Community, with Kirsteen Paton

Rosie Hancock  0:05 
Hi, I'm Rosie Hancock in Sydney, Australia.

Alexis Hieu Truong  0:07 
And I'm Alexis Hieu Truong in Gatineau/Ottawa, in Canada. And welcome back to Uncommon Sense from The Sociological Review Foundation. It's where we take everyday terms that seem pretty straightforward, things we might drop into everyday speech – like say, success, anxiety, taste – and kind of pause to look at them more critically. And to give them a sociological twist. Yeah, we mean that like in the broadest sense, like geographers, anthropologists, cultural studies scholars, you're very much welcome here.

Rosie Hancock  0:36 
Today, we're taking on the idea of community, a word that's not just ubiquitous, but really powerful. It's used to sell property to people along with the promise of things like street markets and friendly co-working spaces. It's used to include and exclude people, to casually frame who does and who doesn't belong. And – increasingly – it's all taking place not just in physical space, but online as communities – often minoritised communities – come together to find places to be themselves, express themselves, and further their interests. So, Alexis, I'm going to revert to our standard format here and ask you the question – you know it's coming – what does community mean to you?

Alexis Hieu Truong  1:19  
I guess, like – for me – it really is about feeling or being welcome. A feeling at home in a place, like a space or with a specific bunch of people maybe? Yeah, maybe more than a noun it feels like community invites me to think of it as a verb, like something like doing community or building community, as if it wouldn't exist if – like – we're not actively making it. Does this make sense?

Rosie Hancock  1:44 
Yeah, yeah, totally. And – you know – I kind of feel like I should sort of share a similar perspective on it as well. Because, you know, I reckon community might in fact be one of the most important concepts in my kind of worldview. And I usually think about it in relation to the social networks that I'm part of with friends and colleagues and neighbours. And I put a lot of weight on feeling like I'm involved in the communities that I'm part of – it is a very, it's a very active kind of sense for me. I mean, I think we'll hopefully get to that later because today we're joined by someone whose work is all about community, explicitly or otherwise. She is Kirsteen Paton, a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Class at the University of Glasgow. Her latest book is called 'Class and Everyday Life' and her interests – among many – include cities, gentrification and community resistance. Hi, Kirsteen, it's great to have you with us on the show.

Kirsteen Paton  2:35  
Hi Rosemary, hi Alexis. Thank you so much for having me. I'm a huge fan of the podcast, so I'm delighted to be here.

Rosie Hancock  2:42 
So we wanted to start by asking what did community mean to you before you became an academic? I mean, thinking right back to your early life.

Kirsteen Paton  2:50 
I really liked your responses to what community means to you, chimes with me. And I think back to my pre-academic life growing up in Greenock, which is a formerly industrial town on the Clyde estuary. So it's just down from Glasgow and – unsurprisingly – it was a former shipbuilding town and community. And it would be the kind of town that would be ripe for those classic studies of place based communities that define that golden era. Communities based around this industry, where the rhythm of the town was formed around what, what happened on the Clyde side. Which had been the case – certainly – when I was growing up, my grandfather and my father both worked in shipyards, and there was a there was a huge crane in the town. But it was called Goliath, that's what we called it locally. And anytime I went past the screen, my mom or my, or my gran would say wave at – you know – your dad, as if he was on the crane, on the crane. But it really represented life in the community that I grew up in. But I didn't have a sense of being part of a really strong community that I would see represented in those types of studies around these strong bonds around that. And that may be because I was growing up there in the 80s and 90s, where that very industry was in decline. It was a town that's really experienced deindustrialisation and everything that goes with that. All the scars that goes with that – redundancies and unemployment. And the town itself, I always say it's like this microcosm of capitalism because it follows these booms and busts in capitalism, different industries. So it was shipbuilding in the town and then manufacturing, then electronics – IBM – then call centres, and then Amazon has a huge plant there, so occupying often the same site as the the former industry that it replaced, searching out cheap, flexible labour. And all of that has had a real impact on the community in creating harms and difficulties.

