Michaela Benson  0:05  
Hi everyone. This is Michaela Benson, the Chief Executive of the Sociological Review Foundation, and I'm delighted to be hosting this special edition of Uncommon Sense. We're recording this live at our Undisciplining II conference which, just for the record, took place in Salford in September 2024. And the questions we're focusing on are who does sociology really speak to, who is it for and who does it serve? These are all, I think, vital questions in a time when we have seemingly more platforms out there than ever before, more means by which to make noise, but at a time also when neither free speech nor academic freedom can be taken for granted, and when the prospects for speaking and actually being truly heard remain grossly unequal, far greater for some than for others. But these are also questions that invite crucial conversations around issues like democracy, representation, empowerment, impact and our theme for today's episode, voice. I'm joined in Salford by three fantastic guests, Claire Alexander, Dan McCulloch and Belinda Scarlett, and here's a little bit more about them. Claire is Professor of Sociology and Head of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester. She is known for her research on race, ethnicity and inequality, with a portfolio that includes her excellent ethnography "The Asian Gang", which explored the production of British South Asian masculinities against the backdrop of moral panic about Asian gangs, and there's a new version that's just come out. She's also one of the thinkers behind Our Migration Story, an award-winning website that focuses on untold stories in Britain's migration history. It offers a fantastic resource for teachers focusing on migration in their classrooms and, to my mind, it's an exemplar of publicly engaged sociology. In 2019 Our Migration Story received the Guardian's Research Impact Award. Dan McCulloch is Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Social Policy at the Open University. His research explores the interplay between the ways in which people find themselves and their conditions categorised, and how these converge and diverge with their lives, actions and practices. He has explored this through research on homelessness and, more recently, with deaf prisoners. And on the basis of his work, he's contributed to podcasts, the film "The Homeless Problem", offered expert advice in court and written reports for third sector organisations. And our final guest for today is Belinda Scarlett. Belinda is the library coordinator at the Working Class Movement Library, which is an activist archive focused on working class history, which happens to be just around the corner from where we are in Salford. She's a practitioner with working class heritage and with a background in history. So I'm really delighted to welcome all three of you to the podcast today.

Michaela Benson  3:16  
To get us going, and before we get more abstract and into the kind of the sociological meat of the discussion, I wanted to ask you each about your voice in the most literal sense. I've often reflected on my own voice, partly since I've been podcasting, because I think I have quite a particular accent and I think that that quite often results in people socially locating me in particular places, which are probably quite accurate in many ways. But I think at the same time, particularly being a female academic, I am also aware of the times at which making my voice heard has actually been quite difficult. So both of those have made me think quite a lot about the question of voice, and I wondered if I could ask you, ask you all whether you have reflected on your voices. So, Belinda.

Belinda Scarlett  4:11 
Yeah, I mean, I obviously have an accent too, but I also work in Manchester and Salford, so it doesn't get commented on as much as it used to. It did get commented on quite a lot when I went to university. It's sort of one of the standout moments from university, having my accent questioned. But the way I think and reflect about my voice is, because I have a working class background and I have experience of living in poverty, I do think my voice is important and I like to use it to challenge the archive sector which is predominantly a middle class space. So that's how I try and use it, and I also feel quite a sense of responsibility to do that in the right way as well. I'm also very aware that I've worked in the sector now for about 15 years, so my day-to-day experiences are no longer the same as many working class people and I try to reflect on that as well when I'm at work, because I am constantly surrounded by people who listen to my voice, and I'm given the opportunity to sit and, on these platforms and talk. So my experiences are no longer working class, really, in that respect, that is something that I reflect on.

Michaela Benson  5:18  
Dan, how about you?

Dan McCulloch  5:19 
Yeah, I've thought quite a lot about this as well. I suppose in some ways, it's probably important to reflect on my kind of position here. I'm a white male, pretty middle class, straight man, and that affords me, I think, quite a lot of privilege. And I think kind of given the histories of thinking about voice, that I think we'll come on to think about, that raises questions for me. But kind of in the more immediate sense, I think one thing that's happened more recently is I think about my voice and my voice in relation to having two young children, and what that means, not only from my responsibilities to myself or to the people I work with, but also to them about the future, what kind of world do I want them to be a part of, and how can I use my voice to try and affect what that world looks like, hopefully in positive ways.

Michaela Benson  6:18  
That's really, that's really nice reflection on the future as well, which I think, I think we sometimes forget about, perhaps. So yeah, Claire?

Claire Alexander  6:29 
Yeah, I try not to think about my voice, largely because it's always that sense of crushing disappointment when you hear yourself. I think that really can't possibly be me. I'm sure I don't sound like that. And also, I think having knocked around the academy for 30 years or something now, it can be frustrating I think. I try not to worry too much about whether I've made a difference or what, whether people are reading my stuff or listening to my stuff or, because I think that way madness lies, largely. I do, I think I agree with you that it's important that different voices, different experiences come to the fore in the academy. I think, reflecting on one's positionality within that, what privileges or disadvantages particular position has, these things change over time. Certainly, when I started off in the academy 30 odd years ago, nobody listened to anything that I said, and I'm not entirely sure they listen that much more now. I understand the desire to kind of want to change the academy, to change the world around you, to make a diversity of voices come through. I slightly worry I think about categorisation and speaking for or representing different experiences, partly because I don't think I represent anybody other than myself. And I think in this day and age, it can be a bit of a double edged sword to worry too much about what people think of you but I have a slightly different take, I think, on those questions.

Michaela Benson  7:54  
I think that that's really, it's really useful to reflect on where the spaces are that you're trying to make your voice heard. The area where I found the most challenges in terms of making myself heard are actually when I've been trying to make my research public. As some of you may know, I worked on Brexit, which is a particularly congested space filled with some, let's say, some men with some very loud voices. And this is, this is not just academics, I'm talking about politicians as well and my experiences of trying to get heard in those kinds of spaces, so those different spaces of power where you're then positioned quite differently. But I think that all of those responses have brought us on to some of the themes that we're going to cover over the course of the next hour or so. But yeah, Dan, I wanted to come to you and turn to that idea of giving voice – which we know is quite a contested term within sociology and among those of us who do research, but it's also quite prevalent in things like journalism and politics. And I wondered if you could start by giving us a sense of what that idea means, and how have researchers typically given voice, or believe themselves to be giving voice to people in sociology, and what kinds of methods they've used?

