Rules, with Swethaa Ballakrishnen

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

Read more about the work of David B. Wilkins and Deborah L. Rhode.

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.

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.

“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

Read more about the industrial sociologist Alan Fox, the work of Bev Skeggs on respectability politics, the work of Nancy Fraser, and the Billionaire Britain 2022 report by The Equality Trust.

What is public sociology and why does it matter more than ever? Gary Younge, Chantelle Lewis and Cecilia Menjívar join Michaela Benson to reflect on its meaning, value and stakes.

In a time of perpetual crisis and gross inequality, how can sociologists best change minds and set agendas? Why are some voices valued over others? And who does being truly “public” involve more than simply being high profile?

Gary Younge reflects on what sociologists and journalists can teach each other – and the ongoing struggle in the UK for space in which work on race can be truly incubated and explored. Cecilia Menjívar describes her deep engagement with migration and gender-based violence – and how in Latin America, “public sociology” is simply “sociology”. And Chantelle Lewis describes the lack of value applied to black scholarship in UK academia – and urges us to embrace hope, honesty and solidarity.

An essential listening! Discussing thinkers ranging from E.H. Carr on history to Maria Marcela Lagarde on feminicide, plus Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, bell hooks, ​​Sheila Rowbotham and many more.

Guests: Gary Younge, Chantelle Lewis, Cecilia Menjívar
Host: Michaela Benson
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

• Strategies of public intellectual engagement – Mohamed Amine Brahimi, et al.
• An interventionist sociologist: Stuart Hall, public engagement and racism – Karim Murji
• Curating Sociology – Nirmal Puwar, Sanjay Sharma

By our guests

• Gary’s books Dispatches from the Diaspora & Another Day in the Death of America
• Chantelle’s co-produced podcast Surviving Society
• Cecilia’s work on migration and gender-based violence

Further reading

• “Gary Younge: how racism shaped my critical eye” – Gary Younge
• “Women's Liberation & the New Politics” – Sheila Rowbotham
• “For Public Sociology” – Michael Burawoy
• “What is History?” – E.H. Carr
• “Beyond the blade” – investigation by The Guardian

Read more about the work of Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall and bell hooks, the life and work of Marcela Lagarde and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the work of Jane Addams on public housing, as well as the poet, essayist and activist June Jordan.

From Shakespeare to RuPaul, we all love a performance. But what exactly is it? What are its boundaries, its powers, its potential, its stakes? Kareem Khubchandani, who also performs as LaWhore Vagistan – “everyone's favourite desi drag queen aunty” – joins Uncommon Sense to unpack the latest thinking on refusal, repetition and more. And to discuss “Ishtyle”, Kareem’s ethnography of gay Indian nightlife in Chicago and Bangalore, which attends to desire and fun in the lives of global Indian workers too often stereotyped as cogs in the wheels of globalisation.

Kareem also reflects on the particular value of queer nightlife, and celebrates how drag kings skilfully unmask what might be the ultimate performance: heteromasculinity. We also ask: what do thinkers like Bourdieu and Foucault reveal about performance? Why is there still a way to go in our understanding of drag and how might decolonising it serve us all? Plus: why calling something “performative” is actually not about calling things “fake”? In fact, performance can make things “real”…

With reflection on Judith Butler, “Paris is Burning”, “RuPaul's Drag Race” and clubbing in Sydney and Tokyo.

Guest: Kareem Khubchandani
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

• Advantages of upper-class backgrounds: Forms of capital, school cultures and educational performance – Vegard Jarness, Thea Bertnes Strømme
• ‘You've Gotta Learn how to Play the Game’: Homeless Women's Use of Gender Performance as a Tool for Preventing Victimization – Laura Huey, Eric Berndt
• Performing the Disabled Body in Academia – Luke Walker

By Kareem Khubchandani

• Ishtyle
• Decolonize Drag
• Queer Nightlife (co-edited with Kemi Adeyemi and Ramón Rivera-Servera)
• Dance Floor Divas
• Kareem’s website, including more about LaWhore Vagistan

Further reading and viewing

• “Introduction to Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform” – Lilian G. Mengesha, Lakshmi Padmanabhan
• “Everynight Life” – Celeste Fraser Delgado, José Esteban Muñoz (editors)
• “Cruising Utopia” – José Esteban Muñoz
• “Gender Trouble” – Judith Butler
• “Camera Lucida” – Roland Barthes
• “Paris is Burning” (film) – Jennie Livingstone

Read more about the work of Dhiren Borisa, Saidiya V Hartman, D. Soyini Madison and Joshua Chambers-Letson; as well as Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Foucault.

