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

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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

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What’s meant – and who’s excluded – when community is invoked? Does membership take more than presence alone? How can seeing local crises through a global lens enrich our understanding? Kirsteen Paton joins Uncommon Sense to discuss community, class, resistance, solidarity and more – including her experience of community in the UK cities of Liverpool and Glasgow.

As the author of “Class and Everyday Life”, Kirsteen gives hosts Alexis and Rosie a fascinating potted history of the study of “community” in sociology – moving from the early work of Emile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tönnies, concerned with industrial capitalism, to recent studies of gentrification and the rise of identities beyond those tied to concrete ideas of “place”. They ask: how is sociology developing its thinking about online communities? And if there’s a tendency to idealise and romanticise “community” as typically positive, how should we think about and conceptualise those on the far right?

Also: does talking about place-based communities risk missing the fact that communities are also connected across borders and histories, including colonialism? Kirsteen reflects – via Ambalavaner Sivanandan and Doreen Massey – on how what appears to be “local” (whether crises like the housing one or cases of resistance) is often inextricably linked to the global. Plus: a celebration of Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall and more.

Guest: Kirsteen Paton
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 Kirsteen Paton

• Class and Everyday Life
• Gentrification: A Working-Class Perspective
• Probing the symptomatic silences of middle‐class settlement: A case study of gentrification processes in Glasgow

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Solidarity – Uncommon Sense podcast episode
• Doing Anti-Racism – The Stigma Conversations podcast episode
• World City – Spatial Delight podcast episode

Further reading

• “Coal is Our Life” – N. Dennis, F. Henriques, C. Slaughter
• “Family and Kinship in East London” – M. Young, P. Willmott
• “St Ann's” – K. Coates, R. Silburn
• “Neither ‘Deepest, Darkest Peckham’ nor ‘Run-of-the-Mill’ East Dulwich: The Middle Classes and their ‘Others’ in an Inner-London Neighbourhood” – E. Jackson, M. Benson
• “‘I Probably Would Never Move, but Ideally Like I’d Love to Move This Week’: Class and Residential Experience, Beyond Elective Belonging” – B. Jeffery
• “Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism” – A. Sivanandan
• “A Global Sense of Place” – D. Massey
• “New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s” – eds. S. Hall, M. Jacques
• “All That Melts into Air is Solid: The Hokum of New Times” – A. Sivanandan

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Think you know “coffee culture”? Anthropologist Grazia Ting Deng discusses her research into the “paradox of Chinese Espresso” – or why and how coffee bars in Italy, seen as such distinctively “Italian” spaces, became increasingly managed by Chinese baristas since 2008. Grazia tells Rosie and guest host Amit Singh – who highlights the overlap with his own co-authored research into the UK’s desi pubs – about her ethnographic study and how she even trained as a barista to better grasp her subject. Painting a vivid picture of how management by Chinese baristas grew due to economic, social and cultural factors in Bologna, Italy, she describes how and why these baristas have typically preserved rather than altered the culture in place. The coffee bar, she shows, is an everyday site of friction and adaptation where diverse groups come together and interact to construct a convivial space. Crucially, Grazia argues, conviviality is not some lofty goal – as is often thought to be the case – rather, it’s a lived reality, characterised by contingency and compromise.

Guest: Grazia Ting Deng
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Amit Singh
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Grazia Ting Deng

• Chinese Espresso
• Hopefully a Good Life
• I Cinesi among Others: The Contested Racial Perceptions among Chinese Migrants in Italy

Discussed by Rosie, Amit and Grazia

• “Heaven’s Kitchen” – Courtney Bender
• “In Search of Respect” – Philippe Bourgois
• “Challenging Codes” – Alberto Melucci
• “New Ethnicities and Urban Culture” – Les Back
• “Coffee and Cigarettes” – film, dir. Jim Jarmusch
• “Shun Li and the Poet” – film, dir. Andrea Segre

From The Sociological Review

• Social spaces and non-places: The community role of the traditional British pub – Reid Allen
• Convivial narratives as agency: Middle-class Muslims evading racialisation in Copenhagen – Amani Hassani
• Valuing the bowling alley: Contestations over the preservation of spaces of everyday urban multiculture in London – Emma Jackson

Further reading

• “The Great Good Place” – Ray Oldenburg
• A pub for England: Race and class in the time of the nation – Amit Singh, Sivamohan Valluvan, James Kneale
• “After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?” – Paul Gilroy
• “Stories from a migrant city” – Ben Rogaly
• “Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection” – Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
• “The Invention of Tradition” – eds. Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger
• “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” – Clifford Geertz

Read more about the work of Mary Louise Pratt.

