Shows
Surviving Society ProductionsE167 Stella Dadzie: Live podcast from the Connected Sociologies Summer SchoolLive podcast alert!
This week we were live podcasting from the Connected Sociologies Curriculum Summer School: Race, Class & Colonialism, with our guest, the legendary Black feminist, Stella Dadize. We discussed a range of issues from cancel culture and education, to self-care. As it’s a live recording we also have a Q & A between Stella and the audience!
Links
https://www.versobooks.com/books/3699-a-kick-in-the-belly
https://www.connectedsociologies.org/about/
2022-08-161h 08
How to build a schoolMea Aitken - Kids of ColourPicture this. a young person at school is disrupting their maths lesson. Consequently they are sent out the classroom. A few days later they get into a fight so they are sent to a room, isolated from peers and forbidden from having break time. Their poor behaviour persists throughout term and in the end they are suspended, remaining at home on their own for 3 days. Finally, after trying everything the school permanently excludes the young person and they are sent to a pupil referral unit, with other young people who have been excluded, away from any of their peers.
2022-06-1555 min
The Connected Sociologies PodcastTocqueville: America and Algeria - Prof Gurminder K BhambraAlexis Charles Henri Maurice Clérel, Comte de Tocqueville was born in 1805 into the French nobility and a family estate in Normandy. He died in 1859. His wider family was part of the conservative reaction to the changes brought about by the French Revolution in 1789, but Tocqueville, himself, looked forward. He participated in public office, initially as a magistrate and subsequently as a deputy of the Constituent Assembly, rising briefly to Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1849. He travelled to the United States between May 1831and February 1832 with his friend Gustave Beaumont, ostensibly to study penal institutions, but instead published a t...
2021-10-1913 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastEarly Modern Social Theory: Europe and its ‘Others’- Prof John HolmwoodThis session looks at the beginnings of modern European social theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The English political philosophers, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704), set out a distinction between the ‘state of nature’ and the ‘state of society’ in order to identify rights and obligations associated with private property. Their writings are widely seen in the context of the later development of capitalism, but are much more directly concerned with the justification of colonialism with which they were each directly engaged. In the eighteenth century, writers associated with the Scottish Enlightenment –for example, David Hume (1711-1776), Ad...
2021-10-1913 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastModern Social Theory - Prof Gurminder K BhambraModern social theory is a product of the very history it seeks to interpret and explain. In this module, we address the categories that form mainstream sociology in order to reconstruct modern social theory. We focus on five key sociological figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth century – Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Du Bois. Our purpose is to expose the significance of colonialism and empire in the organisation of the thought of these writers and, thereby, in the legacies they bequeath to social theory. Addressing colonial histories is a necessary preliminary to the reconstruction of social theory.
Re...
2021-10-1209 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastSecurity in the War on Terror: Predict, Prevent, PoliceThe Global War on Terror, which was launched in response to the attacks in America on September 11th, has strengthened approaches to securitisation in its attempt to eliminate terrorism. The figure of the ‘terrorist’ is closely associated with that of the Muslim man who through laws and policies related to counter-terrorism and counter-extremism, such as the Prevent Duty, is constructed as a risk and threat to society. From the Global North to the Global South, racialised communities, especially those racialised as Muslim, experience the War on Terror in their everyday spaces such as in schools and healthcare settings, as the...
2021-07-2726 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastColonialism & Modern Social Theory: Book Launch and DiscussionIn this event, John Holmwood and Gurminder K Bhambra discuss their new book, Colonialism & Modern Social Theory.
About this event
Modern society emerged in the context of European colonialism and empire. So, too, did a distinctively modern social theory, laying the basis for most social theorising ever since. Yet colonialism and empire are absent from the conceptual understandings of modern society, which are organised instead around ideas of nation state and capitalist economy.
In Colonialism & Modern Social Theory, Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Holmwood address this absence by examining the role of colonialism in the development of...