Alexis Hieu Truong  4:42 
So now you live and work back in Glasgow, having previously been based in Liverpool in the north of England. Like, can you tell us what meanings have you found community to have in those places today?

Kirsteen Paton  5:24 
I spent my adult life in Glasgow, before moving to Liverpool, but via Leeds and then coming back to Glasgow. I felt a real commonality between Liverpool and Glasgow, perhaps that I didn't get when I was in Leeds. Anytime I was in a taxi in Liverpool and they asked where I was from and I said, Glasgow, the response was always the same. 'We're the same, aren't we, Glasgow and Liverpool we're just the same place, you know, we look after each other'. And there was always a response that there was this real like affinity between the two. And I think, you know, it's often said that the similarities come with them both being port cities, both of them claim to be the second city of the empire, as port cities historically. I do think that shapes something in the in the culture of cities, whether it's a certain cosmopolitanism or it's more about – this kind of borrows from from Doreen Massey – about routes as in through rather than roots as in rooted, you get that with the kind of ebbs and flows and experiences in the city. So, I certainly did feel that commonality. And when I first arrived in Liverpool, I was involved in an industrial dispute. So my first experiences, and I distinctly remember as part of that a man in his 70s came up to me and pressed five pounds into my hand. I was on the picket line. And that really struck me, like this stranger giving me money in the street. But, you know, Liverpool is a city that knows industrial action and striking, there's that real connection that shapes politics and maybe shared values as well. So yeah, that really struck me.

Rosie Hancock  7:12 
Kirsteen – I mean kind of, I guess, sticking on this like politics line a little bit – you've written in your latest book about how in 2021 people in the Pollokshields area of Glasgow surrounded a Home Office fan in which two men from the neighborhood were being held by UK immigration enforcement for alleged immigration violations. The men were eventually freed. Can you tell us about that in terms of what it prompts you to reflect on as a sociologist and, you know, what kind of questions and ideas that points us towards?

Kirsteen Paton  7:46 
Interestingly, Rosemary, I was talking about this the other day. It had such resonance with people. It's become a real talking point for years since, in terms of this moment of, of solidarity. I was talking to people – community organisers that were on Kenmure Street, that were part of that protest – and they were reflecting on how it's been used and overly simplified. Because it wasn't actually about the action itself and that's why we really need sociology to help us understand it. Because it's about the longer history of the area and that neighborhood, and the organising that went on, that it wasn't a spontaneous event or action. It was due to these deep networks of solidarity work, of community organising that existed in that neighbourhood, in response to harms, racism, discrimination and stigma that existed in the area. So, Pollokshields is a really mixed area, it's one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Scotland. And it sits cheek to jowl with Govanhill, also highly diverse neighbourhood, high levels of poverty. It's described by some people in Glasgow as Glasgow's Ellis Island, it's been this typical landing point for migrants in the city. So there was lots going on in the neighbourhood for a really long time and understanding it sociologically means having an understanding of that deeper organising work that was taking place in the area. And for me also – as a sociologist of class – I think what we see here is a connection point between class struggles and anti-racist struggles in the city that prompt us to have a more multi ethnic understanding of class. You know, the chants of the protesters there were, 'they're our neighbors, let them go'. And it was very much a position of of unity, but it has much greater histories, as I said in the neighbourhood.

Rosie Hancock  9:44 
Yeah. I mean, I just kind of want to – like – tease out something that I think you kind of mentioned there about the kind of depths of relationships that were within the community – which seems, it sounds like that's quite central to how you're thinking about community. In terms of it not being like a passive thing, that it implies some kind of active engagement with a place. And in your work, I think, you contrast the Pollokshields story with the clap for carers, which –for people who aren't aware – is people clapping on their doorsteps once a week, that happened in the UK during the COVID 19 pandemic. Could you reflect on how you see those two things as different for for us?

