Alice Bloch  0:00 
Hi, it's Alice. I produce Uncommon Sense. And before we get going, I would like to borrow your ears. We're on our fourth season now, and whether you're here for work, for pleasure or study, we're really glad that all of you around the world are enjoying this show and its championing of the sociological imagination. It's part of what the Sociological Review Foundation, a charity, is all about: advancing public understanding of sociology, and you could say that, right now, that's needed more than ever. So if you've got time and the means, we'd be so grateful if you'd consider making a contribution to help us keep bringing Uncommon Sense to you. Whether it's a one off for the price of a coffee or a repeat donation, it will all support the making of this podcast. Head to donorbox.org/uncommon-sense to donate, you'll also find that link in our show notes. Thanks and on with today's conversation.

Rosie Hancock  1:02 
Hi, thanks for joining us for more Uncommon Sense from the Sociological Review Foundation. I'm Rosie Hancock in Sydney, Australia.

Alexis Hieu Truong  1:09  
And I'm Alexis Hieu Truong in Gatineau city, next to Ottawa in Canada. And this is still the show where we cast a sociological lens on the everyday, taking a notion that we might think has a pretty obvious meaning, but then flipping it around a bit to see it differently, more deeply and, yeah, more sociologically.

Rosie Hancock  1:28  
Yeah, that's something we do monthly, with an expert guest and without jargon, because we believe sociology is for everyone and that thinking critically about society – how it works, how it changes, how we relate to each other within it – can help us understand and confront the everyday. So whether it's working out why we might put up with toxic norms at work, which we did in last month's show on scars, or asking big questions about how the media frames war and revolution, and we're going to be doing that next month when we're focusing on Ukraine.

Alexis Hieu Truong  2:02  
Hmm, yeah. And, like I think you said last time, Rosie, sociology has, like, this great way of scaling up or down to look at particular issues, whether it's something seemingly micro, like, let's say, a clash with a housemate over how to decorate your place, or something super macro, like the housing crisis.

Rosie Hancock  2:22 
Yeah, I think it helps to join the dots in a way. And I guess for today's show, those dots are between bodies, individual bodies and society, science, history, psychiatry, even business, because today we're joined by Fady Shanouda to talk about fat.

Alexis Hieu Truong  2:38  
Fady is a critical disability studies scholar based at Carleton University, which is situated on unceded Algonquin territory in Ottawa, Canada, where I'm also based. Fady, I know like we're pretty much in the same place, right? So we could technically share a mic, but it is, it is 6:30am and it is winter, so yeah, yippee for the interwebs. It's really nice to see you here.

Fady Shanouda  3:03 
It's nice to see you too. Thank you both for having me on, I really appreciate it.

Rosie Hancock  3:07 
Oh yeah, we're really excited to chat to you today. To get us started, would you be able to give us a primer on fat studies? What is it? Where did it begin? What kinds of questions that scholars are asking right now?

Fady Shanouda  3:20  
Fat studies is an interdisciplinary field of study. It borrows and follows in the traditions of women and gender studies, queer studies, disability and mad studies, which are two areas that I also do work in. It is a young field. It comes after all of these other sort of fields and traditions were established. And what it does, more than anything else I think, is that it provides a counter narrative, right? It tells a different story about fat and fat people, one that goes against the mainstream, right, mainstream conceptions of fat people, whether it's lazy or indolent or gluttonous, it tells also a different story of the actual material quality of fat. And like many of these other traditions or these other sort of fields of study, it is rooted in its activist arm, right? You might say that the start of fat studies was the first fat-in – sort of like a sit in, a play on words – in 1967 which brought together 500 fat people to do a fat-in in Central Park, really just to say that they weren't going to take fat hatred anymore. But they were sick of it and, collectively, they wanted to come together to sort of make a statement, which is significant in 1967 as you can imagine. 

Rosie Hancock  3:33 
Yeah.

Fady Shanouda  3:33 
Yeah. I feel like some of the questions we're asking now, I think we're still rewriting our, our sort of history. We're still pushing back against old conceptions and ideas about what it is to be fat and so, you know, the field like I said is still young, so it's still countering a lot of ideas that are already out there. I think some of the things that we're really contending with now are also new drugs that have come out that claim, as many have in the past, to be the end of fat people. And what does it mean that there are, in fact, people who are writing opinion pieces in newspapers and things like that that say that these new drugs speak to the end of actually this field, fat studies, not just to the end of fat people. If you know anything about these drugs, they have lots of consequences – like a lot of drugs do – and of course, fat people have always existed and will always exist, which is why fat studies is so necessary.