Dan McCulloch  9:13  
Yeah. So I think for me, I'd probably kind of point to that contention around giving voice, I think you're right. It is quite contentious, that leads us, I think, to think about questions about who has power to give voice, whose voice is it, that sense of ownership over voice. I suppose, in some senses – probably and for understandable reasons – I think we often think about bringing to the fore people's experiences, particularly where people might be part of what might be thought of as marginalised groups, and often related to supporting causes or highlighting particular experiences, and that idea of speaking truth to power. I think that sometimes is a little bit tricky. I think – as you mentioned, Claire – that kind of question of who we're speaking for, who we're representing, is important to problematise and think about. But I think that's, that's kind of what, what quite often, people are talking about in terms of giving voice. In terms of the methods that are used, I tried to think a little bit about this and I think – arguably – any method that tries to speak to people's experiences might talk in some way about trying to bring those voices to the fore. I think for me personally, I'm quite interested in what I would consider to be a fairly recent turn towards more participatory or co-production based methods, and trying to look at those methods a little bit more critically, and whether they do the things that we quite often think they do, or whether there might be something more in terms of what they're doing within the academy.

Michaela Benson  10:54 
That's great. I mean, Dan, you've given there quite an interesting response that thinks about that kind of more participatory dimension of things, and why that might be important, developing on that idea of kind of giving voice. Claire, I mean, you've been doing work with communities for a very, very long time, and I was just wondering what you might add to what Dan's, Dan's just said there. What progress has there been from your point of view, and as an ethnographer as well?

Claire Alexander  11:23 
I mean, I agree with Dan and certainly around some of the ambiguities of it. I was quite surprised in some ways that we're talking about giving voice, because that's one of those things that was really popular when I would have started out in the academy with a generation above of particularly feminist researchers who would do a lot of what we might think of now as participatory research about bringing people in, bringing voices to the fore. And there were lots of problems with that, around the kinds of privilege that put some stuff forward and silenced other kinds of stuff, and the kind of client-patron kind of relationships that some of that research led to, so it's interesting that these things kind of come full circle to some extent. I tend not to think of my work as giving voice. I like to think of it as making space, maybe because I think giving suggests a kind of element of control which is sadly lacking often in ethnography, you often don't always have that much control over it. So what interests me is the politics of representation, who gets to speak, whose experiences count, whose voices are silenced, whose experiences are legitimate or not. And I think that what's interesting there is the way in which those borders are much more complicated, so it's not just a question of people kind of giving voice to particular groups, or the way in which those borders are articulated within the groups that you might be kind of thinking about, about policing who gets to speak and who doesn't get to speak. I mean, some things have changed over time, so it's not just like we're going back to the 70s, but I think, so that within the academy, things are much more diverse than they would have done. You get a wider range of perspectives and that, I think, almost automatically, kind of, leads to a broader range of experiences being represented and I think that's got to be a good thing. But I think being critical about what that means and – yeah – asking the questions all the time about what is being left out of those discussions and what is not being seen and what is not being heard is really important, which is why I think positionality is really important, particularly with ethnography. So I think it's about thinking about who you are but not because you're really interested in who you are, but thinking about what it allows you to see, what it stops you from seeing and kind of reflecting on those things which I think are really important in terms of representing or allowing space for those other experiences to emerge.

Michaela Benson  13:31 
I think that's a really, it's a really helpful framing that you've put there around making space, as well as that kind of concern around positionality and the importance of that for thinking about whose voices are being heard, whose voices are being amplified, as well as, as you said, the kind of the politics of representation that is related to that. And I think that other point about things coming round again, the one about giving voice does seem to come round and round and round again and I'm, you know, I'm old enough to remember the critiques that happened when I was an undergraduate student, and I'm seeing very similar things coming up again when we're speaking with students, when we're seeing how the social sciences or social science research methods are being presented publicly. So I think it's really important that we carry on reminding people that those histories are there where we've already, we have already had some of these conversations, but obviously they do need to, that they take on a different, a different momentum at different points in time, depending on on what's been happening as well. But Belinda, I wanted to come to you because one of the things about the Working Class Movement Library is that at your core your mission is about amplifying working class voices. So, how do you approach that issue?

Belinda Scarlett  14:44 
Yeah, I mean I struggled a little bit with this question for that very reason. So the Working Class Movement Library was set up solely to preserve working class voices, so I think when people – from what I understand – when people talk about amplifying voices, it's often amplifying marginalised voices within a middle class space, for example. So that voice is almost sort of forced into it, whereas the Working Class Movement Library was set up to counter that as a place that they were central, they were key, so I tried to think about this question critically from the library's perspective. And I think we don't amplify all working class voices, so the library has got some work to do there in terms of, you know, which working class voices is it amplifying, and we do that predominantly through, through our collection which I think I'll come on to a little bit later. So yeah, our work is there solely to do that, but we aren't doing it to the best of our ability and I think myself as the Library Manager really needs to think about how we amplify all different working class voices.

Michaela Benson  15:38  
I wonder if I could come back to you, Claire here a bit as well, and ask you if you can see any parallels there between the approach that you take to researching race and ethnicity, and particularly in respect to challenging what that can be quite homogenising and monolithic representations of particular groups or histories? So drawing on your, your work on the politics of representation there as well.