Kirsteen Paton  10:28 
I think it becomes this powerful contrasting example, because with this clap for carers – the 8pm round of applause that we would have for carers or NHS workers or key workers – it might feel nice, nice thing to do but it's rather hollow and a real gestural action. It doesn't have roots in the community. I think it was initiated by a member of the public, but it was definitely appropriated politically. So you would have the likes of then Prime Minister Boris Johnson and then health secretary Matt Hancock filming themselves on social media doing the clap and saying, you know, go health workers, yet their very policies were putting those health workers at risk as well. So there was no praxis in the clap, you know, we weren't enacting an ethics or anything from from that. It was rather kind of cynical, there was no commitment to changing the material conditions of those health workers or improving the safety or working conditions. So I think it very much is a different example where it can feel like something that the community is doing, but the community isn't really done anything. It isn't rooted in anything meaningful or has any action beyond the clap itself attached to it.

Alexis Hieu Truong  11:50 
We've kind of reflected a bit on action as essential to your understanding of community today. But I was wondering –more broadly – how has sociology kind of tended to think of community over recent decades? And I wonder like, how it's evolved? Like, it seems to me that there's been a particular focus – as you've mentioned – in older studies maybe, on maybe like place based communities. Is that correct?

Kirsteen Paton  12:15 
So, the study of community is such a staple of sociology. If anyone's ever studied sociology before, I imagine those introductory lectures have included community in some way because it comes right in to the founding sociologists' work. In sociology, if we think back to Émile Durkheim or Ferdinand Tönnies where there was a concern in a changing or moving away from community as society was evolving and changing in relation to industrial capitalism and urbanisation. So, these more smaller, coherent, traditional, rural, non-industrial communities, this focus how we might be shifting away from tighter bonds and shared values. So, we could see that in, in Tönnies' work, these concepts of a shift from Gemeinschaft community to a Gesellschaft which he calls society. Or with Émile Durkheim, when he talks about mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity. What I think's interesting though is these later studies in the 20th century of community become very place based but also focused around industrial capitalism and industry which these earlier studies were thought to – kind of – it was heralding the end of community. So in this kind of golden era of community studies, you have studies that are built around community solidarity and rootedness in shared employment around industry. So you have things like 'Coal is Our Life' – one of my favorites, a Welsh mining village in 1969, that's Norman Dennis. But you have things like more, place based around Willmott and Young's 'Family and Kinship in East London' which is a really famous one. Or Ken Coates and Richard Silburn's study of St. Ann's. And then what happens is those communities studies then start to dissipate, in relation to deindustrialisation and a kind of waning again of interest in community studies as there is thought to be a dissolution of communities. That's when we see in sociology a concern for individualisation and how we might have more individualised identities than ones that are bound by neighbourhoods and places. So we could see that in the work of Anthony Giddens for example, or Ulrich Beck. But then we see, later on, a return – maybe the 2000s – of community studies around neighbourhoods and gentrification, ironically often sites where those industries might have been formed and how communities are being reformed through placemaking in a community sense and neighbourhood practices. But often in those ones – I mean – there's some really good examples there of studies of middle class communities like Michaela Benson and Emma Jackson's work, which looks at Peckham, but also more commuter built places which they compare it to, and they look at middle class claims to belonging in places. There was less work on working class neighbourhood studies around that time and their experiences of gentrification. I think some notable examples being Bob Jeffrey's study of Salford which famously – Salford Quays – which was an industrial place that was regenerated and it was the experience of that from working class community. So we have this ebb and flow, there's the sense that we think we're always going to lose community. But in some ways, it stays with us in these places, it just gets reimagined or reformed in different ways.

