Reflecting on both physical items, but also those things that remain intangible and untaxable – wisdom, life stories, mentorship, communion – this conversation unites two classic areas of anthropological thought: kinship and the gift. Inheritance, Delwar reminds us – particularly at the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis, for example, and when homosexuality was illegal in countries like the UK – can be a radical and communicative act. At other times, it reproduces dominant norms, among them heteronormativity and the privileging of biological kin. And then there’s disinheritance, too…

A fascinating and exploratory conversation about family, choice, meaning and death. Plus: the enduring popularity of Kath Weston’s “Families We Choose”.

Guest: Delwar Hussain; Hosts: George Kalivis, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Delwar Hussain

• ‘Just who do I leave my worldly possessions to, darling?’: A Study of Queer Inheritance – research project funded by a Wellcome Accelerator Award 
• Boundaries Undermined: The Ruins of Progress on the Bangladesh/India Border (2013)
• Delwar’s profile at The University of Edinburgh

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Uncommon Sense episodes: Love & Reproduction, with Alva Gotby (2025); Performance, with Kareem Khubchandani (2023); Desire, with Angelique Nixon (2025)
• Discover our lesson plans for use in the classroom!

Further resources

• “Families We Choose” – Kath Weston
• “The Gift” – Marcel Mauss
• “Forgetting Family” – Jack Halberstam, in “A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies”
• “How to Survive a Plague” – David France
• “Abolish the Family” – Sophie Lewis
• “Anthropology and Inheritance” – Current Anthropology special issue featuring the pieces by João Biehl, Adam T. Smith and Tim Ingold, mentioned by Delwar

Read more about the work of Judith Butler and Resto Cruz.

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How have maternal - and grandmaternal - ways of knowing been sidelined and undervalued? What role has sociology’s focus on its ‘founding fathers’ played? And what’s the cost, in South Africa and beyond? Babalwa Magoqwana, Director of the Centre for Women and Gender Studies at Nelson Mandela University, joins us from Gqeberha.

In this fascinating conversation on knowledge and value, gender and care, Babalwa celebrates her grandmother - “a learning space, a space of imagination” - who provided her with “ways of knowing” that remain sidelined in academia. By foregrounding such maternal and grandmaternal figures, Babalwa argues, not only might we reduce the dissonance felt by students whose experience jars with that shown to them by classic sociological theory (of the “nuclear family”, for example); we also quickly see how the production of what we value as “knowledge” has been a colonial imposition - including rigid gender binaries, or notions of seniority rooted solely in chronology - that did not originate in Africa itself. Motherhood, says Babalwa, has been reduced to the identity of a single female person. We must de-gender it and recognise that all of us need to care.

Plus: Babalwa celebrates the work of Ifi Amadiume, author of ‘Male Daughters, Female Husbands’, and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, author of ‘The Invention of Women’. She also reflects on the unrecognised labour of Black women in the neoliberal university. And we ask: can we speak of “African Sociology” in general? Babalwa explains why we may.

Guest: Babalwa Magoqwana; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Babalwa Magoqwana

• Inyathi Ibuzwa Kwabaphambili: Theorising South African Women's Intellectual Legacies (2024, with S. Magadla and A. Masola)
• On maternal legacies of knowledge, ukwambathisa, and rethinking of the sociology of Eastern Cape, South Africa (2023, with P. Maseko)
• Thirty years of Male Daughters, Female Husbands (2021, with S. Magadla and N. Motsemme)
• Reconnecting African Sociology to the Mother (2020, with J. Adesina)
• “Forced to Care” at the Neoliberal University (2019, with Q. Maqabuka and M. Tshoaedi)

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Uncommon Sense episodes: Margins, with Rhoda Reddock (2024); Natives, with Nandita Sharma (2022); Love & Reproduction, with Alva Gotby (2025)
• Discover our lesson plans for use in the classroom!