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What does it mean to make things? Why are some people valorised as “makers”, while others are rendered invisible? And what duty do sociologists have as makers of knowledge and narratives? The “sewing cycling sociologist” Kat Jungnickel joins Uncommon Sense to discuss all this and more; including her years of research celebrating historic female cyclists as radical inventors, makers and hackers, responding to barriers to their freedom of movement and raising crucial questions about power and space.

Rosie (no stranger to DIY) and Alexis (a lifelong fan of taking things apart) ask Kat: what exactly is “Science and Technology Studies” (STS) and what’s the idea of the “black box” all about? How are the factory workers who make “our” clothes regarded in academia and beyond? Aren’t we all “makers” now, feeding our “smart” devices? And what can we learn from “Do It Together” (DIT) communities, like those Kat studied for her doctoral work in Australia, where she met people building their own wi-fi networks? Are they performing radical resistance to capitalism, or simply dealing with its downsides?

Plus: Kat celebrates the work of thinkers who inspire her, including Saidiya Hartman. Hartman’s “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments”, Kat suggests, invites us to interrogate and remake established narratives, and to make space for those previously dismissed and denied a voice. Also discussed: John Urry, John Law, Angela McRobbie, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and more.

Production Note: This episode was recorded before Kat Jungnickel's home institution of Goldsmiths, University of London announced organisational restructuring, which includes plans to make more than 50% of academic staff in the Department of Sociology redundant.

Guest: Kat Jungnickel
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 Kat Jungnickel

• Bikes and Bloomers and the project’s open-source sewing patterns
• Politics of Patents
• Making Things to make Sense of Things
• Making WiFi
• Kat’s website

From The Sociological Review

• Words failed us: Repairing sociology’s haunted past means finding new language to write about the social world – Gala Rexer
• “The Promises of Practice” – Christopher Gad, Casper Bruun Jensen
• “Fixing the future? How architects make time in buildings for later life care” – Siân M. Beynon-Jones, et al.

Further reading

• “Science in Action” – Bruno Latour
• “Staying with the Trouble” – Donna Haraway
• “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments” – Saidiya Hartman
• “A Social History of American Technology” (2nd edition) – Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Matthew H. Hersch

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Burnout has become a byword for workplace exhaustion, but does it have a deeper history? Hannah Proctor joins us to explain how the notion emerged in the USA’s 1960s countercultural free clinics movement, at first relating to the emotional defeat of idealistic activists but came to be seen as simply the result of working too hard. It’s a story that tracks the trajectory of capitalism itself – as Hannah shows referencing thinkers from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello to filmmaker Adam Curtis.

Rosie and Alexis ask Hannah: are there gendered, classed and racialised aspects to how burnout gets discussed? How do structural conditions prevent us from caring for caregivers? And how do the statements of those in power undermine or validate the causes we care about, and thus compound our feelings of defeat and exhaustion?

Hannah explains what psychiatrist Frantz Fanon's work teaches us about the challenges and contradictions of striving to make people “well” in a sick society. Plus, she tells us why the Black Panther phrase “survival pending revolution” is a crucial reminder that while small-scale acts of care remain essential, only wholesale reform can ensure a better, less burnout, world for all.