Rosie Hancock  16:04 
That was just like a really great sort of summary – I guess – of the study of communities in sociology. But what is really interesting about that – of course – is that that all seems to be grounded, I mean as you've said, in neighbourhoods and these physical kind of geographically bounded places. And I guess I'm curious about – you know – all this increasing research that's happening with online communities and, you know, the like digital ethnographies and that kind of thing. Because it, it sort of strikes me that the word community often carries implicitly a kind of like progressive associations. So community is idealised as somehow being implicitly good. And so I kind of wonder what we would say about like, far right networks online, are they communities in the way that we might say climate change activists meeting online might be as well? And if not – I don't know – like, why, why not?

Kirsteen Paton  17:02 
It's a really interesting question. There is something implied – even in the history of community studies – there's, there's always a romance tied to communities. There's always a sense of 'oh we're losing something so great'. But also – you know – there, there also has been identified within that, that that communities are not often positive spaces for everyone, if you're, if you don't fit in with that community, or if there's a difference within that community as well. Because communities are about shared values, and those values don't often have to be what we might see as good values. They could be – as you mentioned – like far right communities. If your, if your community is based on identifying an other – which you're a community against – and you have a shared identity, ethnicity, nationality, that which may other someone else, we can see how that might work. And online spaces, online communities simultaneously are growing at the same time as a key space for people to organise and meet like minded people. So it gives this digital space for people to meet and organise. But equally, the other side of that, it's been quite emancipatory for other community groups on the left, and social movements to also organise online and digitally in those spaces. And I think we can see that in around how community issues and protests carry – for example, Black Lives Matter – and how important social media was for that, even carrying those messages that spreads organising globally in that way as well. And I think we do need to think as well so seriously about the value of digital and online communities, because when I'm talking about place based communities – of course – places are always under risk, all the time. So we lose community centres, one of the things that community organisers often talk about is how to keep a place open that's often under threat and you'll lose the place. So more and more the online community and organising is really important.

Alexis Hieu Truong  19:16 
I guess this reminds us that that defining something like communities is very complex. And I guess like – in the simplest sense – we can definitely say that the rise of virtual communities complicates more traditional ideas of place based ones, like as this globalisation, for example, of course. Kirsteen, going back to the activism you described earlier in Pollokshields, that's not really a local place bound story, is it? Like in many ways, it feels kind of like a global story?

Kirsteen Paton  19:47 
Absolutely. I think it really raises the point of the connection of the local to the global, which brings to mind again the work of Doreen Massey when she talks about a 'global sense of place' in her 1991 essay, where she's urging us to see places as open. I mentioned that we should be thinking about routes as in through rather than roots as in rooted. So seeing places as open really is about making those connections globally. And Pollokshields, that's exactly what we could see taking place in that area with, we've got issues at play there about migration – for example – and global issues. And Sivanandan uses that famous refrain 'we're here, because you were there' to connect issues of migration to colonialism as well, that we have to bear in mind that those, those connections are deeply relevant to that. And even in places themselves, those local issues that we have, if we think about around housing, this notion of housing or a housing crisis, deeply, locally experienced, and the difficulties and struggles that we have around that is – of course – connected to this broader financialisation of housing and how housing has become this financial asset in this global market. So we've got these connections between corporate landlords, Airbnb, tourism, gentrification, that are playing out globally that are really locally realised and felt and fought as well. So these, the growth we can see currently of tenants unions, those struggles are all connected as well.

Rosie Hancock  21:36 
It's interesting that you mentioned like the tenants union, because I think – and how that sort of spreading globally – I did it the two year ethnography of a community organisation that's a member of the Industrial Areas Foundation, but they're based in Sydney, right? So, Industrial Areas Foundations – you know – came out of Chicago and the United States. And I think what's really interesting about that, and this kind of growth of things like – we think about some of the issues that you've been talking about, that are affecting communities and how these are these global forces that are having local effects. But it's like the political responses are also – in a way – they have global networks and, and they're sort of trialing political methods and ways of working like with local communities, but as sharing knowledge globally about how that's happening. And it's a really kind of – yeah – I guess kind of the point here being that the local and the global aren't necessarily as distinct as we might think, like both, both kind of the causes of some of the issues in communities, but also the ways that communities might respond to those as well. You know, yeah, communities are not sort of neatly bounded and sealed off. And so – you know – we did a show with Manuela Boatcă a while back on Europeans, where she talks about how the mainstream idea of Europe misses so much, including the fact that in actual fact – inconvenient as it is to many people in power – the boundaries of Europe can be seen as stretching sort of right out to the Caribbean. So I mean, Kirsteen, just talking about place based communities sometimes miss the fact that communities are also connected across borders and histories, like through colonial history, through labour exploitation. Can we risk obscuring some of these complexities that we've been talking about?