Further resources

• “I Write What I Like” – Steve Biko
• “Three Mothers” – Anna Malaika Tubbs
• “Male Daughters, Female Husbands” – Ifi Amadiume
• “The Invention of Women” and “What Gender is Motherhood?” – Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
• “Forced to Care” – Evelyn Nakano Glenn
• “Scholars in the Marketplace” – Mahmoud Mamdani
• “Eating from One Pot” – Sarah Mosoetsa

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What’s behind the reductive pursuit of “paradise” in travel to the Caribbean? How does tourism continue the legacy of colonialism? And how is this being resisted? We’re joined by Angelique Nixon, a scholar and activist at The University of the West Indies at St. Augustine, whose book “Resisting Paradise” examined how tourism shapes Caribbean life and identity, including via deep-rooted notions of “paradise” grounded in colonialism and exploitation. Angelique describes how the Caribbean, a region of such diverse islands, has been constructed a site for the fulfilment of particular desires, while other forms of desire have been suppressed in mainstream narratives. Angelique joins us to discuss this, as well as her new project, “Submerged Freedom”.

Plus: Angelique reflects on writing as a “Black sexual intellectual”, and describes how Franz Fanon led her to reflect on tourism as “the stagnation of decolonisation” – as reproducing and reinforcing existing racialised inequalities. Also, we celebrate thinkers including the sociologist Kamala Kempadoo, authors Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid and Erna Brodber. And we profile the radical Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter, whose work challenged the assumptions of western liberal humanism and highlighted the importance of working on ourselves as part of decolonial work.

Guest: Angelique Nixon; Host: Rosie Hancock; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Angelique Nixon

• Resisting Paradise (2015)
• On Being a Black Sexual Intellectual (2019)
• Angelique’s academic profile, including information on her latest project, “Submerged Freedom”
• CAISO – feminist non-profit civil society organisation committed to ensuring wholeness, justice and inclusion for Trinidad and Tobago’s LGBTQI+ communities

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Uncommon Sense episodes on: Europeans, with Manuela Boatcă (2023) and Margins, with Rhoda Reddock (2024)
• Len Garrison: Archives and Self-Esteem – audio essay by Hannah Ishmael (2025)

Further resources

• “Island Futures” – Mimi Shiller
• “An Eye for the Tropics” – Krista Thompson
• “Sexing the Caribbean” – Kamala Kempadoo
• “Paradise and Plantation” – Ian Strachan
• “The Repeating Island” – Antonio Benítez-Rojo
• “The Wretched of the Earth” – Franz Fanon
• “After The Dance” – Edwidge Danticat
• “A Small Place” – Jamaica Kincaid
• Sylvia Wynter: Beyond Man – short introductory video by Al Jazeera

Support our work. Make a one-off or regular donation to help fund future episodes of Uncommon Sense: donorbox.org/uncommon-sense

A bonus offering for Uncommon Sense listeners! We’re sharing our mini-series, Sideways Sociology: UK Anti-Racism, in which three experts introduce us to three key figures in the story of UK anti-racism, illuminating how they show us what that term really means – and what it takes – but also how their work and ideas speak to sociology.

How can archives fight racism? How can progressive educational resources tackle the harm of discrimination? Why have millennia of British history so often been presented through a reductive and harmful white gaze? Hannah Ishmael – lecturer in Digital Culture and Race at King’s College London – introduces Len Garrison, an activist, archivist and determined educationalist who worked to improve education, particularly for minoritised populations – and to disprove and displace assumptions about the history of Black presence in the UK. Garrison was central in creating ACER – the African Caribbean Education Resource project – and became a leading founder of BCA – the Black Cultural Archives – in Brixton, where, with others, he enacted his conviction that archives have the power to change the reality and representation of people’s lives.

An essay on the meaning and value of archives, and the nature and potential of anti-racist education. With reflection also on Bernard Coard and Stuart Hall, and the importance of attending to what people do as well as what they write.

Episode Readings and Resources: https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.lscb4869

Episode Credits

• Author: Hannah Ishmael
• Producer: Alice Bloch
• Sound: Emma Houlton
• Music: Joe Gardner
• Artwork: Kieran Cairns-Lowe

Support our work. Make a one-off or regular donation to help fund future episodes of Uncommon Sense: donorbox.org/uncommon-sense

A bonus offering for Uncommon Sense listeners! We’re sharing our mini-series, Sideways Sociology: UK Anti-Racism, in which three experts introduce us to three key figures in the story of UK anti-racism, illuminating how they show us what that term really means – and what it takes – but also how their work and ideas speak to sociology.