Guest: Hannah Proctor
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

Recommended by Hannah

• “Hyper” – A. Ismaïl

From The Sociological Review

• The Stigma Conversations: Apocalypse and Change – I. Tyler, A. Knox
• Uncommon Sense: Care – B. Skeggs, R. Hancock, A. H. Truong
• Healing, knowing, enduring: Care and politics in damaged worlds – M. Tironi, I. Rodríguez-Giralt

By Hannah Proctor

• Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat
• “Sadistic, grinning rifle-women” in Gender, Emotions and Power, 1750–2020
• university profile and website

Further reading

• “Burn-out: The High Cost of High Achievement” – H. J. Freudenberger, G. Richelson
• “Staff Burn‐Out” – H. J. Freudenberger
• “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” – A. H. Petersen
• “Edifice Complex” – B. Ansfield
• “The making of burnout” – M. J. Hoffarth
• “Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties” – M. Davis, J. Wiener
• “The New Spirit of Capitalism” – L. Boltanski, E. Chiapello
• “The Care Manifesto” – The Care Collective
• “Revolutionary Suicide” – H. P. Newton
• “The Case of Blackness” – F. Moten
• “The Wretched of the Earth” – F. Fanon
• “Disalienation” – C. Robcis

Read about Isabelle Le Pain’s work and watch Adam Curtis's films.

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

What does privilege look like today? How do the advantaged perform “ease”? And why do some of us feel at home in elite spaces, while others feel awkward? Princeton sociologist Shamus Khan joins Uncommon Sense to reflect on elites, entitlement and more. Reminding us that “poor people are not why there’s inequality; rich people are why there’s inequality”, he highlights the importance of studying elites for studying inequality, as the gap between the two grows.

Being the author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St Paul’s School (2011), Shamus tells Rosie and Alexis about how the way elites justify and see their position has shifted – and how a disability studies perspective helps us to cast a critical eye on the “ease” with which the few seem to nimbly navigate elite institutions. What seems like some of us “have it” and others “just don’t” is, suggests Shamus, socially produced – and what appears to be a “flat” and open world, ripe for the bold to seize, is really far more complex.

Plus: why might people who share the same knowledge be valued differently when that knowledge is held in different – racialised, minoritised – bodies? Also: why TV shows and movies about elites don’t stop at Saltburn, Succession and The Kardashians?

Guest: Shamus Khan
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

From The Sociological Review

• Spatial Delight: Space Invaders – N. Puwar, A. Lisiak
• Uncommon Sense: Taste – I. Karademir Hazir, R. Hancock, A. H. Truong
• ‘Talent-spotting’ or ‘social magic’? Inequality, cultural sorting and constructions of the ideal graduate in elite professions – N. Ingram, K. Allen

By Shamus Khan

• Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School
• Saying Meritocracy and Doing Privilege (co-authored with Colin Jerolmack)
• How Cultural Capital Emerged in Gilded Age America (co-authored with Fabien Accominotti, Adam Storer)

Further reading

• “Flexible Citizenship” – A. Ong
• “Space Invaders” – N. Puwar
• “Learning to Labour” – P. Willis
• “Understanding audience segmentation” – R. Peterson
• “Reality Television and Class” – B. Skeggs, H. Wood
• “‘Oh goodness, I am watching reality TV’: How methods make class in audience research” – B. Skeggs, N. Thumim, H. Wood
• “Capital in the 21st Century” – T. Piketty

Read more about  Shey O’Brien, Fabien Acconomoti, Pierre Bourdieu and Frantz Fanon.

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What are rules for? What's at stake if we assume that they're neutral? And if we want rules to be progressive, does it matter who makes them? Socio-legal scholar Swethaa Ballakrishnen joins Uncommon Sense to reflect on this and more, highlighting the value of studying law not just in theory but in action, and drawing on a career spanning law and academia in India and the USA.

As the author of "Accidental Feminism", which explores unintended parity in the Indian legal profession, Swethaa talks to Rosie and Alexis about intention and whether it is always needed for positive outcomes. We also ask: in a society characterised as “post-truth”, does anyone even care about rules anymore? Plus, Swethaa dissects the trope of “neutrality” – firmly embedded in legal discourse, from the idea of “blind justice” to the notion of equality before the law. There are dangers, they explain, to assuming that law is neutral, particularly given that it is often those in power who get to make and extend the rules – something critical race scholars have long been aware of.