Claire Alexander  16:07 
So I think my interest in ethnography, I think comes from the fact that my undergraduate background is English Literature, so I've always been interested in kind of character, plot, I mean, some ways quite individualising things. But I think my initial take when I started doing ethnography was it would somehow provide a more real input, a real, real voice. So I grew up through the kind of 80s, you know, so that, you know the riots, you know all that kind of thing, and would watch all those kind of very negative images of black young people and think there must be another story which is being told. And when I came to do my research in the late 80s on black youth, I really was really incredibly naive and kind of thought, okay, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna discover the real voice, which will be absolutely diametrically opposed to all those stereotypes that are out there. So I would just, you know, so had this sense, I think that it would, everything would be inverted immediately, all the bad things would, would be offset by the kind of the truth that I would discover within like two weeks. I was like okay, that is really much more complicated than that. So my interest, then, has always been about trying to push back on very clear, homogenising discourses, which are the ones that often come from outside, and to try and show that against those kind of very simplistic ideas, there's always a much more complex, but not entirely good or bad, but just kind of to try and show the humanity and the shifting nature of that and but also to say these things don't exist apart from those structures, that if you are a Black young man or an Asian young man or whatever, those stereotypes, those external constructions are things which constrain your experience, you can't just pretend they're not there and live a life which is independent and kind of whole, and you know, you're wrestling all the time with the, the implications of those constructions for you. So partly, for me, it's been about trying to unpick what it is that people think they know all the time, and also show within that the moment you try and reach a point where you say, okay, this is what is going on, there's always something else which is already going on, so trying to capture that fluidity. And I think at a particular point that's important, so that's the new ethnicities moment, right where you start to say these things are more complex, but then the arguments shift as well and I sometimes think that just showing that everything is complex and fluid and shifting doesn't have quite the same political purchase that it would have had in terms of pushing back against those homogenising stereotypes. So I mean, yeah, Stuart Hall always talked about bending the twig, so what is, what is the dominant discourse, let's push back against that. And the dominant discourse doesn't stay the same either. So I remember an event at LSE where we had some students came in, so they were 15-year-olds, and they'd done, looked at "The Art of Being Black" as part of their course and someone said, "oh, that,you know, that's the woman that wrote", and they were like, "no, it can't be, it can't be, she's too old". And then one boy kind of said to me, well, why did you describe black identities as being an art? Because you know, you're suggesting that we're doing stuff that nobody else, you know, is doing and everybody's, everybody makes up their identities and everybody's identities are shifting. And I was kind of slightly taken back. I said, I said, that's completely true but if you probably went and asked your father what it was like for him when he was coming through, which was when the book was written, you would probably find that it had a different meaning. So I think often those kind of constructions and so on change over time, and trying to kind of get a sense of what it is you're pushing back against is quite difficult, I think sometimes.

Michaela Benson  19:26  
I don't think that you'll be the only person in the room who went into doing ethnography with those views. I certainly think that that that is an experience that I can relate to and it probably took me longer than two weeks as well to realise the naivety of my position on that. So I was wondering, Dan, if you could reflect on your own research to illustrate how you've addressed those kind of methodological and ethical issues raised by the idea of giving voice through research that you reflected on at the outset?

Dan McCulloch  19:58  
Yeah, of course. Yeah, I think there are lots of issues that we could talk about here, so I don't think there's probably time to talk about all of them. But I think coming back to something that I think has probably been highlighted already, I think voice is tied up with power in lots of ways, and there are questions about whose voices are elevated or amplified, and whose are silenced or suppressed. Why? With what consequences? But also knowing that that weight that we give particular voices makes some voices seem more powerful than others, so it's a voice in itself can hold a power, in a sense, not all voices are treated equally and I think that that's quite important to recognise. I think also coming back to the point that Claire made about voices being fluid, that voice is quite context specific and it changes quite often. I think within social research, we have this tendency to present findings as though they're statements that in some way have some permanence, but what someone might say or do changes depending on where they are, who they're speaking to, the, the way that I speak to my children and what I would say would be different from when we're doing this, this recording, not only because this would be unintelligible to them in lots of ways, but I think they'd think me even more uncool than they probably already do. But it's relational, I think voice too. I think there are questions about whether someone has to be listening for voice to matter, and here I think we get those links to social justice, to recognition coming through, and those questions about whose voices are legitimised or silenced. And with that in mind, I suppose one of the things that surprised me in doing some of this work is that not everyone necessarily wants their voice to be amplified in a kind of – what might be seen as quite an indiscreet manner. I remember making films with some people in a day centre, a homelessness day centre, where that day centre was at risk of closure and people were quite keen to talk about why the day centre mattered to them. But I remember talking to one person, and we spoke through whether the film would be shown to other people and for her, I remember very clearly she said "I'd rather it doesn't, because it might expose some of the things that I would prefer people not to know". Actually, it carried a sense of risk and so, for her, it was a very different kind of process around voice. It was about a kind of project for herself in that sense, I suppose, maybe, but it wasn't about that interaction. It wasn't about being listened to by someone else in that sense and that really made me question some of those things about voice, and whether it's a universal good all of the time, or whether there's a bit more complexity to it than that.

Michaela Benson  22:45  
It's a really fascinating reflection on what you then do with the voices that you hear. And I was thinking about, you know, what, what rights we have as researchers or what we're being permitted as researchers, when people share their voices with us and share their ideas with us. And it's very different to come and talk to us as researchers, than for us to then just take those voices and broadcast them, for example, which might be another thing that people might think is a good as you've described. So I think there's a lot to reflect on there and unpack, so thank you very much. Belinda, I'm going to come to you now because there was something that Dan was talking about there around the importance of politics around voice and conversation, even, that I would really like to hear from you about, in respect to the work that you've been doing at the Working Class Movement Library on the Big Flame archive. And the fascinating thing about this project – it's a project that's about to go live, isn't it, so you can tell us a little bit more about that – is about kind of engaging different generations in conversation around the importance of community organising.

