Uncommon Sense

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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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