Alexis Hieu Truong  5:50 
The fat thing you mentioned really gives the sense that this field, like fat studies, is really interconnected right with, with activism. And I guess you could even say that in some way, it implicity, implicitly is activism? But I was wondering, can you expand a bit on that?

Fady Shanouda  6:08 
Yeah. I mean the fat liberation movement, I think, is deeply interconnected with fat scholarship, but just like sort of all of these traditions – like queer studies, for example, or trans studies, which is like more recent – we are still able to look critically at things like fat liberation movements or the body positivity movement, right, and as scholars sit in the uncomfortable questions that we need to ask about any sort of activist movement. Who is it leaving out? Right, who does it belong to? When does it, in fact, do more harm than good? When is it being co opted, right? And so I feel like just like any sort of other field, we are able to do that critical work that sometimes the activist arm of the field can't do themselves because they're so deeply ingrained, right, in the activism itself.

Rosie Hancock  6:59 
I've always wondered what being an activist scholar kind of is, right? I think you hear people say that and figuring out what does it mean when people say that they're an activist scholar, and so identifying that it's being able to engage in the critical intellectual work that might support political work, for example, is such a great connection to make. Do you think of yourself as an activist scholar?

Fady Shanouda  7:23  
I've never used that term before, but I mean, I definitely think I of myself as an activist and I definitely think of myself as a scholar. I think in many ways, I think of myself as a public scholar, like I think my work is accessible and that it is reachable by the public, and that is sort of my aim. I think what the public can then do with that knowledge can surely be informing their activist approaches. And so in many ways, it's like, is the academic work I'm doing for the community I'm serving, or is it just for the insular group of, you know, academic scholars who can read through some of the sort of really dense theory that we might use right to unpack a particular issue?

Rosie Hancock  8:07  
Yeah, well, I mean talking about, you know, dense, dense writing and stuff, could we, I do want to talk for a moment about theory. And I know that you work from what you'd call a feminist new materialist perspective, which sounds, you know, particularly dense, particularly knotty, and something we might want to unpack. So could, could, could you help us do that now? Like, what does that mean?

Fady Shanouda  8:29 
Yeah, it is very dense because it's from a post-humanist lens. But really, I think a feminist new materialist perspective takes the human, the non-human, and the more-than-human. So for example, we know what the human is, right, our relationships with each other. The non-human is, I would think of animals, bacteria, and think of microbes, and think of things that are alive but are non-human. And then the more-than-human, think about technology, think about our relationship to material things around us, the significance of like air quality or spirituality, yeah, like things that we can't really understand, right, things that might be considered even metaphysical. Their relationship with one another is something that we want to take into consideration at all times, right, we might think, how are they in composition with one another. And a feminist new materialist lens is deeply ingrained in, you know, the traditions of French philosophy, but it is in fact millennia years old, ideas that are, in fact, owed to indigenous communities who have constantly been thinking about their relations with the human, non-human and more-than-human, for millennia, right? And so we might say it's new materialism, but for many communities this, these ideas are very, very old.

Rosie Hancock  9:57 
I mean, to give this a little bit of like texture, I guess, I think you said this really great thing to our producer, Alice – I'm not fat in my house – and I was wondering if you could speak to that?

Fady Shanouda  10:07 
Yeah, some people will hear that and they'll be surprised. And certainly I'm not smaller when I go home, but as a product of my particular socioeconomic position, I have the capacity – some might say the luxury, but I don't think being comfortable in your home is essentially a luxury – to build my home in a way that it does not produce fatphobic experiences. The furniture I'm sitting on, the size of my bed, the shower, where things are placed, the height of the countertops in my kitchen, how things are organised in my house produce non-fatphobic experiences. They produce forms of fat liberation, right? And they are, I am in relation with these material things, right? I'm in, I'm now sitting on a couch and this couch is supporting me in all the ways I need in order to feel comfortable. Fat people, so many fat people can tell you, materially, what it feels like to experience fatphobia from sitting in furniture that does not account for our body size or our body shape. And so this is how feminist new materialism sort of shows up theoretically for me, right? What are the material relations? What are the human, non-human and more-than-human relations that actually produce fatphobia in spaces all over the world, but for me, specifically, sort of in public spaces or public places?