Belinda Scarlett  23:59  
Yeah, so the project has just about gone live, and the project coordinator for that project is actually in the room as well, so hopefully I'll reflect it well. A little bit about Big Flame, if you don't know who they are, they were a socialist revolutionary organisation that was active in the 70s and the 80s, and had branches East London, Liverpool, Manchester. We have a collection of material at the library that relates to the Big Flame, there are other Big Flame archives around as well, in other archives. When I started as a manager at the Working Class Movement Library, I'd seen that this archive was sort of sat there. It hadn't been catalogued. It'd never really been explored. I'd never heard of Big Flame before. So I started to look through the archive and was just sort of quite surprised by how relevant their approach to organising was and some of the subjects that they were talking about as well. So they were a left libertarian organisation and they were very interested in tackling some of the subjects that they felt other areas of the left weren't looking at appropriately, so women's organising, autonomous organising groups. So we applied for some National Lottery funding, which we were successful in getting. It's allowed us to employ a project coordinator and a researcher. And the main aim of the project is to work with young people, so one of the voices that are severely lacking at the Working Class Movement Library is young working class people so I was very keen to work with that group in particular. We've recruited a group of young, local working class people who are going to help us research the archive and ultimately create an exhibition which will open next summer, and our project coordinator is now working really closely with that group of young people. And I asked her about this question, to get her perspective on it, and she said to me that the most surprising thing about it is, really, although the world has changed significantly since the 70s and 80s, the core struggles still seem to be the same, unfortunately. So you know, what does that mean about how much we've learned from the past or we haven't? And because Big Flame were so interested in lots of different types of organising and had a very grassroots perspective to organising, it's fertile ground for young people who are interested in organising themselves, even if they don't really know a great deal about history or politics, but have that sort of keen desire to be involved in community organising, it's a rich fertile ground for them. So we hope that they will then become engaged in the library, and we can encourage them to speak to their elders, the people who've been doing that community organising for years and really get that dialogue going. And it is a co-creation project and I am fully aware of all the problems and complexities of that term and what it means, but the intention from the library is to do that in a way which gives real voice to the young people there that are getting involved.

Michaela Benson  26:43 
I think it sounds like a fantastic project and I think that it kind of does all of that work, as you said, around co-creation, but it reminds me a lot too of some of the things that Dan was talking about earlier around participatory work. And Dan, one of the things that you've done through your research is to use participatory visual methods, like giving people cameras or putting them in front of cameras and asking them to present the world as they see it. Can you tell us a bit about the project you did on this? And I think that was based in that day centre that you've just introduced us to.

Dan McCulloch  27:16 
Yeah. Yeah, it was based in the day centre, you're right Michaela. And I think the more that I reflect on this actually, the more I kind of see the issues of this – as I think you're pointing to Belinda – in terms of kind of bringing through voices and where they sit, what spaces they sit and for what purpose. I think it's sometimes easy for us to assume that participatory or kind of co-creation work is good for these voices, kind of inherently so. And I think that that's a bit that I find tricky and more problematic over time. And I'll be honest, I think I've been guilty of some of that as well, in terms of seeing that as doing something different for the research process, but in ways that I now think I'm not so sure about. In fact, that's kind of what, what led me to reflect on voice as part of this initially, because I think in lots of cases the benefits of these kinds of projects are still more weighted to us within the academy, perhaps, and so I think we have to be accountable when we're working with these methods in the same way that we are when we use any method. I think participatory or co-production or co-creation approaches in their purest forms look quite different from maybe more traditional social science methods. I think right from the formulation of ideas, they would look very different. The kinds of methods that you might use, if you're thinking of methods, what data might look like, whether you'd even call it data, what you would do with that, I think would, would all be very different. So I think it requires a very different starting point, and I think when we're talking about visual research as well I think quite often it's easy to think that visual research does something different because it goes beyond the spoken word, but as with kind of spoken or written norms around language, there are visual norms and expectations and ways that people see as good forms of communication, or less good forms of communication. So I think that that also makes me question, well, what responsibilities do we have in terms of doing the best that we can to those that are involved in these projects? And I think one of the things for me is that I sometimes feel like the power imbalances in some projects still remain, quite often within the academy. I think these projects are still driven by university priorities, by university research agendas, and that shapes what we do, inevitably, but also who has the power to shape those, those research agendas? Who has the power to kind of shape those projects, and what they look like and the parameters, I think are all important questions for us to reflect on. I should say I'm not against these methods, I think it can make me sound very cynical, and I think the medium, the context, the process, all matter potentially in positive ways as well. But I think we have to reflect critically on some of this and not just assume that these are good processes and good ways of doing things, in terms of the ways that we go about doing research.

Michaela Benson  30:21  
I think that's becoming even more important at the moment. And I don't know if it's the case for all of you and the places where you work, but at my university, there's a real push, particularly through the kind of the public engagement strand of the university's agenda, to make everything co-produced and co-created as part of their civic engagement responsibility. And I don't think there's been so much critical thinking that's actually gone into that, nor has that necessarily been designed in partnership either with members of the local community or with academics who've been working with those kinds of methods and are aware of the critiques of them in any way. So I kind of observed it from – with a bit of skepticism, I have to admit – from that distance. But I want to kind of come in on a slightly different question of power, with you Claire, which is about the tightrope between amplifying voices or making space for voices and making an individual voice a source of authentic knowledge and understanding. I mean, as sociologists, I think one of the things that we're trying to do ultimately is point to problems at structural and societal level, to say where the action for change needs to be, but certainly in the context of some ethnography – and I'm not suggesting that this is in the case of your ethnography at all – authentic voices are given quite, can be given quite a lot of privilege, can't they?