Kirsteen Paton  23:27 
Yes, I mean, absolutely I agree. It goes back to that idea that communities can be exclusive and bounded that exclude others. And in confronting that, and seeing communities in a more inclusive way, we do have to confront a lot of those longer histories. And I think, returning to the example of the places that I've mentioned before – Liverpool and Glasgow – both as being port cities which meant that they were directly involved in the slave trade as well and trafficking the labour. And those histories are – I mean – they're imprinted into the very fabric of the cities, the landscapes, the streets, the buildings, the statues, it's named, it's really imprinted on the areas. And there's so much work that's been done – in those two cities example but in other places – to confront that history, as well. And that's often work that's been done in the communities themselves. And, well we can say that Liverpool has got this fantastic International Slavery Museum, for example, on the Albert Docks, which I think's really important. And increasingly, we have walking tours in cities which are telling us other stories of those histories, of the streets and the buildings.

Alexis Hieu Truong  24:48 
Your book 'Class and Everyday Life' looks at how class is actually lived by people. And you describe your approach as being underpinned by Gramscian thought, I think via Stuart Hall. Can you explain that for us and how – kind of – like those thinkers complicate common sense ideas of community?

Kirsteen Paton  25:06 
They're both writers I love, Alexis. So if you bear with me then to explain how their work is connected. So in different ways with Stuart Hall and Antonio Gramsci are trying to make some connections between how – kind of – the material and the political might shape the culture and our kind of present moment, which is something that I am keen to do in my own work in different ways. So Stuart Hall uses the work of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. And he does so in a way where he says Gramsci doesn't have the answers or hold the key to your troubles, but we have to think things through in a Gramscian way. And what he means by this we can see with his work – and Doreen Massey – is his use of this concept of the conjuncture, which is trying to understand how any given period is shaped by particular constellation of social, political, and economic and ideological contradictions. They come together in society to give it a specific shape at any given time. So we can see that in Hall's famous work 'New Times' where in that he actually coined the term, Thatcherism, that's trying to capture that emergent conjuncture. So for me I find that really useful in my work as I'm trying to understand class today within a present conjuncture, within particular shifts where we would see the end of New Labour and maybe this age of aspiration and Third Way, where we moved into more austerity politics. This real kind of cutting back of the social state, of public spending and also a rise of authoritarianism as well as being these different continuities and discontinuities politically and economically, and what happens in those spaces in terms of class formation.

Rosie Hancock  27:09 
I feel like a bit of what we've been talking about today is we're sort of circling around this question of who gets to define what community is and what it's for? And it sort of speaks to your earlier work on gentrification and class, in which you studied a Glasgow neighborhood undergoing gentrification from the perspective of working class residents. Can you tell us about that and how it complicated ideas of gentrification and resistance, but also complicated community as well? Perhaps, I mean, perhaps maybe via an anecdote, because I know, you've got one, a good one, about the supermarket Tesco.