Swethaa also fills us in on their recent interest in the TV show "Ted Lasso" and considers pop culture that speaks to our theme, including the series "Made in Heaven" and "Extraordinary Attorney Woo", plus a short film by Arun Falara.

Guest: Swethaa Ballakrishnen
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 at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

From The Sociological Review

• Socio-legal Implications for Digital Environmental Activism – Audrey Verma et al.
• The Moral Rhetoric of a Civilized Society – Susanna Menis
• Depoliticisation, hybridisation and dual processes of stigmatisation – Shaoying Zhang

By Swethaa Ballakrishnen

• Accidental Feminism
• Law School as Straight Space
• Gender Regimes and the Politics of Privacy (co-authored with Kalpana Kannabiran)
• “At Odds with Everything Around Me” in Out of Place (forthcoming)
• “Of Queerness, Rights, and Utopic Possibilities” (interview) – part of Queering the (Court)Room

Further reading, viewing and listening

• “Lawyers and the Construction of Transnational Justice” – Yves Dezalay, Bryant Garth (eds)
• “Criminal Behavior as an Expression of Identity and a Form of Resistance” – Kathryne Young
• “The Language of Law School” – Elizabeth Mertz
• TV series: “Extraordinary Attorney Woo”, “Ted Lasso”, “Made in Heaven”
• “Sunday” (short film)– Arun Fulara
• Uncommon Sense: Performance, with Kareem Khubchandani

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What exactly is spirituality? How does it relate to religion? Are both misunderstood? And what stands beyond and behind the idea that it has all simply been commodified to be about wellness, big business and celebrity? Andrew Singleton joins Uncommon Sense to reflect on this and more, including his experience researching young people’s spiritual practices in Australia, and time spent in Papua New Guinea.

Andrew describes how what has been called the “spiritual turn” emerged through the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s and led to today’s “spiritual marketplace”. We ask whether the young people of today’s Generation Z are more open-minded than their elders – and whether, across the Global North and Global South, people are meeting a need for betterment in the “here and now” through spirituality, but also religion.

Plus: what did Marx really mean when he described religion as the “opium of the people” – and how has that quote taken on a (rather cynical) life of its own? Also, from reactions to the bestselling Eat, Pray, Love to the historical condemnation of female fortune tellers, why do our definitions and dismissals of spirituality seem to be so deeply gendered?

Guest: Andrew Singleton
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 at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

From The Sociological Review

• The spiritual turn and the disenchantment of the world: Max Weber, Peter Berger and the religion–science conflict – Galen Watts, Dick Houtman
• The “Belief” issue of The Sociological Review Magazine (May 2022)
• Capitalising on faith? An intergenerational study of social and religious capital among Baby Boomers and Millennials in Britain – Stuart Fox, et al.

By Andrew Singleton

• Freedoms, Faiths and Futures: Teenage Australians on Religion, Sexuality and Diversity (co-authored with M.L. Rasmussen, A. Halafoff, G. Bouma)
• Religion, Culture and Society: A Global Approach
• The Spirit of Generation Y: Young People’s Spirituality in a Changing Australia (co-authored with M. Mason, R. Webber)

Further reading and listening

• “Selling Yoga” and “Peace Love Yoga” – Andrea Jain
• “Selling Spirituality” – Jeremy Carrette, Richard King
• “Selling (Con)spirituality and COVID-19 in Australia” – Anna Halafoff, et al.
• “Women's Work: The Professionalisation and Policing of Fortune-Telling in Australia” – Alana Piper
• “Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World” – Alexandra Roginski
• “The Dream” podcast – Jane Marie

Read more on the life and work of Gary Bauma, as well as about Karl Marx and Michel Foucault.

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Anxiety is part of contemporary life, yet rarely seen as anything other than personal and intimately psychological. Cultural Studies scholar Nicky Falkof joins us to discuss her work on fear and anxiety in South Africa, and how such negative emotions are often collective and collectively constructed – and relate deeply to our identities. Indeed, as Nicky tells us, if you ask yourself what or whom you’re scared of, you quickly face the question of who you think you are.