2021-07-271h 42The Connected Sociologies Podcast(Un)archiving Black British FeminismsBlack Feminism draws attention to the ways in which racialised, gendered and classed structures and discourses interact to position women differently in relation to white supremacist and patriarchal systems of oppression. In Britain, Black British Feminism offered not just a challenge to the white feminist theoretical claim to universal womanhood but offered a political space through which racialized women were able to develop their own political frames and build their own campaigns and struggles. In this session we consider the lessons that can be learnt from Black British Feminist theories and struggles. The session also raises some epistemological questions...
2021-07-2727 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastEnclosures and The Making of the Modern WorldIt has long been argued that the enclosure of land in England facilitated the agricultural and industrial revolutions that transformed Britain into a modern capitalist state. Yet the connections between land enclosures within England and the English-led colonial enclosures that were taking place at the same time have been less explored. This session examines connections between the enclosure of land and people within England and within the colonial world (from the 16th century). In contrast to nation-bound understandings of English capitalist modernity, which focus on land enclosures, the Industrial revolution, and the formation of a new class society within...
2021-07-2725 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastDraining Value, Drowning Labour - Dr Lucia PradellaHow much did the British gain from their empire? According to some calculations, Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India alone between 1765 and 1938: seventeen times more than the total annual GDP of the UK today. This huge amount of wealth was transferred unilaterally from India to England via trade, banking and administrative mechanisms. While India got nothing in return, the colonial drain played an important role in both the so-called primitive accumulation of capital in England and the reproduction of its industrial system. Only part of this wealth was reinvested in India, and in a way that k...
2021-07-2729 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastAnti-Slavery, European Imperialism, and Paternalistic ‘Protection’ (1880s to 1950s) - Professor Joel QuirkThe main role of organized anti-slavery during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to both legitimate and reinforce deeply rooted hierarchies which saw European states and their peoples position themselves at the moral and racial apex of ‘civilization’. Centuries of death and destruction associated with Transatlantic slavery firmly dispatched to the past, despite their continuing and catastrophic effects, thereby enabling Europeans to be reborn as abolitionists rather than enslavers. The foundational premise of organized anti-slavery – no one should be enslaved – would come to be primarily understood in terms of paternalistic ‘protection’, with ‘civilized’ Europeans justifying unprovoked wars of colonial conq...
2021-05-1733 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastPolicing "Gangs" - Dr Patrick WilliamsWhat is a ‘gang’? Whilst the disciplines of Criminology and Sociology have long grappled with this question, the answer is increasingly of no relevance to criminal justice policies that claim to address the problem of violent crime across England and Wales. Within the context of contemporary policing and law enforcement, the ‘gang’ has evolved as a ‘transcendental signifier’ (Alexander 2008) and today serves to legitimise intrusive and harmful policing practices as part of a gang-industry (Williams 2014). Of particular concern to this session, a cursory glance at police gang databases reveals that those who are ‘suspected’ by the police as ‘gang members’, associat...
2021-05-1728 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastPolitical Economy and the Environment - Dr Keston PerryDebates in political economy have shifted from resource extraction as a means of accumulation under capitalism to consider how workers, indigenous peoples, Black and other marginalized communities are dispossessed through climate devastation and breakdown. Yet political economy has almost remained silent about the ways in which commodification in faraway places in the Global South, in particular the Caribbean that constituted plantation economies. These spaces comprised the most important resources for colonial powers (e.g. sugar, oil, coffee, and cotton, copper among others) to accumulate capital. Natural spaces served as extractive landscapes for accumulation by metropolitan centers of power are...
2021-05-1739 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastThe Grunwick strike - Prof Sundari AnithaDominant representations of South Asian women in Britain locate them within their family and community lives; the women themselves are constructed as passive, confined to the domestic sphere and lacking agency. Their roles as citizens, as workers and as active members of trade unions who have contributed to the struggles for workers’ rights in the UK is elided in historical accounts and contemporary popular discourses. The Grunwick strike that took place in the late 1970s was one of the many occasions when South Asian women fought for their rights as workers. The focus of this session the Grunwick strike an...
