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

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Interested in podcasting with us? Read more here, and contact us at [email protected] 

The word “revolution” conjures powerful imagery. But what does it mean today? Do revolutions neatly promote the will of the people, forging radical transformation? Or is it more complicated? Sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko joins us from Freie Universität Berlin to explain his take on “deficient revolutions” as he reflects on the 2014 Euromaidan uprising and recent events in Ukraine – where, he argues, conflict with roots in class has become polarised along “ethnic” lines, with devastating consequences.

Ukraine, he shows, is not an anomalous case on the periphery of Europe and the former USSR. Rather, its story is instructive for the study of global processes, including the “crisis of hegemony” – one he describes in terms of the “shellness” of politics, and which is in fact often compounded by contemporary revolutions. “People want their say”, Volodymyr explains. “They can overthrow the governments. But they cannot bring about the change that would represent their interests”.

An urgent discussion about decolonisation and discourse, progress, popular mobilisation and imagining alternative futures. With reflection on Soviet-era sci-fi authors, the Strugatsky brothers – and on sociologists’ duty to highlight complex, messy realities.

Guest: Volodymyr Ishchenko; 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 Volodymyr Ishchenko

• Towards The Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War
• Ukrainian Voices?
• Class or regional cleavage? The Russian invasion and Ukraine’s ‘East/West’ divide
• Insufficiently diverse: The problem of nonviolent leverage and radicalization of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, 2013–2014
• Why is Ukraine struggling to mobilise its citizens to fight?

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Community, with Kirsteen Paton
• Security, with Daria Krivonos
• Good warning, Vietnam? Comparing the Russian opposition to Putin with the greatest anti-war movement in the US – Arseniy Kumankov

Further resources

• The Snail On The Slope – novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, also reviewed in the TLS by Muireann Maguire
• Understanding Ukraine’s Euromaidan Protests – Open Society Foundations
• “Ethnic Conflict: A Global Perspective” – Stefan Wolff

Read more about

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Hi everyone!

The next episode of Uncommon Sense is landing here soon, but for now, we want to tell you about our brand new podcast, Sideways Sociology: UK Anti-Racism, a mini-series of audio essays on the work and lasting sociological significance of three important and inspirational figures in the story of UK anti-racism: Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Gerlin Bean and Len Garrison. 

Listen to our trailer to learn more!

Be sure to FOLLOW the podcast on your preferred platform to catch all episodes: https://sideways-sociology.buzzsprout.com/2498143/follow

Episodes will also be made available directly on our website: https://thesociologicalreview.org/podcasts/sideways-sociology-uk-anti-racism/

Out on May 30th!

Thanks for listening.

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

Interested in podcasting with us? Read more here, and contact us at [email protected] 

How do we typically see fat, and how can thinking differently about it have emancipatory outcomes? Fady Shanouda of Carleton University’s Feminist Institute of Social Transformation introduces Fat Studies and their inextricable link to activism. Alert to the connection between living and other things, Fady unpacks his feminist new materialist approach, and explains what it means to say “I’m not fat in my house”, describing how our surroundings can liberate us or show bias. He also considers the harm caused by misconceptions of fat as simply “surplus”, “inanimate” or even “dead” material. How does such valuing get mapped onto whole bodies and lives? And what happens if, instead, we recognise fat as essential, pushing back against the idea that having a lower amount of body fat means somehow a more valuable life?

Plus: how has fat come to be seen as a matter for psychiatry? And what are the manifestations of the “fat tax” in a world where things are made with certain bodies in mind and costs imposed on others?

Featuring discussion on autoethnography in North America. Plus: celebration of TV drama “Shrill” and the gripping reality TV survival series “Alone”.

Guest: Fady Shanouda; 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 Fady Shanouda

• Fat Animacy (forthcoming book chapter)
• Fat and Mad Bodies: Under, Out of, and Beyond Control (chapter in Fat Studies in Canada)
• Disability Saves the World (podcast)

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Sugar Rush by Karen Throsby – Lucy Aphramor
• Fat Activist Podcasts
• Just my size? Our bodies, our waistbands, our triggered selves – Nina Sökefeld

Further resources

• “Fat Studies” – an Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society
• “Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect” – Mel Y. Chen
• “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain” – Margaret Price
• “Narrating the Closet: An Autoethnography of Same-Sex Attraction” – Tony E. Adams
• The “Pool” episode of the TV series “Shrill”
• The reality TV survival show “Alone”

More on the “Obesity Paradox”

• “The impact of obesity on the short-term and long-term outcomes after percutaneous coronary intervention: the obesity paradox?” – Luis Gruberg, et al.
• “‘Obesity paradox’ misunderstands the biology of optimal weight throughout the life cycle” – J. B. Dixon, et al.