Claire Alexander  31:46 
I think that's probably true. I hope that's not true of my work, because actually there's a whole range of different voices. I think people are always looking for easy answers, particularly around race, ethnicity, where there has been that move very much to kind of find representatives or people that speak for particular groups of people, and the kind of condensing and simplification of very complex experiences into one dimension of that, whether that's in a person or not. So I think insisting on multiplicity, insisting on the fact that none of this stuff sits even when you've presented it, is really important, there's always something else going on. So I mean, I think two things. One is that there is a real problem with the kind of authenticity arguments in any kind of research, particularly, I mean qualitative research, where the question about who speaks for, who does this kind of work, what claims they have, how that is both enforced by things like research council agendas, but also internally, you know, from within groups and communities or within the academy. So I think that now, for example, if I wanted to do my research on the – you know – the art of being black, which was done 30 years ago, I almost certainly could not do that work. I almost certainly wouldn't get funded to do that work because of a whole range of quite kind of essentialist ideas about race matching and various other kinds of things that need to be brought into, into play. So I think that that's, it's always a problem. I think it's a real problem, the kind of authenticity thing. And the other thing that really winds me up – while I'm on it – is the kind of privileging of the assumption of experience to make any kind of claim about anything, not just in the academy, actually, more broadly. All those sentences that start with as a, as a mother, as a person of color, as a working class person, as a whatever, as if that somehow makes whatever you're about to then say realer. I have a real issue with that, because it is massively kind of simplifying of what anybody's experiences or what people bring to that, and it closes down rather than, I think, opens up discussions. But there's a lot of that platform claiming that goes on in the academy and in research, I think, and particularly in things like ethnography and qualitative research. My research was on Bangladeshi Muslim boys, working class boys. I'm so not that, I was twice their age, but there are forms of connection that go on, and you think about what those connections are and what those things give you, what those things don't give you access to. Those are the things that are worth thinking about and I genuinely think no, there should be no point at which somebody says they should not do certain kinds of research. But it is about thinking about what that brings with it, what it doesn't bring with it. And the other point – which I think is the point you're mainly talking about, power – is, is, what is the point of research? What are we trying to do? And I mean, I agree with what you're saying earlier Dan, but I also think you don't – Les Back is here and Les, I remember him saying to me a few years ago, but you never know, Claire, you never know who's going to read your stuff. You never know who's going to take what away from, from the work that you do. Yeah, now you worry that some of these young people, you know, maybe didn't get perhaps what you thought they were going to get or, you know, but, but you don't always know what people are going to take away. So I've just published my follow up to "The Asian Gang" book, which was kind of 25 years on from the first study. And it's really hard to say what those – now no longer quite so young – men took away from the first study, but they all pretty much entirely, one or two said no, everyone else said yes. And one of them said to me at the, we had a dinner to kind of give them the books and stuff, and was saying that, "oh, I'll be telling the people at work, you know, that the second book about me is being published". There's no sense of, for him, I think of a broader context of what the significance of that work is but it still meant something to him and I'm not sure that it's for me to say whether that's a good or a bad thing, or a right or a wrong thing, or to try and kind of curate that too much. I do think that we need to make research have a purpose. So I think you know, if you're going to be doing that kind of work, you would want to be changing the world in some way, it can't just be entirely extractive but you have limited control over, I think, the way that research is taken up in policy and question, you know, positions of power, particularly nowadays with social media. I mean, that kind of question about where power lies in research has become incredibly complicated, you know. So to some extent it lies to the people that you're working with, to some extent it lies with you as the researcher and the person that produces the stuff, to some extent it's the research councils, it's your research directors that are wondering what you're doing about impact. But it's also on social media where, you know, that's like the wild west, right? Who knows where any of that stuff is going to go or how stuff is going to get taken up, which is one reason why it took me a long time to write my follow up to the "Asian Gang" book, because I was just really concerned about where, how things travel, and how things get taken up, and how things get interpreted or misinterpreted and the dangers inherent with that. But the question is, should you then not do the research because you don't know what it's going to do? And I also was thinking about Mitch Duneier's book "Sidewalk", there's a fabulous appendix at the end of that book where he talks about, he goes back, takes his research back to his informants and gets them to try and kind of read the book and engage with, you know, and look at their transcripts. And they're like, no, no, no, no, it's fine, we trust you, we trust you, we trust you, we don't want to. And this, this kind of goes on for a number of pages but I think there's something quite telling in that whole thing about the narcissism of researchers in some ways about what their expectations are of the people that they do work with, and what the people that they're do the work with think is going on, and they have their own take on what those questions are I think.

Michaela Benson  37:13 
That's a really important reminder about our sometimes a bit of the navel gazing that goes on in relation to our sense of our own importance and those claims to authority that we try to make sometimes when we're doing research, but also that we are located in a massive ecosystem where you know, as you said, we have no idea how our research is going to be taken up, how it's going to impact on, on people. We can only orchestrate that to a certain degree, and you might question whether we should at all. But Dan, I noticed that you had some thoughts that you wanted to share, so I'll bring you back in.

Dan McCulloch  37:51  
I mean, I agree with what you're saying there, Claire. I suppose my bigger concern about it is kind of the pressure that comes down to us from universities to make claims when we set out in research to our participants, kind of in terms of saying things like this will have this effect, or this will change this kind of policy. And sometimes I remember having a back and forth with an ethics panel in my university because they kind of said, well, you need to put in here what the benefits to participants will be. And I was saying, well, I'm not sure I can make a promise about that. I think I can say this is the aim of it, but they were very insistent that I've kind of said this will benefit you in this way and society in this way. And I kind of thought, actually, I'm not sure I can actually do that or deliver on that. That holds me to something that I'm not sure is ever actually possible, and that makes me worry about how honest we're being with people because of those kinds of institutional pressures. And I suppose it's a reflection on that and the kind of pressures that sometimes feel like they come down from above, in terms of the kinds of claims that we're making when we set out in terms of this research.

Michaela Benson  38:59 
I think that that's a really useful kind of reflection on where we're located. But Belinda, I wanted to come back to you and to talk about the archival work that you do at the Working Class Movement Library, because there is another side to this as well that we've already started to explore, which is to do with filling gaps where things have become silent. So filling gaps in official history or in documentation, and the significance of that precisely for engaging in some of those conversations around power and who has authority.