Alexis Hieu Truong  10:07 
That really highlights like the way that these like power relations and subjective experiences are intertwined with the way that the material landscape is organised or experienced, right? And one of the things you mentioned was to have like a post-humanist lens. Could you kind of give us a bit of a definition?

Fady Shanouda  12:15  
Post-humanism is different from feminist materialism. Some people sort of bring the two together, or they conflate them. But post humanism thinks about how we are always and now in relation with more-than-human and non-human. So it's really decentring the human altogether, right? The concern I have with some, a lot of post-humanist ideas is that for those of us in marginalised bodies, specifically for lots of racialised people, access to human, the category of human has in fact been denied for centuries, right? I mean, there were laws in the US that in fact did that, deny people the status of human, status of personhood, and therefore was allowed for them to take their rights away. And so we have to be really critical of this idea that now we're just post the human. We're past this idea of the category of the human. For many of us, we're actually still trying to get people to recognise us as anything but subhuman. And that's just like a really simple sort of explanation of this idea. I do want to add one more thing about this idea of like living in my house means I'm not fat, is that some might call how much money someone needs to spend in order to make spaces more accessible for them, especially when they're fat, a fat tax, right? And so there is a cost that fat people have to, a burden that fat people have to pay. For example, my car is larger than the one I actually need because it fits me. You know, I could buy a small car, I just wouldn't fit in it. And it's not like they can't build small cars for big people, right? It's just we don't imagine fat people as users of those things. And so fat people then have to go up in a size of a car, I drive a big SUV because it's the only one that is, in fact, comfortable, but it costs a buttload of money. The insurance is higher, and I got to pay more gas, right? And that's sort of the fat tax that's ascribed to lots of things that we might need to buy in order to make ourselves not experience fatphobia.

Alexis Hieu Truong  14:29  
It kind of makes me want to shift gears a bit and ask about how, I guess, fat is perceived in the mainstream, like with the mainstream, let's say, in this case, being North America where we're both based. But you're interested in this, in this idea of, like, discourse, yeah, which scientists maybe uses a word to talk about the ideas that circulate and show up as a kind of, let's say, common sense, the ideas that get internalised and then taken for granted, show up repeatedly in language and so on. So I know you've been thinking about how fat is too often typically seen as in, as inanimate, as damaging, as surplus, or maybe even as dead. Can you tell us about that?

Fady Shanouda  15:20  
Yeah, so here when we're talking about fat, I have to clarify that we're talking about the actual material substance, so the thing that is under your skin, but also like oils or grease or blubber, or things like that, fat as the actual material substance. People think this, this material thing is dead, is inanimate, right? We also think we don't need it. Public discourse around fat is that 0% body fat is something that is attainable. If you have 0% body fat, you're dead, right? Your body can't function. In fact, your body needs fat so much, right? In order to, for energy, to process, to live, it is a necessary quality of life. And so the impression that lower body fat means somehow a more valuable life, right, is one that I'm pushing back against. The title of the paper is Fat Animacy, this paper is not out yet but it's currently under review, and it's a misnomer, right? Because fat is alive, I don't actually have to say that it's alive, but I'm pushing back against these ideas that are so widespread, right, that we don't need fat, that fat can be cut, it can be grafted, it can be sucked out, it can, we can do all these things to fat and that it's not necessary for life. When we speak of fat as inert, as harmful, as dead, we also then ascribe sort of the same value to fat people. There is a relationship that ends up happening that gets transcribed onto the people who carry this dead thing the most, the supposedly dead thing the most, and that's very harmful for our communities. Yeah, so like to to understand fat as animate, really what ends up doing it reminds us that the ways that fat matters, it acknowledges fat's significance, how it contributes to life. And I think for fat people, claiming fat as animate is also an emancipatory political act. It helps us reshape this discursive conversation that we're having here and that we have in the public about the material quality of fat. It tells us that fat people are productive, that we can be desirable, that there is joy connected to us, and that we are necessary as much as the product itself, the material quality of fat is.

Alexis Hieu Truong  18:10 
I feel that this kind of brings a very big contrast with, with some of like the public, like the YouTube channels and stuff like that on hypertrophy and like muscle building, right? So there are tonnes of, like, drugs and so on that are are being used for people to gain very big amounts of muscle and very low percentage of fat. And in, I feel that the imaginary around that is really that the muscle is alive and the muscle is part of you, right, and that adds value to you. But what you're, you're explaining is, like, really in the contrast, the fat cells are seen as dead and that can be cut from you, right? So it, yeah, it's making me think a lot.

