The Art of Listening

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Today, Neil and Freya are all about the deep and ancient connections between the land, nature and culture. It’s something that you can feel pretty strongly in the West Highlands of Scotland, and we’ve been learning how all of those things can work together to enrich our everyday lives. co-author with T Crabbe and J. Solomos) The Changing Face of Football: Racism, Identity and Multicuture in the English Game Oxford: Berg Many thanks to Malcolm for taking part in today's episode. For more information about the area, take a look at

Michelle Christian, Louise Seamster and Victor Ray New Directions in Critical Race Theory and Sociology LB:This summer I was involved with the Urban Water Cultures project at CUCR and we had a great event in Laurie Grove Baths on how thinking with water sociologically – everything from hygiene to washing to swimming - makes you understand city life differently. Also, I have just finished a new book called Migrant City with my friend Shamser Sinha. The book is the story of contemporary London through 30adult migrant lives. We worked alongside the participants for ten years and I have learned so much from working with people rather than doing research on them. The book will be published next year. I spoke to him about his upcoming research, plans for the Centre, and the 'urban regeneration' of his native South East London.Luke: Amazing. Les has published many important books and papers, but to name a few of those books, New Ethnicities and Urban Culture from the mid-'90s; Out of Whiteness that he published with Vron Ware; The Art of Listening, one of my favourite books; Academic Diary; Migrant City just a year or two ago; and written more widely about music, football and culture. I’d really recommend for people who haven’t read Les’ work to do that now. There’s some beautiful writing and really important arguments that should be shared widely. Today, Freya ventures south on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula to Morvern, for a walk through time and nature. We meet Sarah, Hugh and their cheeky pygmy goats, to learn how working with the land and animals can improve wellbeing. Alex Rhys-Taylor Coming to Our Senses: A Multisensory Exploration of Class and Multiculture in East London2011 (full-time ESRC Student) Luke: Exactly. And I think the kinds of arguments you make about the metropolitan paradox I found them especially useful when engaging with some of the sociological literature on everyday multi-culture, or super-diversity, which try and look at what they term, unquestioningly, kind of 'diverse' places, as though diversity is the question rather than racism. But I feel like, yes, the concept of metropolitan paradox really helps us look at some of this complexity and have racism front and centre, rather than just trying to describe, as you say, these complex kaleidoscopic configurations of difference, which some sociologists seem especially fascinated by, and you’ve criticised that line of inquiry really well. That’s one of the reasons I found the metropolitan paradox so helpful actually.

The limits of the sociological imagination might be posed a different way if we ask 'can sociology hear beyond the boundaries Europe and America without committing violations of this sort?' Or, better still how has the intellectual apparatus of sociology and its relationship to modernity been limited? What also has it been deaf to closer to home? Gurminder Bhambra argues ( 2007a) that British sociology remains unable to confront the centrality of the colonial and postcolonial experience to its constitutive theoretical formation. She argues for ‘difference to make a difference’ to our ways of conceiving the social and not to reduce issues of difference to ‘identity’ that, following Spivak, is assimilated as an ‘add on’ sociological specialism. CS: The emotive issue of 'urban regeneration' is one that continues to effect areas local to Goldsmiths like Deptford and New Cross. What is your take on the so-called 'gentrification' of South East London? BHAMBRA, Gurminder K. 2007a. ‘Sociology and postcolonialism: another ‘missing’ revolution?,’ Sociology, 41(5): 871-884. [doi:10.1177/0038038507080442] Sireita Mullins Post colonial legacies of marginalisation as rendered in the visual works of multiethnic young people in Lambeth , 2011 (Full-time ESRC Case Studentship)He has recently become Director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research, replacing Professor Caroline Knowles in the position. Migrant City is an exceptional book. Elegantly written, beautifully visual and profoundly humane the authors skilfully bring a range of interdisciplinary into focus to understand contemporary urban life, multicultural London, mobility, exclusion, resilience, racism, space, time and gift giving to the life stories of the young migrants who have worked with the authors. It is bold and brave book too. It debunks anti-migrant arguments, reemphasises inequalities and relations of power, the flows of capital and the harms of racism but does so alongside a new emphasis on the capacities (and tools) for being convivial. To the world’s range of enormous problems, liberalism responds with its verbal fetish of ‘freedom’ plus a shifting series of opportunistic reactions. The world is hungry; the liberal cries: ‘Let us make it free!’ The world is tired of war; the liberal cries: ‘Let us arm for peace!’ The peoples of the world are without land; the liberal cries: ‘Let us beg the landed oligarchs to parcel some out!’ In sum: the most grievous charge today against liberalism and its conservative varieties is that they are so utterly provincial, and thus so irrelevant to the major problems that must now be confronted in so many areas of the world ( Mills 1963: 30-1).

Lewis, C. (2020). Listening to community: The aural dimensions of neighbouring. The Sociological Review, 68(1), 94–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026119853944 NELSON, Lynn Hankinson 1993. ‘Epistemological communities’ in Feminist Epistemologies, eds. L. Alcoff and E. Potter. New York and London: RoutledgePhilly Desai Spaces of Identity, Cultures of Conflict: the development of New British Asian Masculinities(full-time, ESRC studentship) 2000 Much of Mallaig's history is all around you as you walk through the town; fishing vessels come and go and boats are repaired in the harbour. But there's also a fascinating connection with the Jacobite rebellion thanks to Lord Lovat. Les: I think it’s really important. The world is a better place for the fact that the Centre exists at all and that you’re trying to do the work that you’re doing. To my mind, what you’re doing is part of hope’s work. That’s what it means. That’s what it is. It’s undeniable, it cannot be taken away, it’s done, it’s achieved; and I think it’s important to honour that and to appreciate it. BHAMBRA, Gurminder 2007b. Rethinking modernity: postcolonialism and the sociological imagination. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Migrant City is, at heart, a book of stories written and illustrated with young migrants about their relation to the city they live in, and expertly rooted in contemporary scholarly and political debates. The combined authorial team of participants and researchers enables a ‘sociable people writing’ that skillfully and critically explores the journeys migrants make and their lives in the city; evokes their roles in the making of places they inhabit and the imprints past dwelling places make on them; and juxtaposes the speeded-up time of global neoliberalism with the dead time of waiting for papers, for status, for life to begin again. It's the final episode in season 1 and we come to a rest at the end of the West Highland railway line: Mallaig. BHATT, Chetan 2004. ‘Geopolitics and “alterity” research,’ in Researching Race and Racism, eds., Martin Bulmer and John Solomos. London and New York: RoutledgeOn a moody, drizzly day, Freya met Dr Jennie Roberton, a freelance archeologist, for a walk through a beautiful patch of woodland which opens out onto some fascinating ruins. We learn about the story of Mary of Inniemore who was one of thousands of Highlanders who were cleared from the land and had to make a new life. Nasar Meer and Tehseen Noorani A Sociological Comparison of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Muslim Sentiment in Britain Many of the migrants were happy to become more than mere subjects, hence the writing credit for three of them.