Kirsteen Paton  27:48 
That's right. So yeah, my early research was looking at gentrification in Partick, it's a neighborhood in Glasgow that is on the Clyde, so it had associated industry on the Clyde side. And, of course that was near a brownfield site, that industry was no longer there and there was a proposal for a huge luxury housing development, Glasgow Harbour. And my research was – it was a case research where I was commissioned by the, by the local community in Partick to look at the impacts of the Glasgow Harbour development. And of course, the assumption was going to be – as is often the case – that the impact of gentrification on the working class community will be displacement. Now, of course, yes, that absolutely happens. But it was more complicated than that. Firstly, Partick has a huge stock of social housing, which acts as a buffer of gentrification in terms of residents being priced out. So what it revealed instead was a more complex study of how people live with gentrification. And as part of the development on the proposed site – which never came to fruition in the end – was a huge Tesco development near the harbour site. And this was faced by some protests, but the protests wasn't from the local working class community. I went down as part of my study – you know, my ethnography there – to one of the protests and one of the protests involved a seed bombing, so planting seeds. And there was a hug-in, as well. There weren't representation there of the working class community, and in fact in my interviews with residents it told a more interesting tale, where because Dumbarton Road – which is the main high Street in Partik – had been neglected, it used to be a thriving street where it was said, if you can't buy it in Partik you can't buy it anywhere, all the shops that you can imagine, and they'd just kind of fallen into decline. The prospect of a Tesco being in the neighborhood was very appealing. And a resident interviewed said, is there somewhere I can go that I can buy a pair of shoes, buy a pair knickers? I'm going to be, you know, delighted. And so there was this idea where instead it was maybe middle classes in the community that were ideologically opposed to a huge corporation Tesco – not that working classes don't have those politics, but there was other things at the forefront of their mind in terms of what was happening in the neighborhood which that, that wasn't the main one.

Rosie Hancock  30:29 
Yeah, it's like the convenience. And like actually, having kind of a big shop in your neighborhood that's kind of functioning is a good thing. Thanks, Kirsteen. We will be back in a moment to talk about a thinker who has inspired you. But first, a word from our producer Alice.

Alice Bloch  30:55 
Hi, I hope you're enjoying today's episode with Kirsteen Paton, where we're thinking critically about community. Uncommon Sense is in its third season now and whether you join us for work or pleasure or study or out of sheer curiosity, we hope the podcast is a really valuable resource for you, and that this is a valuable community for you. If you've visited thesociologicalreview.org, maybe to find our show notes and find our reading lists or to look at our other podcasts, you might have spotted that The Sociological Review Foundation is a charity. We're about advancing public understanding of sociology – and you might say that in 2024 it's looking like that's needed more than ever. So we want to ask you a favor before we take our short summer break. If you can, please consider making a contribution to help the Foundation keep bringing Uncommon Sense to you over at donorbox.org/uncommon-sense. That's donorbox.org/uncommon-sense. You'll find that link in our show notes, you can read more, and you can make one off or repeat donations to directly support the making of this podcast, all really gratefully received. And, of course, we're also simply grateful for you listening in. Want to get in touch? You can find us at uncommonsense@thesociologicalreview.org. Thanks for listening.

Alexis Hieu Truong  32:24 
Okay, so here's where we want to turn to hear about a thinker that provided you, Kirsteen, with some uncommon sense. Someone who made you think differently, and maybe challenged perhaps like your own assumptions around our theme today, that of of community. I understand you want to tell us about 'Communities of Resistance', a collection of writings by the Sri Lankan born activist and intellectual Ambalavaner Sivanandan who became the director of the Institute of Race Relations, and offered fresh thinking on race, solidarity and resistance.

Kirsteen Paton  32:57 
I wanted to speak about Sivanandan 's work because I think it gets overlooked in sociology. He wasn't a sociologist, but I think his contribution is so important. And the book you mentioned collects some of his most famous essays and the full title of the book is 'Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism', and this really reveals Sivanandan's politics which are deeply anti-racist and anti-capitalist. And the essays are written from 1982 to 1990 and they capture this black working class movement in Britain, it's such an important documentation. And I think, that's why I think his work's so vital, because I don't see that work necessarily going on in sociology, ones that is joining the dots between struggles, between different communities that, that he does so well. And you see in this, in the whole collection, that he's exploring how exploitation and oppression go hand in hand and you can't fight oppression without the same time fighting exploitation, and they must be done together, which I think's really powerful.