What did Black radical politics look like in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s? What was its relation to the Black women’s movement, which highlighted the multiple oppressions faced by Black women? How, in studying such movements, can we celebrate brilliant activists, without erasing the importance of movements and collectives? In this essay, A.S. Francis – author of “Gerlin Bean: Mother of the Movement” – introduces Gerlin Bean, the Jamaican-born activist who came to the UK as a student nurse and became central to Black British Feminist Socialism. They describe Bean, who passed away in early 2025, as a radical listener and mediator who applied to her entire way of living an acute awareness of how race and gender intersect to create particular types of disadvantage – and spoke to those she helped, on the ground, with a skillset that sociologists and others could learn a lot from.

Episode Readings and Resources: https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.jgfc6963

Episode Credits

• Author: A.S. Francis
• Producer: Alice Bloch
• Sound: Emma Houlton
• Music: Joe Gardiner
• Artwork: Kieran Cairns-Lowe

Support our work. Make a one-off or regular donation to help fund future episodes of Uncommon Sense: donorbox.org/uncommon-sense

A bonus offering for Uncommon Sense listeners! We’re sharing our mini-series, Sideways Sociology: UK Anti-Racism, in which three experts introduce us to three key figures in the story of UK anti-racism, illuminating how they show us what that term really means – and what it takes – but also how their work and ideas speak to sociology.

What does tech have to do with anti-racism? Why do we dismiss complex economics at our peril? And how do global struggles for justice connect to local ones? Here, John Narayan – Chair of the Council of the Institute of Race Relations, and a lecturer in European and International Studies at King’s College London – introduces us to Ambalavaner Sivandanan, or “Siva”, a giant of anti-racism who showed us how to truly understand discrimination, and how we can best confront it, together – not just at the interpersonal level or that of language alone, but through communities of resistance, with an eye focussed on capitalism, colonialism and technology. Here, John celebrates and unpacks the ideas within Siva’s 1989 essay ‘New Circuits of Imperialism’, which saw him address racism, capitalism and tech at a global scale, and relate this back to state racism at the national level.

Siva, John says, shows us the scope for a truly anti-racist sociology, teaching us that the struggles of “Indian farmers for land rights, those of indigenous Amazonians, and those of Grenfell Tower fire survivors” are ultimately connected – united by “a story of people harmed and marginalised by the market state; and confronting it.”

Episode Readings and Resources: https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.lhcx9119

Episode Credits

• Author: John Narayan
• Producer: Alice Bloch
• Sound: Emma Houlton
• Music: Joe Gardner
• Artwork: Kieran Cairns-Lowe

Production Note: This episode was recorded in 2024.

Support our work. Make a one-off or regular donation to help fund future episodes of Uncommon Sense: donorbox.org/uncommon-sense

Made tea for your partner today? Helped a vulnerable neighbour? You may have been performing what Alva Gotby calls “emotional reproduction” – the caring and emotional work we do to create good feeling amid life under capitalism, but that also plays a part in reproducing that very system and its norms. While it may feel like love, such work can be exhausting, unjustly organised and heavily gendered.

Inspired by Wages for Housework and sharing common ground with thinkers such as Sophie Lewis, Alva reflects on the often invisible, isolating and unevenly distributed emotional work that we perform to help each other withstand capitalism – and that keeps us attached to the status quo. It’s a discussion that raises crucial questions. We ask: is anything left of love after such an analysis? What does this mean for altruism? And how can we think critically about care while still valuing it? It’s not that we must stop caring, Alva explains; instead, we need wholesale reform of the social relations within which we care. Seeking “equality” within the norms of romantic coupledom and the insular nuclear family will only get us so far.

Plus: what about the mobilisation of another emotion – hate – in the so-called manosphere? And is the “trad wife” a response, of sorts, to the same crisis that Alva identifies? A provocative conversation, reflecting on love, private life, emotion, family, care and capitalism.

Guest: Alva Gotby; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Alva Gotby

• They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life (Verso, 2023)
• Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing (Verso, 2025)

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Uncommon Sense episodes on: Care, with Bev Skeggs; Emotion, with Billy Holzberg; Burnout, with Hannah Proctor; Joy, with Akwugo Emejulu
• Book review of “They Call it Love” – Patrycja Sosnowska-Buxton (2023)
• Contributions, conjunctures and care: Revisiting Formations of Class and Gender – journal article by Helen Wood and Jo Littler (2025)
• Migrants' Regular Army of Labour – journal article by Sara Farris (2015)