Belinda Scarlett  39:30  
The Working Class Movement Library was set up to do just that, to document and find a space for histories that weren't being saved anywhere else. That was the sort of intention of founders, Ruth and Eddie Frow, and I think the reason the Working Class Movement Library has survived as long as it has and why it is such an important resource is because of their approach to collecting. So, they were non-sectarian in their collecting when it came to, to left politics. So even as Communist Party members, they didn't just collect Communist Party materials, so we have everything from sort of anarchism to fabianism, everything in between. We have library collection, which is sort of the official published histories of left politics in this country and everywhere else as well, to be honest. But I think most importantly, the library and the founders saw the importance of collecting that unique ephemera that was produced by the movement, and that's where the real richness lies in the collection. And there seems to have been almost an obsession with the founders towards the end of their lives to sort of try and collect and save that material, because it didn't have anywhere else to go. So, it wasn't just the official trade union histories, it was the grassroots activism. And they were able to do that because they were embedded in those movement themselves, but also because they built up trust with activist communities in Salford and beyond. And people trusted Ruth and Eddie, if you gave them your stuff, they would understand it, they would respect it, they would save it and then they would make it accessible to everybody. That was always the point of the library that it wasn't a, you didn't have to be a member to access the collection. And I think the library now has to try and continue to deliver that mission, which is not an easy thing to do, but it also has to change as well. So, I think one of our big issues is the people that come to the library with their archival material and offer to donate it to the library are obviously a self-selecting group of people who think that their history is really important, and then get quite surprised when we say actually, we have five of those already so we don't really want them. So we have to do the work to build those links back up with the activist communities in, in Salford and in Manchester and wider because I think over maybe the last 15 to 20 years that has been lost. So since Ruth passed away in 2008 those connections have been lost and the library has employed professional people like me to do that work. And so that sort of creep of professionalism has meant that it's become sort of less of a activist space and more of a repository for certain types of working class history. So I think that's my job to try and change that round.

Michaela Benson  42:04 
You've always been really clear when we've been talking about how what voices are not there, and the partiality of that and the work that you're trying to do to kind of overcome that. I think Claire that that kind of brings me back round to some of the other work that you've done on the award-winning website, Our Migration Story. And if you haven't checked out that website, you really should. This is a website that focuses on untold stories in Britain's migration history, and it offers fantastic resources for teachers particularly focusing on this in their classrooms. Listening to Belinda talk, and listening to some of the things that you've already said about your work on race and ethnicity, and thinking about whether there's there's something that we might refer to as willful deafness, where, very simply, those in power choose not to hear certain narratives and arguments. And your work really stands out to me for trying to actually address that.

Claire Alexander  42:55  
Yeah, that's very nice for you. I mean, there's a long history of people that have been trying to challenge the history curriculum in the UK for much longer than we have, and we built on that very clearly. I mean, the, the Our Migration Story website had a longer kind of pre-history, which came out of a project we did on Bengali migration, Bengali Muslim migration, which was oral histories and we collected that in a site – which is a beautiful site – which was put together by the Runnymede Trust, called Bangla Stories, and it really exquisitely kind of – I claim no credit for it all – it's just beautiful. And we then wanted to use that as a way of getting young people in schools to talk about family history and do family history, so we did some work in schools where people went and spoke to people in their community or their grandmothers or whatever about their life histories, and then try to do something creative with that, some, sometimes cartoons or photo montages or whatever. And then from there, we we wanted to think about, well, what can we do to help these kinds of histories get taught in schools? So we were working with teachers who would say, yeah, that's great. You know, this is really great to do this project. We really want to do this work. But honestly, you know, I've got so much other stuff to do, I'm frank, I'm going to go back and I'm going to teach Henry the eighth because I can download lesson plans from the TES website, and it's really easy. So we thought, okay, well, let's give people a resource which allows them to tell these histories, give them ways in which they can engage with increasingly diverse classrooms without actually kind of having a nervous breakdown along the way. So we did that, and it kind of chimed with the same time that the government under Michael Gove was trying to kind of close down the history curriculum, there was this whole big discussion – I'm sure you'll all remember – around our island story, which is a very kind of closed down, white version of what British history was. And our line was like, okay, let's take that version of our island story and tell a different story – which is why we called it Our Migration Story – which is to say, yes, you can tell this history of Britain in that way. You can also tell it as a story of migration from the very start, right the way through kind of 2000 years, it's always been a history of migration. We deliberately decided not to make it Black and Asian histories. We wanted to set a whole range of migration histories up against each other as a way of making it accessible, and also, I mean, deliberately less frightening to people in positions of power to say, okay, you know, everybody actually has a migration story. All of these stories give us a starting point of things that we as a 15-year-old or a 12-year-old can start to think about the things that we share. We were in classrooms and realised that, you know, these classrooms are so diverse, it's not even a question of Black and Asian. You'd get kids from everywhere with all kinds of histories, and trying to kind of bring those into, into one place. So partly, it was about speaking truth to power, challenge the dominant narrative, saying let's do this, we, you can tell a different version of this story. It was also about bringing forward stories that didn't get enough space. So some of that was Black and Asian history, some of it was German sausage makers, you know. And this was work that was given to us by academics or by museums and archives and so on, who wanted to give this a higher visibility, these stories. So it was about bringing those different histories together, but also allowing people to think about the things that we share across that. So it was probably a quite naive project in some ways, but it's kind of like if we start with the idea that most people somewhere in their kind of family history have a migration story to tell, it gives us a point at which we can start thinking about the things we share and then the things that are different between us, and how those different stories might be really different. So it had a range of different kinds of audiences in mind, from the kind of, stick two fingers up to Michael Gove down to the kind of like, you know, I remember a young woman in a school we worked at in Greenwich called Maisie who said, but I don't have an identity. I don't have a story. I said, well, we talked to her a bit. It turned out her, you know, her grandmother had given birth on, on a boat over from Ireland, and, you know, and just to kind of say, well, actually, that's, that's a fascinating story, story which tells us something which you can own and give, gave her life and it was a revelatory moment for her, actually and I think it was, it was really moving for us. I'm not, I'm not generally moved by these kind of things, but it was actually really quite a telling moment about what can you do with young people to help them feel part of a broader society which they feel that maybe they don't get seen or heard.