Rosie Hancock  34:09 
Kirsteen, perhaps more than would normally be the case, understanding Sivanandan's background is key to understanding his work. So, could you tell us a little bit more about him and about kind of 'Communities of Resistance', which I think came out around 1990, but featured writing from the years before?

Kirsteen Paton  34:28 
Absolutely. I think his biography is so essential to his politics and his contribution. He fled Sri Lanka, after the anti-Tamil pogroms, and he arrives in London as a refugee but he walks right into racialised violence against the black community in relation to the riots in Notting Hill. And he calls this a double baptism of fire, and famously says after that he felt he could no longer stand on the sidelines, that race and his struggles affected him so directly. And he has this other turn phrase, 'the personal is not political. The political is personal'. So inverts that really famous political slogan, the personal is political. And he does so because he says that the person, that when the personal is political the concern is then what one is owed by society. And he's trying to invert that to say what do we owe society? The political is personal. And we can see that in his work and his commitment to community struggles directly.

Alexis Hieu Truong  35:42 
Am I right, that his view of the relationship between the political and the personal also informed his view on identity? Can, can you tell us about that?

Kirsteen Paton  35:52  
Yes. So Sivanandan famously publishes an essay in response to – one of his colleagues, collaborators, allies – Stuart Hall, and his work on New Times. He responds in an essay called 'The Hokum of New Times', where he's taking aim at Stuart Hall's theorisation of Thatcherism, which is identifying the way that subjectivities are being formed and reformed within that. And for Sivanandan, he tries to kind of maintain a much more kind of Orthodox Marxist position and is against this deviations of identity, because he sees one that undoes the struggle, that we become too concerned by separating off issues of race, of gender, of sexuality from class. So what's so fundamental in Sivanandan's work is that we need to understand them together.

Rosie Hancock  36:54 
So do you think we can say that he was kind of very much about sort of forging solidarities and like finding points of intersection between these sort of – I guess – different types of identity, maybe these sort of cross cutting ties? I think you, I think you wanted to tell us about his 1981 essay titled 'From resistance to rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles in Britain'. I mean, why is that one in particular important?

Kirsteen Paton  36:55 
So, I think this essay is really powerful in capturing a couple things. Firstly, it's about a kind of grassroots, alternative history from below. And in that essay, I think it's a really good example of him making the connections and joining the dots. So the essay begins where he discusses a hanging in London, of Udham Singh, after he has a revenge shooting of Lieutenant Michael O'Dwyer, who had been responsible for colonial violence, for a massacre in Punjab in India. So he begins with that, but then what he reveals throughout the essay is also that Singh had been involved in setting up an Indian Workers' Association, during his stay in England. So we're connecting worker's struggles and class struggles, with also colonial struggles as well. He tells these kind of great stories and documents political organising on the ground, which is really powerful. And, and I think it's really powerful for us today because it challenges the reductive and problematic narratives around class, and the separating of race and class that, that's happening often. And it's not just happening in Britain, but an example from Britain is we see that around narratives around Brexit, which was actively pitting race against class. And I think in Sivanandan's work we just have that reminder that we need to connect those struggles together.

Rosie Hancock  39:02 
I mean, it's interesting you talking about his use of the stories of – like, kind of – contrasting the big colonial stories with these, like, organising struggles that were sort of happening on the ground as well. There's sort of two different forces. And there's kind of a methods thing here right, thinking about how and why you go about your, your research or how you'd might talk about these things and holding on to the importance of history from below and everyday lived realities and so on which – you know – I know we've, we've spoken about. But – you know – Kirsteen, thinking of how we actually generate change Sivanandan urges us to find commonality. But you've written that for the past 30 years, class unity and community in the UK have been attacked through things like anti-trade union legislation, declining union membership, the decimation of social housing, the erasure of public community resources, so on and so forth, which feels very depressing. Can, can you reflect on where and how we might find some hope?