Further resources

• “The Managed Heart” – Arlie Hochschild
• “Formations of Class and Gender” – Bev Skeggs
• “The Feminine Mystique” – Betty Friedan
• “The Promise of Happiness” – Sara Ahmed
• “Abolish the Family” – Sophie Lewis
• “Radical Intimacy” – Sophie K Rosa
• “The Mental Load: A Feminist Comic” – Emma
• “Wages Against Housework” – Sylvia Federici
• “I cannot hold appropriate space for these bizarre self-care templates” – Shon Faye (on DAZED)
• “The Mothers Who Fought To Radically Reimagine Welfare” – Gene Demby (on NRP)
• “I'm a professional cuddler - let me tell you why a hug feels so good” – Danny Fullbrook (on BBC News)

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How do stereotypes of “the child” contribute to injustice? Why must we decolonise childhood? What can it mean to work with love, rather than just study it? And how can we think about children’s agency? Sociologist and counsellor Brenda Herbert, the Sociological Review Fellow for 2024-25, reflects on her in-depth research getting to know children who had experienced domestic abuse and social work intervention in London. Applying a “live methods” approach – working with photography, play, and simply hanging out – she looked beyond the typical trauma and social work gaze to create knowledge with them about what mattered to them in their everyday lives.

Inspired by Erica Burman’s “Child as Method” and by Franz Fanon, Brenda reflects on how powerful notions of “the child” can serve to prop up the status quo – from the treatment of refugees, to how children’s views are handled in family courts. Meanwhile, children who don’t fit our expectations of what a child should be risk being treated differently and pathologised.

A heartfelt and rallying conversation, also describing the distinct joys and the challenges of doing research with children. Reflecting on social work, agency, power, and decolonial and black feminist thought, including Brenda’s “first academic love”: bell hooks.

Guest: Brenda Herbert; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Brenda Herbert

• The Everyday Lives of Children Who Have Experienced Domestic Abuse: Looking Beyond the Trauma Lens – forthcoming
• What’s love got to do with it? Live methods and researching with children who have experienced domestic abuse and social work intervention – 2025
• Cupboard love: Is tidiness essential for good parenting? – 2023

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Palestine: A Sociological Issue
• Live Methods
• Joy, with Akwugo Emejulu
• The Sociological Review Fellowship 2024-25: meet our winner

Further resources

• “The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis”  – eds. Lynn Chancer, John Andrews
• Hortense Spillers in conversation with Gail Lewis (ICA, London, 2018)
• “Child as Method” – Erica Burman
• “All About Love” – bell hooks
• “The Selected Works of Audre Lorde” – ed. Roxane Gay
• “The Creative Spirit and Children’s Literature” – June Jordan, in “Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines” – eds. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, Mai'a Williams

Read more about Hortense Spillers, Gail Lewis and Franz Fanon. Plus: the concept of epistemic injustice.

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How is the notion of “free speech” abused and misunderstood? What’s wrong with “debate me” culture – and with the value placed on appearing to be “controversial”? And what happens when people who are actually pretty powerful claim they “can’t say anything anymore”? Sociologist Aaron Winter, an expert on racism and the far right, joins Uncommon Sense to discuss all this and more.

Showing what sociology has to offer to discussions of “freedom” often found in politics, Aaron describes how “free speech” has been invoked through the decades in North America and Europe, including in the victimisation narratives found in far-right discourse today. Plus, we reflect on the importance of no-platforming, and the need for critical thought when we hear that certain ideas are simply the “voice of the people”.

Featuring discussion of Aaron’s work with Aurelien Mondon on “Reactionary Democracy”. Also: celebration of influential American sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of “Racism without Racists”, and the UK band The Specials.

Guest: Aaron Winter; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Aaron Winter

• Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream – co-authored with Aurelien Mondon, 2020
• Reading Mein Kampf, Misreading Education: The reactionary backlash goes back to school – co-authored with Aurelien Mondon, 2017
• Online Hate: From the Far-Right to the ‘Alt-Right’ and from the Margins to the Mainstream – 2019
• Conflating antisemitism and anti-zionism emboldens the far right – 2023

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• The Cacophony of Critique – Tom Boland
• Voice, with Claire Alexander, Dan McCulloch and Belinda Scarlett
• Palestine: A Sociological Issue

Further resources

• "On Liberty" – John Stuart Mill
• "White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-civil Rights Era" – Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
• "Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America" – Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
• The Specials

Read more about Jose Medina, Miranda Fricker and the concept of epistemic injustice, as well as Michèle Diotte at The University of Ottawa.

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