2021-04-1919 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastSchool to Prison Pipeline - Dr Karen GrahamThe potential link between educational ‘failure’ and offending is often debated. Discussions frequently focus on the community, cultural or family backgrounds from which the children who ‘fail’ come, and/or on more adequate provision for those ‘at risk’ of school and social exclusion. These discussions often prioritise the apparent significance of race, class and gender, indicated by the over-representation of poor, male, Black students in punitive school disciplinary processes and a parallel disproportionality in the criminal justice system. However, many of these approaches assume educational systems to be intrinsically good and consider cases of educational failure to be anomalies that require...
2021-04-1931 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastPolicing in Postcolonial Continental Europe - Dr Vanessa E. ThompsonThe global protests and mobilisation for Black lives crystallised around policing, although simultaneously pointing at the broader dimensions of criminalisation and control of especially Black and other racialised poor folks and communities. The protests unfolded globally very quickly, also in many parts of continental Europe such as Germany, France and Switzerland. In this session, we explore the differential logics of policing in Europe, which are connected to the histories of empire, colonialism and racial gendered capitalism. We consider the functions and logics of policing, its relation to violence and safety and explore possible alternatives.
Reading
Eddie Bruce-Jones (2014), “German po...
2021-04-1929 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastIndian Indenture in the British Empire - Dr Maria del Pilar KaladeenBetween 1834 and 1920, two million men women and children were taken from India, by the British, to labour on sugar colonies across the Empire under temporary contracts called indentures. The majority of these workers never returned to India and the system of indenture, under which they were bound, has all but been erased from British colonial history. In this lecture, I reflect on how and why this silencing took place. I additionally refer to acts and forms of resistance utilised by indentured labourers and share ideas about the important contemporary contributions of the global Jahaji Bhai – the international indentured labour di...
2021-04-1912 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastModes of Integration, Multiculturalism and National Identities - Dr Prof Tariq ModoodFull integration requires some degree of subjective identification with the society or country as a whole. How to integrate difference so that difference ceases to be problematic? Four modes of integration are discussed in order to bring out the character of multiculturalism and its relation to liberty, equality and solidarity – the core components of national citizenship. The key difference between multiculturalism and other modes of integration is the normative significance it gives to minority racial, ethnic and religious groups, not just individuals and organisations, within national citizenship. The recent emphasis on cohesion and citizenship is a rebalancing of the po...
2021-04-1928 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastPolicing in Schools - Dr Remi Joseph-SalisburyIn recent years there have been repeated high-profile calls to increase the number of school-based police officers. Whilst police are becoming an increasingly normalised presence in British schools, there is a need for closer scrutiny of the potential problematics of this development. Wider evidence of institutional racism in both policing and schooling, suggests that the presence of police in schools may raise issues in terms of race and racism. There are also issues with regard to social class and other structural factors, including disability and sexuality. In this session, we explore the issue of police in schools with a...
2021-04-1919 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastColonialism, Immigration and the Making of British citizenshipThis session examines how Britain’s colonial and postcolonial history has shaped its understanding of citizenship. Citizenship can be understood as membership of a political community. As such, it cannot be separated from wider political projects of nation and empire. The session shows how colonial and postcolonial immigration shaped the development of what we now call British citizenship, and how national citizenship in Britain is inseparable from postcolonial conceptions of identity and belonging. The session explores how citizenship was introduced into UK law and traces its evolution in response to postcolonial immigration. It concludes with some reflections on contemporary legacies, in...
2021-04-1921 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastRacial Capitalism - Dr Lisa TilleyAn intellectual product of the Black Radical Tradition, ‘racial capitalism’ was first expansively developed as an account of the historical origins and embedded logics of global capitalism by Cedric Robinson in his key text Black Marxism. This session introduces students to the idea of racial capitalism and explains how it helps us to understand the centrality of race to the formation of capitalism. We will also consider how racial capitalism helps us to remain attuned to the constant production and reproduction of difference; and the exploitation and expropriation of those who are differentiated as ‘inferior’. But, perhaps most importantly, we’ll al...