Read more about the work of Eli Clare on bodyminds and Hunter Ashleigh Shackleford.

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

Interested in podcasting with us? Read more here, and contact us at [email protected] 

From TV’s “The Bear” to the simmering restaurant thriller “Boiling Point” we seem drawn to angry-but-vulnerable chefs in pop culture. But how do such stereotypes shape who works in kitchens and how they treat their colleagues? Is “kitchen culture”, with its macho rough and tumble norms, always so different from the work culture so many of us face – including in academia? Sociologist Ellen T. Meiser joins us from Hawaii to discuss this and more, reflecting on her new book Making It: Success in the Commercial Kitchen. She tells us about her lifelong fascination with kitchens – from teenage shift work in Anchorage, Alaska, to studying baking and pastry at the Culinary Institute of America and entering the field of Food Studies.

We ask: how do scars serve as a kind of currency in commercial kitchens amid values of stoicism, perseverance and pain? How does the transience of worker populations make kitchens sites of risk and low accountability? And how does “scarring” take place beyond the kitchen, in a traumatogenic society where individuals, but also our planet, face significant harm?

With celebration of the late chef and author Anthony Bourdain.

Guest: Ellen T. Meiser; 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 Ellen T. Meiser

• Making It: Success in the Commercial Kitchen
• “It Was, Ugh, It Was So Gnarly. And I Kept Going”: The Cultural Significance of Scars in the Workplace
• The Social Breakdown (podcast co-hosted with Penn Pantumsinchai and Omar Bird) – including the episode Culture and Systems: An Intro to Food Studies

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Food and Work – The Sociological Review Magazine issues
• Taste, Performance, Success, Burnout, Toxic – Uncommon Sense episodes

Further resources

• “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• “Food and Culture: A Reader” – ed. Carole Counihan, Penny Van Esterik, Alice Julier
• “Takeaway: Stories From a Childhood Behind the Counter” – Angela Hui
• “Scar Cultures: Media, Spectacle, Suffering” – Pramod Nayar
• “‘Yes Chef’: life at the vanguard of culinary excellence” – Robin Burrow, Chef John Smith, Christalla Yakinthou
• “The Forms of Capital” – Pierre Bourdieu
• “Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body” – Phillip Vannini
• “‘I see my section scar like a battle scar’: The ongoing embodied subjectivity of maternity” – Sally Joh

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

Interested in podcasting with us? Read more here, and contact us at [email protected] 

What comes to mind when you think about joy? And can there be joy in protest and refusal? Someone who’s been asking and trying to answer questions about this is Akwugo Emejulu. She’s been investigating the relationship between Black feminist joy, ambivalence and futures, asking how Black feminists are remixing political media, meanings and messages to co-create manifestos for change.

Akwugo has also been mapping the grassroots organising and activism of women of colour for more than 15 years, and in this episode shares her insights about the role of joy and other emotions in understanding society and social change.

Plus: Akwugo introduces us to the work of bell hooks, including her take on Beyoncé’s album “Lemonade”, and gives her pop culture recommendation for some Japanese anime, much to Alexis’ delight!