Fady Shanouda  18:55  
Yeah, imagine, imagine that we talked about muscle the way we talk about fat. It would, people would, I mean the idea of, like, melting muscle, burning muscle, cutting muscle, like it just, I mean, there is no public discourse around that, right? The amount of products that help us cut, burn and melt fat compared to build, strengthen, etc, muscle, right? I mean, they are completely, like they're totally different. We constantly think about not needing fat, that it is superfluous and yet you will die, right, if you do not consume fat.

Rosie Hancock  19:37 
Yeah, I feel like this, this idea of whether it's a contrast of kind of building muscle or losing fat for this kind of goal that we have in mind, it's like this, you know, making your body a site of future focused productivity, or something, you know, like.

Fady Shanouda  19:55 
Absolutely. 

Rosie Hancock  19:56  
Yeah, I wondered if we could just bring up briefly, because we've mentioned the word animate – you've mentioned, you know, animate and fat quite a few times – and could we talk here about Mel Chen's work on animacy?

Fady Shanouda  20:07  
Sure, yeah. I mean, a lot of this paper borrows from Mel's ideas around animacy, or Dr Chen's work on animacy, I should say. Chen is actually focusing very specifically on inanimate things, really like toxins and metals in their book, things that in fact aren't alive, but do this sort of more-than-human relationship that we were talking about. They act upon us. They have agency in that way. As Chen points out, they can make us sick, right, toxins at different levels. And so I take on this idea of things that we think are dead, right, that are ex-animate, not just inanimate, and play with that to think about fat as, in fact, having animacy.

Alexis Hieu Truong  20:55  
Okay, so just summarising, you're pointing out that if we recognise fat as being not just alive, but also necessary, right, for living, our whole way of seeing and valuing bodies and perhaps life itself, like our values, our activities, how we live, could change in some way, right?

Fady Shanouda  21:15 
I would hope so. I mean, I would hope that when we think about fat in our lives as something essential – that it not just nourishes, but in fact protects – that we might actually value this thing and the people we in fact call fat. I mean, you know, there have been studies around something called the obesity paradox. It's this medical term invented by the, like the medical scientific field to talk about findings and studies that contradict medical doctors' expectations around fat people. It is a paradox because it pushes back against their knowledge, not because there's anything actually paradoxical about it. And the results are that older folks who may experience a health crisis, a heart attack, cancer, etc, those who carry more fat, specifically the people whose BMI – not that we want to reify the BMI, but this is how the studies work – the ones who fall into the obese area of BMI are more likely to survive. Yes, it is true that you're also, as a fat person, you're more likely to experience a health event, but you are so then more likely to survive it because of the weight that you're carrying. So how is it that, that fat protects and that the medical industry can't make sense of it, so they call it a paradox, right? This is how discourse works to, in fact, create knowledge around fat people, right? That even when the thing that we carry does good, they deny it by calling it a paradox.

Rosie Hancock  22:55  
This is such a great uncommon, uncommon sense point, you know, so you know, thank you.

Fady Shanouda  23:01  
I'm glad, good.

Rosie Hancock  23:04 
I mean, talking about the medical industry, though, I feel like we could perhaps start to bring in Mad studies at this point, which I know has got quite a strong presence in Canada. And you know, correct me if I'm wrong, is kind of an interdisciplinary area of study that's critical of psychology and psychiatry. And I was hoping you could talk to this area a bit and specifically the psychiatrisation – is that even a word, I don't know – of fatness.

Fady Shanouda  23:32 
It is. It certainly is a word, one that I use often. Yeah, I mean, Microsoft doesn't think it's a word but what do they know? Yeah, so mad studies, like you said, is a field. It really, what it does, it does again provide a counter narrative, much like fat studies, to ideas around mental health, but it centres the voices of mad people more than anything else as the expert. So that, in fact, takes expertise away from what we call the psy knowledges, so psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, and it asks sort of mad people to define what the experiences are of having a psychiatric difference. I think your question was, how do fat people become psychiatrised? And what I surmise is that there has been a process over the last maybe 40 years of making fat not just a medical condition, but also a psychiatric condition. To simplify the argument as much as possible, I think there is a, there is an idea that if someone gets to be a certain size it is a consequence of a mind that is out of control. It is a bodymind, one might say, to borrow a phrase from Margaret Price, that sort of thinks about the physical and the mental together, that the bodymind is now out of control and that this is a psychiatric condition. No one who is sane would ever get to five, 600 pounds, right? Only someone totally out of control would, would let that happen. And so this is how, for example, in 2012 when they were rewriting the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, there was an effort to in fact include obesity as a new category in the psychiatric manual. It did not happen. It wasn't included. But it doesn't mean that psychiatry isn't now a new sort of venture that, sorry, that obesity right, now falls under psychiatry in this new push to expand psychiatric intervention. We see it all the time in all these new apps that are coming out, the new mental health landscape, a digital mental health landscape, is one that very much includes obesity as a site of intervention.