2021-02-2424 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastColonial Policing Comes HomeBritain in the 1970s and 80s saw the rise of a new generation of black and Asian youth who, unlike the previous generation, had been born in Britain. They were not migrants like their parents, and demanded to part of Britain. At the same time, black and Asian youth were a useful scapegoat for a government unable to deal with economic crisis and rising unemployment. Creating the impression that ethnic minorities brought criminality and violence to Britain brought with it two things: 1) Forms of racist, violent policing which had previously been used in the colonies, and 2) Mass resistance and...
2021-02-1620 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastGlobal Supply Chains and Unfree Labour - Prof Genevieve LeBaronGlobal supply chains today depend on and reinforce relations of unfree labour, including forced, child, and trafficked labour. These coercive labour relations are often described as a ‘new slavery’, and are understood to be driven by criminality, cultural backwardness, corruption and poverty in the contemporary economy. Yet, dominant narratives about ‘new slavery’ gloss over the historic and ongoing dynamics of colonial capitalism in predictably giving rise to unfree labour in supply chains. These dynamics include: dispossession and expropriation; colonial histories of unfree labour and how these continue to shape the lives of contemporary workers and communities; the role of wealthy...
2021-02-1518 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastColonial Policing - Dr Adam Elliot-CooperStandard discussions of police racism in Britain, present it as being a consequence of Britain becoming multicultural, as African, Caribbean and Asian people migrated to Britain in significant numbers after World War 2. These migrants are seen as disrupting a peaceful, united monocultural Britain. But historically, most of Britain’s policing hasn’t taken place on British soil – it has been deployed in its colonies. Millions of colonial subjects, exploited and controlled for the enrichment of Britain for centuries, required policing. British colonial policing was far more militarised and violent than policing on the British mainland. The racial hierarchy of the Br...
2021-02-1514 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastGendering Modernity: Postcolonial and Decolonial Perspectives - Prof Anne PhillipsFrom (at least) the eighteenth century onwards, European philosophers and historians have represented the status of women as a crucial marker of a society’s level of civilisation, and have seen modernity as the era when women came to be accepted as individuals in their own right. In this framing of distinctions between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, it became one of the justifications for colonialism that it supposedly rescued women from precolonial abuses. The contrast is however highly contentious, and particularly so when ‘modernity’ so often maintained and intensified gender difference. Ideas about the superior treatment of women in modern societies cont...
2021-02-0814 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastLegacies of British Slave Ownership - Prof Catherine HallFor too long the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and slavery in the British colonies in the Americas in 1833 have dominated the ways in which Britons have (mis)remembered slavery. The Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at UCL set out to re-think the history of Britain’s long involvement with the slavery business across the Atlantic through exploring British slave-owners. When slavery was abolished, £20 million was paid in compensation to the owners for the loss of what was defined as their property. Almost half this money came to Britons. We followed the money, establishing who got it and...
2021-01-0822 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastGendering Modernity: Black Feminist PerspectivesIn the making of modernity, questions of gender and sexuality constitute the very structures of power by which modernity is produced, organised and understood. Equally, it is not possible to talk about the gendering of modernity without also showing how these structures of power are inherently racialised. To illustrate these points, this session will examine the social category of ‘womanhood’ through Sojourner Truth's speech, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ in order to trace the figure of the enslaved African woman and her labour within the making of the modern world. Hortense Spillers’ concept of the ‘ungendering’ of African women under conditions...