Guest: Akwugo Emejulu
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Guest Producer: Chris Garrington
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense

Episode Resources

Rosie, Alexis and Akwugo recommended

• The works of psychologist Rollo May and poet Toi Derricotte
• The anime TV series Orb: On the Movements of the Earth and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

By Akwugo Emejulu

• Fugitive Feminism
• To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (co-edited with Francesca Sobande)
• Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain (co-authored with Leah Bassel)
• The Black Feminism Remix Lab: on Black feminist joy, ambivalence and futures (co-authored with Francesca Sobande) 
• Refusing politics as usual: mapping women of colour’s radical praxis in London and Amsterdam (co-authored with Inez van der Scheer)
• The politics of exhaustion (co-authored with Leah Bassel)

From The Sociological Review

• The lonely activist: On being haunted – Akwugo Emejulu, Leah Bassel
• Dissonant intimacies: Coloniality and the failures of South–South collaboration – Srila Roy

Further resources

• “Feminist Theory: From Margin To Center” – bell hooks
• “Feeling Race: Theorizing the Racial Economy of Emotions” – Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
• “The (Un)Managed Heart: Racial Contours of Emotion Work in Gendered Occupations” – Adia Harvey Wingfield
• “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure” – Arlie Russell Hochschild

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

Interested in podcasting with us? Read more here, and contact us at [email protected] 

With so many platforms available to share information, there are more means than ever to make a noise. But in the spirit of free speech and academic freedom, those speaking and actually being heard remain grossly unequal. What are the links between voice and power and how can we amplify those voices that we can’t hear?

In this special episode recorded at The Sociological Review Undisciplining II conference, Michaela Benson is joined by Claire Alexander (Professor of Sociology and Head of the School of Social Sciences at The University of Manchester), Dan McCulloch (Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Social Policy at The Open University) and Belinda Scarlett (Library Manager at the Working Class Movement Library) to talk about empowerment, representation and impact, under a common theme: VOICE

Guests: Claire Alexander, Dan McCulloch, Belinda Scarlett
Host: Michaela Benson
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Guest Producer: Emma Houlton
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense

Episode Resources

By Claire Alexander 

• Our Migration Story
• The Art of Being Black: The Creation of Black British Youth Identities
• Stuart Hall and ‘Race’

By Dan McCulloch

• Critical Reflections on Participatory Visual Methods and Voice
• Why Deaf Prisoners Have Been in a State of Lockdown Since Well Before COVID-19
• Homelessness and Mortality: an Extraordinary or Unextraordinary Phenomenon? (co-authored with Vickie Cooper)

By Belinda Scarlett

• Working Class Movement Library
• Big Flame Project

From The Sociological Review

• Accent and the Manifestation of Spatialised Class Structure – Michael Donnelly, Sol Gamsu, Alex Baratta
• Youth Voices in Post-English Riots Tottenham: The Role of Reflexivity in Negotiating Negative Representations – Julius Elster

Further resources

• “Sidewalk” – Mitchell Duneier
• Black British Voices – report of project led by Kenny Monrose
• Valuing Voices in the Digital Age – Sharath Srinivasan
• “Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism” – Nick Couldry
• At Home and Not at Home: Stuart Hall in conversation with Les Back; also available for listening

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

Interested in podcasting with us? Read more here, and contact us at [email protected] 

Life admin often refers to the overwhelming and mundane paperwork that surrounds contemporary living. However, Oriana Bernasconi, a sociology professor at the Alberto Hurtado University in Chile, joins Uncommon Sense to talk about a more serious side of the term – that of paperwork documenting human rights abuse – as well as a living, breathing archive and the analogue spreadsheet.

Author of “Resistance to Political Violence in Latin America: Documenting Atrocity”, Oriana talks about her substantial research in human rights archives documenting the atrocities that took place during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. She also talks us through “technologies of memory” and how archives have allowed the living to connect with the dead.

Plus: Oriana introduces us to the works of Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida around performativity and gives her pop culture recommendation for the 16-part TV series “Una historia necesaria”.

Guest: Oriana Bernasconi
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Guest Producer: Emma Houlton
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense

Episode Resources

Rosie, Alexis and Oriana recommended

• WINHANGANHA – film by Jazz Money
• Inside/Out: A Prison Memoir – theatre production by Patrick Keating
• Una Historia Necesaria – TV series by Hernán Caffiero

By Oriana Bernasconi

• Resistance to Political Violence in Latin America: Documenting Atrocity
• Political Technologies of Memory: Uses and Appropriations of Artefacts that Register and Denounce State Violence (co-authored with Elizabeth Lira and Marcela Ruiz)
• Archives of Violence: Case studies from South America (co-authored with Vikki Bell, Jaime Hernández-García and Cecilia Sosa)