Michaela Benson  47:08 
I think that that importance of working across different generations is coming out really, really clearly in both sets of work that you're doing there, and it's certainly something that that seems to be coming increasingly popular as well, in terms of thinking about how we do those kind of connected bits of work on history that that are coming into sociology as well. I'm just thinking a little bit back to some of our earlier conversations around authenticity, and I wanted to come back on this point about authentic voices. And it's something that's kind of occurred to me again since doing the research on Brexit in respect to, I suppose, like the more sensational, controversial things that people might say to you in the context of doing research, things that we might find challenging ourselves. And I suppose really the question here is about the challenge of realism, because I think that that has taken over in some areas of our discipline to a certain degree. But I'm going to bring you back in Dan, because I was thinking about this, which is – you know – there's a, there's a question about the multiplicity of voices and how we best represent that, but in a context where we still have, at some point, to kind of draw a line and generalise, dare I say, so. I just wondered if you had some thoughts on that.

Dan McCulloch  48:29 
Yeah, so I sometimes feel that this is a bit of a tension sometimes. And I suppose one of the things that sometimes I reflect on in relation to this is that we quite often go into pre-existing social situations that already have existing power dynamics, already have existing social dynamics, and we become kind of tied up in those and sometimes in ways that haven't fully anticipated beforehand, and have probably been quite naive about if I'm being quite honest. I think in my own work, I try to be honest about the kind of end goal and the process. Where do I think this is going to kind of end up? What's the plan here? But I think there are inevitably kind of tensions and trade offs. I think also it makes me think that – if I'm thinking back to some of that kind of participatory visual work – that if there's a kind of audience in mind, or, I guess an intended audience at the outset, there are questions about what makes sense to that audience. And actually, if someone is telling a story that they want to have a particular impact, if you like, but you know that the audience might not interpret it in that way, it makes me wonder what kind of responsibilities we have without kind of influencing things unduly, or kind of censoring in some ways. And I think that is a tension. I think that is a tension because in doing so, you could be intervening and changing what someone might think they want or what someone wants to say, so you could be affecting the kind of voices as is expressed, but at the same time, there's a kind of tension with what they want to do with that voice. And I don't think that's always easily resolvable. I think that's a tension that sometimes we have to live with and kind of work through and try and do our best in supporting people, but know that that's probably imperfect.

Michaela Benson  50:19 
We're getting a lot of a great sense of naivety and imperfection in respect to thinking about research today, which I think is, I think it's really productive and I think it's really important to acknowledge that we're all still learning, and we're all still going through that process. Now this is me with my naive question Belinda, which is that, but when I think about archives, I have this impression of order and categories and that somehow the things that you uncover through an archive are neat or perhaps on message. So my naive understanding of this is that research and archives might be less messy than the ethnographic or in depth qualitative research we do with people, but I'm pretty certain that I am wrong there. So how does that kind of multiplicity of voices, that messiness, come through in your activist archives?

Belinda Scarlett  51:12 
Well, you're right that archives are about categories because I've, we sort of spend all day, every day, fighting about them and we know what lies in what category, what goes in what box. That is something that archivists do all the time. And I'm not a professional archivist and there's a lot of perspectives from archivists that differ from my actual sector, which is museum sector, in terms of splitting up archives and the way that they're structured in the catalogue that the public see as well, and how impenetrable they are sometimes to researchers with PhDs, so any normal person it's practically impossible to penetrate some of those categories. And when it comes to the categories, I think it's important to think about who's coming up with that, with those categories. So I think a lot of the problem with the Working Class Movement Library is it's been cataloged by, you know, a small, narrow group of people that represent certain things, and they are not the right person to be putting some of that material in categories. And then it makes it messy because people can't find it, so if you're a researcher that's coming in to look at LGBTQ working class stories, we have that material in the collection. It's just not being catalogued in a way that it's findable and there's absolutely masses of work to do there. So, I think archives are incredibly messy, but that's probably because I don't have the experience if you've got the other types of research. And that's almost why I love archives so much, because you will be in one part of an archive, and before you know it you're in another and – you know – your research becomes something else, really, once you start to look at those primary source materials, that's how I think it works. But I haven't done ethnographic research, so I don't know how, nothing to compare it to.

Michaela Benson  52:45 
I think I'm probably just hoping for something that's a bit tidier, but, um, but obviously just, it's just wishful thinking I think. I think we're kind of getting towards the end of, end of the discussion for today. I don't think that we can, can leave the room without reflecting a little bit on audience, and I think that the question in my mind is about how might sociologists reach a wider audience, and what happens if we don't reach the audience we intend. So Dan, what do you think?

Dan McCulloch  53:15 
It does remind me – and perhaps this comes back to a point that I think you made earlier, Claire – about the kind of power or lack of power that we might have in terms of when people start listening and why they start listening. It reminds me that some of the work that a colleague and I have done around the experiences of deaf people in prison. That has a long history and for a long time, there wasn't a huge amount of interest in those experiences from those with the power, perhaps, to change what those experiences were. More recently, there's been interest in that, and that really followed on from the introduction of the British Sign Language Act that put certain kinds of statutory responsibilities on organisations. All of a sudden, perhaps unsurprisingly – I might be being a bit cynical about this –  those organisations are interested in talking to us because their duties are different. So all of a sudden, they want to know more about what they should be doing. We had no real role, I don't think, in effecting that, that came about through, through legislation. We didn't have the power to decide who listened in that instance, but change outside of our control has changed who is listening and why they're listening. So I think it probably comes back to who has a power to decide about that. But I think, I think it is okay to be honest with people about the limits of our power and that we might want to change things, but that we can't promise that. And I think that's okay, in a sense, I think I'm coming back to that point earlier about university pressures. I think sometimes there can be that university pressure to kind of over promise, and I'm always a little bit wary about that. So yeah, I think quite often, in terms of thinking about new audiences, I think quite often it's outside of our control, and there are things that happen that maybe change that.