2021-01-0815 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastDecolonisation - Dr Meera SabaratnamIn the modern world, the main type of formal political organisation has gone from being ‘empires’ to ‘nation-states’. But how did this happen, what was left behind and what does it mean? More importantly, why do people still talk about decolonisation today? This session maps out how and where decolonisation unfolded with a particular emphasis on the twentieth century. It looks at the different ideas of liberation that underpinned it, how people organised themselves, how this was met by imperial powers and what the results were in different contexts. The session also examines why struggles for ‘decolonisation’ are ongoing and spreadin...
2020-12-1126 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastColonial Dispossession and Extraction - Dr Su-ming KhooThe historical development of the modern, capitalist world economy systematically bound colonisers and colonised into unequal relationships of extraction, colonisation and dispossession over the past 500 years and more. Material realities are central to understanding what we mean by ‘colonisation’ - of materials, life and labour. Colonialism occupied land and turned people and nature into human and natural resources for a singular aim – the accumulation of capital. Historical processes of extraction, dispossession, replacement and extinction drove colonisation and ecological imperialism as structural imperatives of modern capitalism. Land-grabbing, wars and slavery connect with the extensive spread of commercial monocultures as economic structures...
2020-11-1922 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastWhat is the Colonial Global Economy? Dr Paul Robert GilbertIt is increasingly common for claims to be made about the incompatibility between capitalist ‘progress’ and the institution of slavery, and to frame colonisation as economically advantageous for the colonised. Yet this overlooks the considerable scholarship, primarily from the ‘Global South’, which shows that industrial capitalism in Europe (and the UK in particular) would have been unaffordable without slavery, and that transfers of wealth from the colonies to colonial powers continue to shape contemporary inequalities. In this sense, the global economy can be understood as a colonial global economy, shaped not only by the legacies of our colonial past, but by col...
2020-11-1916 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastThe Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair - Prof John HolmwoodIn early 2014, the media was full of stories of a ‘plot to Islamicise schools’ in Birmingham, Bradford and Oldham. Various official investigations claimed to find evidence of extremism, but when misconduct cases were brought against teachers in September 2015, the only charges were ‘undue religious influence’. The cases collapsed in May 2017 because of ‘impropriety’ on the part of lawyers acting for the government. Nonetheless, the affair led to important changes in policy – a new emphasis within Prevent on safeguarding children from non-violent extremism, and a requirement on schools to teach ‘fundamental British values’. Most recently, the latter has spilled over into arguments tha...
2020-10-2825 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastFrom Windrush to Grenfell - Dr Luke de NoronhaBoth the Windrush scandal and the Grenfell fire raise urgent questions for sociologists, and for people concerned about tackling racism more broadly. Both remind us that racism is not just about individuals being intolerant, prejudiced, or bigoted, but about the social and institutional structures that organise who is entitled to what. In this lecture, I invite us to ask some questions about racism, rights and exclusion – particularly in relation to the history and contemporary dynamics of immigration control. It is by asking who is a member of the nation, who is excluded, how this changes over time, and what ca...
2020-10-2423 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastThe Haitian Revolution - Prof Gurminder K BhambraThe French Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence tend to be seen as the revolutions that brought into being the modern world. While both events opened up the political process to increasing proportions of their populations and established general or universal understandings of citizenship. In this session, we consider the significance of the Haitian Revolution and discuss its contribution to the making of the modern world.
This lecture is part of The Making of the Modern World module from the Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project.
Readings
Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2016. ‘Undoing the Epistemic Disavowal of the...
2020-10-1617 minThe Connected Sociologies PodcastRace, Rights and Resistance - Dr John NarayanThis session examines how Britain possessed its own distinctive form of Black Power movement, which, whilst inspired and informed by its US counterpart, was rooted in anti-colonial politics, New Commonwealth immigration, and the onset of decolonisation. The session also explores how British Black Power offers valuable lessons about how the politics of anti-racism and anti-imperialism should be united in the 21st century.
This lecture is part of the British Citizenship, Race and Rights module from the Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project.
Reading
Angelo A. M. 2009. ‘The Black Panthers in London, 1967-1972: A Diasporic Struggle Navigates the...
2020-10-1324 min