Alexis Hieu Truong  26:09 
And I feel that this really like allows us to think about the process, like how social processes play a role in policing individuals, kind of determining their living conditions, shaping their experiences, all in the context of power relations, right? So this, I guess, the drive towards a kind of social control, like the disciplining of fatness, the bias against it, can be more limiting than a person's actual size, right? So can we also think,  talk about air travel as a case in point for that kind of experience?

Fady Shanouda  26:46  
Yeah. I mean, you're referencing like, this idea of making the body docile, and I would say, like it is so neoliberal, because we are just making each fat person a self manager, right? They're just being someone who is learning all these like ideas about the body in order to make themselves smaller, to conform to a normative ideal, one that in fact has eugenic roots, that is quite violent and in many ways does not exist, right, because we are all shaped differently. And we see these eugenic sort of ideals actually manifest in the example of the construction of public space, like an aeroplane, right? I mean, the, these, these seats are made for men who are 70 kilos, who are a certain weight, a certain height, I think it's 5′ 10″ right? That's who these chairs are made for. That's who, that's what public space is made for. And for those of us who are fat or short or who have body parts that are bigger in one place and not the other, whether it's shoulders or hips, I mean, these chairs don't make any sense. They don't, they don't imagine us as users, and for fat people in particular, flying is very violent because we don't not just fit in the chairs, we also don't fit in the toilets. We don't fit in the laneways. I'm sorry, I'm forgetting the term for –

Rosie Hancock  27:20 
The aisle?

Fady Shanouda  27:24  
Aisles. Thank you. We don't fit, we don't fit in the aisles. We fit maybe going sideways. So the plane is the opposite of my house. I only feel fatphobia in a plane, right. When I fly, I have to buy a second seat, especially when I fly internationally, that, that cost comes out of my, that's another fat tax we might say. In Canada, there's a rule that if you fly domestically, they can't charge you for the second seat. And so when I fly within Canada, I don't pay this fat tax. But anytime I want to go anywhere else internationally, I have to buy a second seat. I also have to go to the doctor regardless to get a medical note, that's an extra $50. It's also a tonne of time, the doctors end up really not liking having to fill out forms. And then I can't buy, I can't actually buy my tickets on most websites, I have to call.

Alexis Hieu Truong  29:18 
Yeah, so like, the industry is really, like, shaping up the planes and so on in a way that causes violence to the individuals inside, right? And I feel like, even if, even if we, let's say, had not experienced that, like, I feel a lot of people might think about just like, going to buy clothes, right? The way that clothes are made around specific sizes, like size four and very like strict social norms, right? When I try out a shirt or something like that, I'm always feeling my body is not the right shape, not the right size and so on.

Fady Shanouda  29:52  
Yeah, one of my students is doing a project on fat fashion. She's actually looking at fast fashion, how it's one of the, one of the areas that is where a lot of like fat women in particular shop and fast fashion are things like those kinds of like major clothing brands that do trends really quickly and then the, you know, the clothes have to get thrown away in a year because they're made really quickly and cheaply. And she thinks that there's an ethical cost to buying fast fashion, and it's a fat tax of a different kind, right, one that's on your ethics, right? That you can't, you can't, if you want to sort of source plus size clothing that is ethically made, you are spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars per item, right? And so, so there are other ways that we pay, right, as well. We we might have to participate in these, in these systems that we know use, you know, child labour, or that violate the environmental protections laws.

Rosie Hancock  30:57 
Do we want to give her a name check?

Fady Shanouda  30:58 
Absolutely, yes. She's my student. Her name is Mercedes Bacon Traplin, a fantastic MA student in our Women and Gender Studies programme here at Carleton University.