Hear about Nicky’s teenage engagement in goth culture as South Africa approached the end of apartheid, and how it led her to think critically about fear and social change. Plus, she explains why that country, and Johannesburg in particular – as explored in her new book “Worrier State” – is seen as such a fascinating site for studying anxiety. With Rosie and Alexis, she also reflects on the architecture of fear – and why some people are unjustly expected to live in fear while others feel entitled to fight it.

We also take on the trope of reflexivity, as Nicky considers how being truly reflexive requires not just introspection and soul-searching but meaningful practical action. With reflection on thinkers from Zygmunt Bauman to Jacob Dlamini and from Sara Ahmed to Sigmund Freud. Plus: what can the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles possibly teach us about anxiety?

Guest: Nicky Falkof
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 at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

From The Sociological Review

• ‘Under attack’: Responsibility, crisis and survival anxiety amongst manager-academics in UK universities – Vik Loveday
• Decolonising and re-theorising the meaning of democracy: A South African perspective – Heidi Brooks, Trevor Ngwane, Carin Runciman
• Social class, symbolic domination, and Angst: The example of the Norwegian social space – Andreas Schmitz, Magne Flemmen, Lennart Rosenlund

By Nicky Falkof

• Worrier State: Risk, anxiety and moral panic in South Africa
• The End of Whiteness: Satanism and family murder in South Africa
• Find out more on Nicky’s website

Further reading

• “The Cultural Politics of Emotion” – Sara Ahmed
• “Gender Trouble” – Judith Butler
• “Liquid Fear” – Zygmunt Bauman
• “Female Fear Factory” – Pumla Dineo Gqola
• “Native Nostalgia” – Jacob Dlamini

Read more about Sigmund Freud, and the work of Johnny Steinberg.

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“If you’re talented and work hard, success (whatever that is) will be yours!” – So says the powerful system and ideology known as “meritocracy”. But if only it were so simple! Jo Littler joins Uncommon Sense to reflect on where this idea came from, how it became mainstream, and how it gets used by elites to convince us we live in a system that is open and fair when the reality is anything but that.

But Jo also shows things are changing. Since the crash of 2008 it’s been clear we’re living and working on a far from “level” playing field. Jo describes the recent embrace of non-work and the rise of assertive “left feminisms” as a sign of hope that the tide may be turning against meritocracy and shallow ideas of success, and discusses the work of people leading the way.

Plus: we reflect on the trope of escape. Why is it so often that to “succeed” in life, one must leave the place that they’re from and embrace the risky and new? And what’s up with the cliche of the “ladder” as a visual image for success? Jo reflects with reference to everyone from Ayn Rand to Raymond Williams. Also: we consider the 1990s rise of the “Mumpreneur” and the more recent phenomenon of the “Cleanfluencer”.

Guest: Jo Littler
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 at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

Jo, Alexis and Rosie recommend

• C. Carraway’s book “Skint Estate”
• M. Brown and R. Jones’ book “Paint Your Town Red”
• D. Aronofsky’s film “Requiem for a Dream”
• R. Linklater’s film “Slacker”

From The Sociological Review

• Sociological reflections on ‘doing’ aspiration within the psychic landscape of class – Kim Allen
• Birds of a Feather – Natalie Wreyford
• The price of the ticket revised –  Anthony Miro Born

By Jo Littler

• Against Meritocracy
• Mrs Hinch, the rise of the cleanfluencer and the neoliberal refashioning of housework (co-authored with Emma Casey)
• Left Feminisms: Conversations on the Personal and Political

Further reading

• “The Rise of the Meritocracy” – Michael Young
• “The Coming of Post-industrial Society” – Daniel Bell
• “Coloniality and Meritocracy in Unequal EU Migrations” – Simone Varriale
• “Perceptions of Meritocracy in Singapore” – Terri-Anne Teo
• “Meritocracy and Elitism in a Global City” – Kenneth Paul Tan
• “The Tyranny of Merit” – Michael Sandel
• “Inequality by Design” – Claude Fischer, et al.
• “Notes on the Perfect”– Angela McRobbie
• “Culture and Society” – Raymond Williams

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