It is increasingly accepted that we cannot take nature for granted. But do we even know what nature is? Catherine Oliver brings her expertise in geography and sociology – plus her love of chickens – to the latest Uncommon Sense to reflect on what’s at stake in how we think of and relate to “nature” – and how we might do better. Along the way, she considers what happens when neoliberalism shapes what “good” nature is – whether in regeneration or meddling with metabolisms.

Alexis and Rosie also ask Catherine: how might the chicken be “thriving” yet also “extinct”? What potential is there in speaking of the “more than” and “beyond” human? And what responsibility do social scientists have for the age-old binaries that split humans from wider nature?

Plus: a celebration of Andrea Arnold’s “Cow”, Margaret Atwood’s “MaddAddam” trilogy and – Alexis’ favourite – “Captain Planet”.

Guest: Catherine Oliver
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

Catherine, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

• Andrea Arnold’s film “Cow”
• Margaret Atwood’s “MaddAddam” book trilogy
• TV series “Captain Planet and the Planeteers”
• Evia Wylk’s essay collection “Death by Landscape”

From The Sociological Review

• Performing the classification of nature – Claire Waterton
• Daphne the Cat: Reimagining human–animal boundaries on Facebook – Verónica Policarpo
• Unnatural Times? The Social Imaginary and the Future of Nature – Kate Soper

By Catherine Oliver

• Rising with the rooster: How urban chickens are relaxing the pace of life
• Transforming paradise: Neoliberal regeneration and more-than-human urbanism in Birmingham
• The Opposite of Extinction
• Returning to 'The Good Life'? Chickens and Chicken-keeping during Covid-19 in Britain
• Metabolic ruminations with climate cattle: towards a more-than-human metabo-politics (co-authored with Jonathon Turnbull)

Further reading

• “Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save” – Tyson Yunkaporta
• “Toward equality: Including non-human animals in studies of lived religion and nonreligion” – Lori G. Beaman, Lauren Strumos
• “A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet” – Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore
• “The Chicken Chronicles: A Memoir” – Alice Walker
• “The Chicken Book” – Page Smith, Charles Daniel

Read more about the work of Zoe Todd, Adam Searle, Anna Tsing, Anna Guasco, Paige Colton and The Care Collective.

Does anyone know what European means? Manuela Boatcă thought she did, until a late 1990s move from Romania to Germany unsettled everything she had taken for granted. In this episode, she challenges mainstream ideas of “Europe” to show how its borders extend to the Caribbean (and beyond) – a fact that’s obvious if we acknowledge colonialism’s past and present, but is an inconvenient truth for some in political power.

Alexis and Rosie ask Manuela: How has Brexit revealed the contradictions built into so much discourse about “Europe”? How does “Creolizing” theory differ from “Decolonising” it? And what is the legacy of early sociologist Max Weber’s leading question: why the West?

Plus: a celebration of Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems approach, which decentres the nation state. With reflection on Stuart Hall, Edouard Glissant, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih.

Guest: Manuela Boatcă
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

Manuela, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

• Arton Capital’s The Passport Index
• “Europe” travel guides
• Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Família
• Daša Drndić’s novel “Canzone Di Guerra”

From The Sociological Review

• The material effects of Whiteness – Aleksandra Lewicki
• Puzzlement of a déjà vu – Nirmal Puwar
• The ambiguous lives of ‘the other whites’ – Dominika Blachnika-Ciacek, Irma Budinaite-Mackine

By Manuela Boatcă

• Thinking Europe Otherwise
• (Dis)United Kingdom
• Counter-Mapping as Method
• What does British citizenship have to do with Global Social Inequalities?