Michaela Benson  55:17 
I think you're absolutely right, and I think that in that context, yes, there are pressures from our universities to over promise, perhaps, but also to not necessarily think through what the structures and support systems would be that might help us to reach those audiences that they want us to reach. I'm going to take this slightly sideways Claire in my question to you, because in a previous episode of the podcast I spoke with Gary Younge, Cecilia Menjívar and Chantelle Lewis about public sociology, and one of the things that Cecilia highlighted was about the inherent dangers of public sociology, and yet the fact that Latin American colleagues had been doing sociology in public, even under you know the threat of death, because they saw that as their public mission. And I recently attended the American Sociological Association conference, and one of the big themes there was about academic freedom in the context of what's happening in Florida, but also elsewhere. So, the banning of critical race theory from syllabi, for example. And in that case, I suppose it's like attention that you'd prefer not to have from your government or from local administrators, and they're finding themselves obviously under scrutiny even from including race in the syllabi of public institutions. But they've also seen over there, and probably more acutely than we have here, quite a lot of issues around academic freedom in the context of speaking about Gaza and the student occupation. So, part of the big project there at the ASA was really about how to strategise around this. But I wondered if you could reflect a little bit on the context of your work on topics that have at times been highly politicised, what you think the challenges are to those of us in the UK doing this?

Claire Alexander  57:14 
I mean, I think – thinking about what Dan was saying – I think you can plan, to some extent, who you want to engage with, who you think your audiences are. You have to think about what it is you want or you're doing the research for, and what it is that – even naively – one might want to change, and therefore how you might want to lead to certain kinds of change, recognising that a) some of those almost certainly won't go anywhere but also there will be unintended kind of things that will catch you by surprise. I mean, when I did my first book, "The Art of being Black", I mean, it got picked up by the national press. So there was a hilarious double page spread in The Voice, so, you know, "is being black an art?", and a couple of really appalling reviews in by Darcus Howe and Caryl Phillips, where they just absolutely trashed it. So I had not a single suspicion, in my naivety, coming out of my PhD, that that was even going to happen. That was unusual. Some stuff you can plan for and I think if you want to plan to do certain kinds of, say, policy change, then you have to think about who you can work with. I think the stuff around the context in which research is received today is scarier than it's ever been. Took me a long time to do the second Asian Gang book because I was really worried about how that would be received, not just within the academy, certainly within, you know, social media, those arguments around who gets to do certain kinds of research, what it means and so on, have really changed in the 24 years since the first book came out. And I was really, and just before it was due to come out, obviously, the Israel-Gaza stuff kicked off and I got unwittingly snarled up in that in my job as Head of, Head of School, and there was a bunch of, you know, Daily Mail controversy and all this other kind of stuff. And I had to go back through the book just before it was about to be published and change some things because I didn't want people to be identifiable. I was, it's a perilous thing and I think if you're a representative of a less powerful group, if you're a woman of color, let's say – in my case – then you become visible in certain, really unexpected ways and it does make you vulnerable. The question is whether that is more important than the work that you want to do. So I mean, the examples you're giving about the kind of Latin America, there's acts of bravery there that I'm not sure I would have. Sometimes you do the stuff because you just want to do the work but I think living with the consequences of that can be really – as we're discovering with a whole range of academics who are losing their jobs because they're doing research that somebody doesn't like – it's a pretty perilous time to be doing that. And if you're already in a marginalised group within the academy, which is not to deny certain kinds of privilege for people in those categories too, it's pretty terrifying I think. So, I mean, it's interesting that you know academia of all things these days is something of an act of bravery.

Michaela Benson  59:58 
That's incredibly powerful words Claire, thank you. And I certainly, yeah, we haven't had a chance to touch as much as we might have done on social media and how that's also exacerbated some of these issues. But Belinda, I'm just going to come to you before we close, about whether – for you at the Working Class Movement Library – there are similar challenges in making those histories audible, particularly because they may very well be uncomfortable for those who are in power.

Belinda Scarlett  1:00:25 
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a tight rope that the library walks all the time. It shouldn't really exist at all. If it was truly radical place, it just wouldn't exist, it would get shut down. So it has to play a game almost between being a radical space and challenging, but also being able to survive financially as well, and it's a really tricky thing. So, my worry as the Library Manager – and something I think about a lot – is how do I keep it a radical space, but also keep it going? And I think the way to do that is where we get our funding from. So the library is predominantly funded by the movement, by the trade union movement, by individuals who believe in what it's trying to do. And I think it needs to keep being funded by the movement, otherwise it risks becoming another museum that – let's say – says that it celebrates certain types of things, but then can't really fully do that because the people in power keep telling them to stop doing what they're doing, or to not do what they really want to do and what the staff they really want to do. So I think that's a very difficult challenge, but I think it's the only way that you ever going to have an archive or a library or a museum space that is truly radical is to make sure that it's funded by the movement itself and by the people that really care for it and by its community, so that the organisations have to work with their communities all the time, so that they want to fund them. I think that's the only way the library and any library like it can continue to survive. If it was truly radical, though, you would just burn it all down.

Michaela Benson  1:01:54  
Well, I think that that's a great point to end on. Thank you very much Belinda, Claire and Dan for joining us today.

Rosie Hancock  1:02:06 
We'll be sure to put the different readings and thinkers into our show notes. Those show notes can all be found in the app you're using to hear this and on the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org. There, as ever, you can also browse our themed magazine, enjoy our other podcasts and take a look at the Sociological Review journal and much more.

Alexis Hieu Truong  1:02:27  
Our sound engineer was Dave Crackles, and our producers were Emma Houlton and Alice Bloch. We'll be back soon with more Uncommon sense. Thanks for listening. Bye.