Alice Bloch  31:14  
Hi, it's Alice again here, producer of Uncommon Sense where today we're with Fady Shanouda, talking about fat. You'll find the books and authors we've mentioned all listed in our show notes, not all of them academic, we've even got some reality TV in there today. And if you're enjoying this, do take a look at The Sociological Review magazine online. It includes a 2020 piece where we showcase three podcasts with fat activist themes and a review of Karen Throsby's book, Sugar Rush. Also, as I mentioned before, if you scroll our show notes, you'll find that link where you can make a donation via Donorbox to directly support the making of this podcast. Thanks for listening.

Alexis Hieu Truong  32:00  
Okay, welcome back. In our last few shows, this is where we've asked our guests about a person or thinker who's inspired their work. So many great examples have come out of this, like Akwugo Emejulu celebrated bell hooks, Ellen Meiser just now nominated Anthony Bourdain.

Rosie Hancock  32:19  
But today, we're doing something different and asking you to champion a way of working and writing that's given you Uncommon Sense. And what we're talking about today fits our remit, because it is sorely misunderstood – an underdog, you might say, of the methods world – and that is auto-ethnography. Fadie, I've never done a proper auto-ethnography, so I'm not sure I'm actually even brave enough to try and define it. So I'm going to hand over to you.

Fady Shanouda  32:45 
Auto-ethnography is a methodology. It's one that comes, obviously, comes from ethnographic traditions, but it centres the researcher as also the subject. And so the researcher-subject is one who puts themselves into their work. I think a lot of qualitative methodologists were familiar with reflexivity, this idea of positioning oneself in the research, saying why you come to it, how you come to it, etc. That's essentially what auto-ethnography does, except you do that all the time, throughout the entire thing, not just in a blurb at the beginning. And you, in fact, might be writing yourself into the narrative and story, you might also be the subject of the material. And so for people like me, who are embodied and embedded in difference, and my embodied knowledge is vitally important, how I experience being fat in the world is knowledge that is, in fact, not out there and theoretically considered. This methodology is very important, because how I experience the world is also something that is missing in academic knowledge. What I think it also does that's vitally important is that is often more accessible, talk about public scholarship early, auto-ethnography uses stories, right? It uses narrative. It is about communicating really complex ideas in a way that people can grasp because we are often storytellers. We are writers. We are using narrative prose to communicate these ideas, ones that the public can maybe, who don't have access to things like definitions for feminist new materialism, can make more sense of, of the complex ideas.

Alexis Hieu Truong  33:13 
And looking at examples of how that's done, like I've read a piece of yours where you give us, well, you celebrate an especially joyous moment with your mom in the car. Can you tell us more about like how you have used auto-ethnography in your own work, but also how it's been used specifically and more broadly maybe in fat studies?

Fady Shanouda  35:09 
Yeah, I mean, the piece that you're referencing is one that didn't start off as an auto-ethnographic piece. It's one that started about examining things like Noom, which is a corporation, like a weight loss company, and other things like that, and how they conceptualise the fat body. And in the process of writing this piece, I was living at home with my parents, because this was during COVID, and there was a Noom commercial that came up on the TV, and my mom said this thing in Arabic – our mother tongue – it just felt like it captured everything I wanted to say in the paper. And so it's how I started the paper, like, you know, narrating this, this moment in our, my living room that happened with my mom, who is also fat, and then how I brought the paper to her, she read the paper, and how in the car – waiting for my dad as he was doing dental surgery – we had this conversation about what it was like to finally be beyond the control of the weight loss industry. You know, her finally getting there in her 60s, me in my 30s also just finally getting here and sort of inviting people to sort of think about how our ideas around fat are also very much intergenerational.

Alexis Hieu Truong  36:33 
In the context of a recent supervision I was also looking like at auto-ethnography, and there was kind of like talking with other colleagues and so on, and reading the literature, there's kind of a sense sometimes that it gets a bad rap from people who think it's too niche and so on, right? That's quite an annoying word, what would be your answer to that?

