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

** Complete our listener survey here! It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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] 

Sign up to the Sociological Review Foundation newsletter

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

** Complete our listener survey here! It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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] 

Sign up to the Sociological Review Foundation newsletter

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.

** Complete our listener survey here! It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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] 

Sign up to the Sociological Review Foundation newsletter

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

Find more about Uncommon Sense

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)

** Complete our listener survey here! It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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] 

Sign up to the Sociological Review Foundation newsletter

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

Find more about Uncommon Sense

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.

** Complete our listener survey here! It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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] 

Sign up to the Sociological Review Foundation newsletter

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

Find more about Uncommon Sense

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.

** Complete our listener survey here! It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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] 

Sign up to the Sociological Review Foundation newsletter

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

Find more about Uncommon Sense

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 Antonio Gramsci, William H. Sewell and Dylan John Riley.

** Complete our listener survey here! It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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] 

Sign up to the Sociological Review Foundation newsletter

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.

** Complete our listener survey here! It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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] 

Sign up to the Sociological Review Foundation newsletter

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.

** Complete our listener survey here! It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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] 

Sign up to the Sociological Review Foundation newsletter

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 Johnson

More links to resources available at thesociologicalreview.org

** Complete our listener survey here! It helps us, a charity, learn who’s listening to Uncommon Sense, and why. Thank you **

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] 

Sign up to the Sociological Review Foundation newsletter