Show Notes
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 als...
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Ever attempted a "power pose" or been advised to "make yourself vulnerable"? Feminist scholar Shani Orgad joins us to talk about confidence, vulnerability and the gendered nature - and consequences - of the imperatives to perform and embody both. Discussing her landmark book 'Confidence Culture', co-authored with Rosalind Gill, Shani also reflects on her more recent work on 'Posting Vulnerability on Linkedin' - a platform broadly known as a place for self-branding, work-seeking and the ...
In Buenos Aires, psychoanalysis has “left the clinic”. Far from being for the elite alone, its core concepts and ideas abound in TV shows, the analyses offered by taxi drivers schooled in Lacan, and in intimate conversations among peers. Here Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas tells us about her brilliant study of what she calls “psychoanalytic listening” in the Argentine capital, where friends confidently say things to each other that often imply “when you say X, I hear Y”. Reflecting how such words ac...
Frantz Fanon, the radical psychiatrist and anti-colonial philosopher, was not a sociologist but has shaped so much critical sociological thought. Julian Go, Professor of Sociology, joins us to reflect on the life, work and significance of one the twentieth century’s most important - and at times misunderstood - thinkers, who was born a French citizen in Martinique, went on to fight for France in WWII, and then against it in Algeria’s struggle for independence. Julian tells us about encounteri...
What does family life really look like in Contemporary China? What has changed through the generations since the Communist Revolution of 1949? And what persists? Jieyu Liu, Professor of Sociology at SOAS, University of London, joins us to discuss her years of detailed research with people across three generations in rural and urban China. Putting forward her concept of ‘embedded generations’, she argues that family transformation has been less linear than assumed - and calls out dominant Euro...
Who gets to decide when something is over? How is declaring so an act of power? Professor of Global Health Ethics, Patricia Kingori, joins to discuss these questions and many more raised by the interdisciplinary ‘After the End’ project on which she’s the lead researcher. From ‘post-natal’ to ‘post-war’, we humans seem enamoured with the idea that complex things can be declared “over”. But - from long Covid to the persistence of supposedly long-eradicated diseases - what happens when we’...