From The Sociological Review

• The aesthetics of memory: Ruins, visibility and witnessing – Margarita Palacios
• The digital writing of human rights narratives: Failure, recognition, and the unruly inscriptions of database infrastructures – Josh Bowsher

Further resources

• the publications of the Tecnologías Políticas de la Memoria project
• “Documenting Dictatorship: Writing and Resistance in Chile's Vicaría de la Solidaridad” – Vikki Bell
• “Documentality: Why it is Necessary to Leave Traces” – Maurizio Ferraris
• “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” – Judith Butler

Read more about the concept of Speeach Acts, as well as the work of Miche

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

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What comes to mind when we think about toxicity in everyday life? It could be toxic relationships or masculinity – through to consumption, waste, governance and environmental harm. Alice Mah joins Uncommon Sense to discuss toxic expertise, waste colonialism and more.

The author of “Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation” and “Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It”, Alice reflects on what the petrochemical industry has to do with sociology. From the impact on marginalised communities often having no choice but to live in a toxic environment through to the concept of “waste colonialism”.

She also introduces us to the work of Dr Max Liboiron and their work CLEAR (Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research) – an interdisciplinary plastic pollution laboratory whose methods foreground humility and good land relations. Alice explains how the work of CLEAR has impacted her and made her think a little differently when approaching her own work.

Guest: Alice Mah
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Guest Producer: Emma Houlton
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense

Episode Resources

By Alice Mah

• Petrochemical Planet
• Plastic Unlimited
• Toxic Expertise

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Deep Time, Intergenerational Knowledge, and Socio-Ecological Futures – The Sociological Review Annual Lecture 2024 by Alice Mah
• Into the abyss: Monsters, minerals and deep-sea mining in Norway’s blue economy – Jennifer E. Telesca
• Climate Justice – magazine issue

Further resources

• “The Climate of History in a Planetary Age” – Dipesh Chakrabarty
• “Pollution Is Colonialism” – Max Liboiron
• “Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution” – Gerald Markowitz, David Rosner
• “The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World” – Linsey McGoey
• Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)
• “The Blue Planet” – documentary TV series presented by David Attenborough
• “Dark Waters” – film directed by Todd Haynes – based on Nathaniel Rich’s New York Times article “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare”

Production Note: This episode was recorded in July 2024.

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What gets centred and what gets framed as marginal? Who decides? And what are the consequences? UN expert, feminist scholar and social historian Rhoda Reddock – Professor Emerita at The University of the West Indies – joins us from Trinidad and Tobago to discuss the theme of margins, reflecting on the importance of radical Caribbean thought, the contested meaning of the “global south” and the evolution and significance of Caribbean feminism from the 70s to today.

As a member of the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), Rhoda shares her reflections of moving between Switzerland and Trinidad and Tobago for her work. She also gives advice to scholars striving to make an impact – and to those questioning the necessity of moving to the “global north”. Why, Rhoda asks, does scholarship from the “global south” too often get perceived as regionally specific, while the “north” remains regarded as the centre of sociological thought? And how, Rosie and Alexis ask, has the Caribbean typically been regarded – or indeed, dismissed – by the discipline?

Plus: Rhoda also shines a spotlight on Trinidadian-American scholar Oliver C. Cox, author of “Caste, Class and Race”, whose work was a precursor to Wallerstein’s “World Systems Theory” and also to women’s studies today. A fascinating discussion, also featuring celebration of thinkers including CLR James and Walter Rodney, author of “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”.

Guest: Rhoda Reddock
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 Rhoda Reddock

• Radical Caribbean Social Thought
• Women and Slavery in the Caribbean
• “Conceptualizing ‘Difference’ in Caribbean Feminist Theory” in New Caribbean Thought
• Rhoda’s online profile

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Europeans, with Manuela  Boatcă – Uncommon Sense podcast episode
• Global Sociology – online magazine essay collection
• Decolonising Methodologies, 20 Years On: The Sociological Review Annual Lecture – Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Further resources

• The UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)
• “North-South: A Programme for Survival” – Willy Brandt
• “Southern Theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science” – Raewyn Connell
• “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” – Walter Rodney
• “Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics” – Oliver C. Cox

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

Interested in podcasting with us? Read more here, and contact us at [email protected]