Further reading

• “Provincializing Europe” – Dipesh Chakrabarty
• “Poetics of relation” – Édouard Glissant
• “The Creolization of Theory” – Shu-mei Shih, Françoise Lionnet
• “Sweetness And Power” – Sidney Mintz
• “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” – Max Weber
• “The Essential Wallerstein” – Immanuel Wallerstein

Read more about the work of Stuart Hall, Fernand Braudel, Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Fernando Coronil and Salman Sayyid.

AUDIO CONTENT WARNING: description of extreme racist violence

In 1993, Black British teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racist attack that sparked a long fight for justice and led the UK to ask questions of itself and its institutions. Three decades on – with The Runnymede Trust’s Shabna Begum, and Suresh Grover of The Monitoring Group – Karis Campion of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre hosts this special episode to ask: who are we now? What happened to anti-racist solidarity and how can it progress?

Karis and guests reflect on the fragmentation of “political blackness”, “monitoring” as a radical act inspired by The Black Panther Party, and the importance of showing systemic racism while doing justice to individual lives. Plus: what does social media offer to anti-racism when the internet provides fertile ground for prejudice? And what are the costs of fighting for change in an unjust world?

With reference to the activist writer Ambalavaner Sivanandan, the feminist scholar Audre Lorde, the social geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and more. A collaboration between the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre and The Sociological Review.

Guests: Suresh Grover, Shabna Begum
Host: Karis Campion
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 Karis, Shabna and Suresh

• Karis’ work at The Stephen Lawrence Research Centre
• Shabna’s book “From Sylhet to Spitalfields”
• Suresh in conversation with Paul Gilroy

Further reading

• “Abolition Geography” – Ruth Wilson Gilmore
• “Another Day in the Death of America” – Gary Younge
• “Here to Stay, Here to Fight” – Paul Field, et al. (eds)
• “I Write What I Like” – Steve Biko
• “Policing the Crisis” – Stuart Hall, et al.
• “Race and Resistance” – Ambalavaner Sivanandan
• “The Uses of Anger” – Audre Lorde

Online resources

• Over-policed and under-protected: the road to Safer Schools – The Runnymede Trust
• The Baroness Casey Review (this episode was recorded prior to this publication)
• The Black Panther Party – US National Archives
• The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry – Sir William Macpherson

Find out more about Quddus Ali and the cases of Michael Menson, Ricky Reel, Rolan Adams and Rohit Duggal, as well as the activist Claudia Jones.

And check out The Monitoring Group and The Runnymede Trust, as well as The Stephen Lawrence Centre Archive.

What does Eurovision have to do with the Coronation? In this episode swap, the team at Who do we think we are? is talking about what we learn about “Global Britain” and its imagined community by looking at how migrants understand major cultural events.

Elena Zambelli explains what social scientists mean when they talk about the imagined community. Laura Clancy, sociologist of the royal family, joins us to talk about the missing voices in conversations about the future of the British monarchy. Co-hosts Nando Sigona and Michaela Benson reflect on what British citizens living abroad, EU citizens and others who have made the UK their homes told them about how they understand Britain and their place within it following Brexit. What does hearing from them about the monarchy, the Commonwealth Games and Eurovision make visible about the new borders of political membership and symbolic boundaries of belonging?

In this episode we cover:

1. The imagined community
2. The monarchy and the myth of the British nation
3. Eurovision, the Commonwealth Games and Royal Events

Active listening questions:

• What imagined community, or imagined communities, do you feel that you belong to?  
• Are there public events during which you do or could celebrate your belonging to this or these communities? Which ones? 
• Who do you think is excluded from this imagined community and how? And what does this tell us about the symbolic boundaries of this community?

Find more about:

• What EU citizens in the UK and British citizens in the EU think about the monarchy in Elena and Catherine’s article in The Sociological Review Magazine
• The concept of imagined community in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and the critique offered by Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and its Fragments
• Laura’s sociology of the royal family in her book Running the family firm and the Surviving Society podcast miniseries The Global Power of the British Monarchy

Our podcast picks for this episode are:

• Academic Aunties on “Harry and Meghan”
• The Allusionist on Eurovision
• Conversations with IRiS on Political Demography

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