Kirsteen Paton  40:10 
Yes, so I think that's one of the reasons that I really am drawn to Sivanandan's work, because it is an account of a common struggle and how a unified struggle can emerge today, which is, is so necessary. And it is often actually in the face of the decimation of communities and community resources, that we find those struggles and those organising taking place. So I mentioned – earlier – the example of Pollokshields. And also with tenants union – tenants unions and that local level community organising – is born out of the inequalities and hardships that are faced. So, we are seeing the formations of different communities of resistance in relation to these and what I find really interesting and hopeful –  which again speaks to Sivanandan's work – is about making those connection points, because the power is in the unified struggle. So when we see tenants unions helping migrants and asylum seekers, and we see trade unions and tenant unions working together, finding those points of unification is really powerful. And we're seeing more and more of that today and that certainly gives me hope. But hope is powerful – and just like community is an action, hope has to be an action as well, I think.

Alexis Hieu Truong  41:48 
Okay, so finally Kirsteen, it's that part of the show where we close. We're looking for a quick recommendation from you first from something not academic, that's basically not Gramsci but from out there, like in popular culture that we can turn to think a bit further about today's theme community. And I understand that you have a song for us today.

Kirsteen Paton  42:14 
You said that in a way that I was going to sing the song, but I am not going to sing this song. No, I do have a song for you. I also feel I should say – other cities are available and not just Glasgow and Liverpool. But again, I'm referencing Glasgow and Liverpool because the song that I'm going to mention is, 'You'll Never Walk Alone'. It's a song that's become popularised as a, as a football anthem. It was originally through a musical carousel, and then was covered by a band Gerry and the Pacemakers, which were a Merseybeat band. And at that point, it gets appropriated by Liverpool Football Club as a song that they sing. And to go back to the topic of hope – the lyrics – one of the lyrics are 'walk on with hope in your heart, and you'll never walk alone'. They are really powerful lyrics, and it can mean solidarity around, in support for your football team. But also the way that it's changed meaning over time in the context of Liverpool where the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, where 97 football fans lost their lives through that disaster, that song became an anthem of that. And an anthem of hope and defiance, because particularly Liverpool supporters were initially blamed for what happened there, which turned out to be not true and there was a lot of cover up around that. That song was really important to Liverpool and the community. And then recently – again, because it's also the song of Liverpool Football Club – quite a few football clubs lay claim to this song. Recently, the stadium was full of flags in support of Palestine and all the fans were singing this song. The clip went viral, and – again – 'walk on with hope in your heart and you'll never walk alone' had another meaning there for these broader global solidarities as well in that context. So, so yes, it's a song that means a lot to me, anytime I hear it always has a kind of powerful impact.

Rosie Hancock  44:30 
I love that you chose a song for your example Kirsteen, specifically one that's like an anthem and that's sung – you know – at football matches or protests and you know. Because I really feel like singing in a group, in unison is this wonderful kind of embodied – really kind of – way of feeling connected to other people actually. Like there's a real affective thing about singing together.

Kirsteen Paton  44:53 
Absolutely, it is.

Rosie Hancock  44:54 
So I think it's, it's a great, great example here.

Alexis Hieu Truong  44:57 
Okay that's all we have time for today. Thank you so much for joining us, Kirsteen

Kirsteen Paton  45:02 
Thank you so much for having me, Alexis and Rosemary.

Rosie Hancock  45:04 
We'll be sure to put the different readings Kirsteen mentioned into our show notes for today. They can be found in the app you're using to hear this and on the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org, where you'll also find another podcast that speaks to today's theme, Spatial Delight hosted by Agata Lisiak and all about the geographer Doreen Massey. We're taking our August break next month but we'll be back in September ready and refreshed with more Uncommon Sense.

Alexis Hieu Truong  45:36 
Thanks for listening. Bye

Rosie Hancock  45:38  
Bye