What does family life really look like in Contemporary China? What has changed through the generations since the Communist Revolution of 1949? And what persists? Jieyu Liu, Professor of Sociology at SOAS, University of London, joins us to discuss her years of detailed research with people across three generations in rural and urban China. Putting forward her concept of ‘embedded generations’, she argues that family transformation has been less linear than assumed - and calls out dominant Eurocentric accounts of modernization and social change.

Plus: Jieyu celebrates the work of prominent sociologist and anthropologist Fei Xiaotong, and recommends Shen Fu’s memoir ‘Six Records of a Floating Life’ for its insights into Chinese society. An important conversation about love, relationships, family and social change - and the influential concept of ‘individualisation’.

Guest: Jieyu Liu; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardiner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find out more about Uncommon Sense

Episode Resources

By Jieyu Liu

• Embedded Generations: Family Life and Social Change in Contemporary China

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Listen to Katherine Twamley on Intimacy
• Obligated to Care: Intergenerational Family Relations in Contemporary China 
• Raising Global Families by Pei-Chia Lan
• Generationalism: Understanding the difference between what generations are and what generations do

Further resources

• Fei Xiaotong - Obituary
• Fei Xiaotong (1939) Peasant Life in China
• The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies
• Individualisation: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences 
• Shen Fu (1809/1877) Six Records of a Floating Life 

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Who gets to decide when something is over? How is declaring so an act of power? Professor of Global Health Ethics, Patricia Kingori, joins to discuss these questions and many more raised by the interdisciplinary ‘After the End’ project on which she’s the lead researcher. 

From ‘post-natal’ to ‘post-war’, we humans seem enamoured with the idea that complex things can be declared “over”. But - from long Covid to the persistence of supposedly long-eradicated diseases - what happens when we’re faced with lived experience that challenges such a simplification? Patricia reflects on this and more, including: what do we owe research participants, after a project has formally ended? And why, if we want to ensure “temporal justice”, should we consider actually asking “the people who are affected" whether they consider a thing to be “over”.

Plus: Patricia evokes her experience of time on St Kitts, where she grew up, and celebrates the time-bending movie ‘All of Us Strangers’. A boundary-breaking, continent-spanning conversation on health, inequality, conflict and time.

Guest: Patricia Kingori; Host: Rosie Hancock; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardiner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

Episode Resources

By Patricia Kingori and colleagues at the ‘After the End’ project

• Being the index-case
• The End and What Comes After
• Indigenous Time

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Good vibrations: Why sociologists make ideal podcasters
• Listen to Ilana Gershon on Breakups

Further resources

• Sand Talk and Right Story, Wrong Story
• Feminist, Queer, Crip
• What the land can teach us
• Grenfell Tower fire and key findings of the Grenfell Inquiry’s final report
• On the standardisation of time
• Debora Deniz
• Patricia Daley
• Against Time
• In a Queer Time and Place
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• All of Us Strangers
• Dora Vargha and her Polio Across the Iron Curtain

** We want to hear from you! Please take two minutes to complete our listener survey here. It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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**Note: this episode was recorded in late 2025, prior to the extremely violent suppression of protests in Iran, and prior to the strikes by the US and Israel that began in late February 2026**

“Being seen” has become a meme, pointing to the satisfaction felt at one’s true self being understood by another. But can we think more critically? Self-described “accidental” Professor of anthropology and ex-taxi driver Shahram Khosravi joins Uncommon Sense to discuss visibility, power, knowledge and the violence of unseeing. 

Shahram describes how growing up in Iran’s Bakhtiari culture shaped his own way of seeing  and taught him, early on, how some forms of knowing get legitimised while others are  dismissed - including in academia, where asking one question obscures the possibility of another. Here, he calls out the topsy turvy optics by which certain people - delivery workers, taxi drivers - go “actively unseen”, while others are loaded with value, visibility and esteem. Plus, he calls out those who ask “where are you from?” of the migrantised person. This “question”, he suggests, is often really a statement of non-recognition. 

An urgent conversation, with reflection on Édouard Glissant, George Orwell and Hannah Arendt. It is imperative, Shahram shows, that in what - via Arendt - he identifies as our present “dark times”, we challenge active “unseeing” and speak “clearly…with courage”.

Guest: Shahram Khosravi; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardiner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense

Episode Resources

By Shahram Khosravi

• How to Do Migration Studies in Dark Times
• "Bordered Imagination" in ‘Infrastructural Love: Caring for Our Architectural Support Systems’ (2022) eds: S. Karami, Adr. Carbonell, H. Frichot, H. Frykholm
• Doing migration studies with an accent
• “The Archive of Stolen Breaths” in 'Breathe – Critical Research into the Inequalities of Life' (2023)
• The Holes
• 'Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran' (2017), University of Pennsylvania Press
• 'Young and Defiant in Tehran' (2008), University of Pennsylvania Press
• De Verbranders podcast, Episode 30: “Outside the Law”

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Listen to Rhoda Reddock on Margins, Angelique Nixon on Desire, Nandita Sharma on Natives 
• Why Stigma?

Further resources

• Miranda Fricker "Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing" (2007)
• Judith Butler "Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?" (2016)
• Hannah Arendt "Men in Dark Times" (1968) 
• "For Opacity" in Édouard Glissant’s ‘Poetics of Relation’, transl. Betsy Wing (1997/1990)

** We want to hear from you! Please take two minutes to complete our listener survey here. It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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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

Find more about Uncommon Sense

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

Find more about Uncommon Sense

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

Find more about Uncommon Sense

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

Find more about Uncommon Sense

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

** We want to hear from you! Please take two minutes to complete our listener survey here. It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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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

** We want to hear from you! Please take two minutes to complete our listener survey here. It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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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

** We want to hear from you! Please take two minutes to complete our listener survey here. It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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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.

** We want to hear from you! Please take two minutes to complete our listener survey here. It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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