Fady Shanouda  36:57 
I would prefer everyone do autoethnography. I think position, positioning is something that we are all moving towards. I want quantitative studies to be, like I want to know why you're studying cancer research, right? And, and so many people who study things like cancer research or diabetes, they have a story. There's a story why it's important to them. There's a reason why people select the things that they research. For some reason that's not considered bias, right, but the work that I do is. And truthfully, all work has a bias to it, I don't know why we're running away from this idea that we have positionalities. I'm not saying that I, that my work is cherry picked, or that like there's a misuse of ideas, that would be bad research. But I have a position, I come from a particular place, I'm doing work for a particular reason and I don't think that should be camouflaged, right, the reader should know that. The thing about auto-ethnography is that for so long it was only used by tenure track faculty, faculty that were protected, senior faculty in those positions, because often they were writing about the institutions that they worked for and how they'd experienced some sort of violence or harm or discrimination. And so it, in fact, was used by some of the most protected people because they knew the stories that they were telling could make the most waves, right. Stories are very powerful. They, they move and shift our world views and we need to tell more of them from the knowledges that we have, supported by, of course, the evidence and the highest standards in academic rigour.

Rosie Hancock  38:48  
Fady, I'm curious to know whether there's a sense in which maybe we're all ethnographers now, or there's been like this democratisation of a quasi auto-ethnography, in the sense of, like, mining and generating data about ourselves, you know, broadcasting it on social media, constructing a narrative, right? Telling a story about our own lives, perhaps doing some sort of pop theorising about our lives as well. You know, is this related at all? Or is this something totally different?

Fady Shanouda  39:19  
I haven't thought of that, but it's actually really interesting. I mean, most of that is not peer-reviewed, which is maybe where I push back against it.

Rosie Hancock  39:28  
Fair enough!

Fady Shanouda  39:28 
I feel like at least auto-ethnography, there is, you know, there is still the peer-review process which is really important and vital. But it is certainly better that we're hearing more stories from more people. There is certainly a democratising of experiences when everyone can tell their story. I know so many fat liberation activists who've used these platforms, right, to push back against the mainstream narrative.

Rosie Hancock  39:54 
Yeah, so thanks so much. We're definitely going to put everything that we've mentioned today – niche or otherwise – into our show notes. But before you go, before you go, Fady, we really wanted to ask you for your pop culture recommendation, something that you've enjoyed watching, reading or listening to, that approaches fat with a little bit of critical, uncommon sense. So do you have any tips for us?

Fady Shanouda  40:20  
I do. I'm gonna tell you two things. One is Aidy Bryant's show, which is over now. It was called Shrill, it's also a book. And if you're only gonna watch one episode, watch the pool party episode because it is a moment of fat celebration, of fat liberation that has never been captured on TV before this. And the other show, I'll suggest – one that is like on the opposite spectrum of Shrill – is actually the survival show, Alone.

Rosie Hancock  40:54  
I love that show!

Fady Shanouda  40:57 
If you have seen Alone, you know how, how people who are dying, starving, how they talk about fat.

Rosie Hancock  41:04  
Yeah.

Fady Shanouda  41:04 
Because so many people on that show have to leave because they don't have enough fat in their diet.

Rosie Hancock  41:11  
The winner of the last season in Australia literally got fat before going on the show to win.

Fady Shanouda  41:18 
And this and this idea that, like you might be, someone in one of the seasons killed a moose, 600 pounds of meat. But because moose is such a lean, lean meat, right, they didn't have enough fat in their diet, and so they were still losing a pound a day.

Rosie Hancock  41:38 
Oh wow.

Fady Shanouda  41:39 
So they had to fish, still, even after killing a giant moose, because, of course, fish, it's a fatty food, right? It has all this important like omega threes and amino acids and all these kinds of things that you need for your diet. So if you want to hear people that have nothing to do with fat studies talk about the significance of fat, right, watch a season of Alone. It's also great television but yeah.

Rosie Hancock  42:03 
Fady, I'm so happy that you brought up Alone and that – along with your excellent podcast, Disability Saves the World – is going to be in our show notes.

Alexis Hieu Truong  42:12 
Fady, we've learned a lot from talking with you today and it's really like one of those conversations where we'll be, where I'll be seeing things differently afterwards. Thanks a lot for joining us.

Fady Shanouda  42:25  
Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure to speak with you this morning. Thanks.

Rosie Hancock  42:28  
Thanks, Fady. And that's it for another episode of Uncommon Sense. Remember to head to thesociologicalreview.org to check out not only our show notes, but our other podcasts and also The Sociological Review magazine. Alice has written a piece about the journey of this show and what it has to offer, not just for listeners but for guests too.

Alexis Hieu Truong  42:50 
We'll be back next month with Volodymyr Ishchenko, talking about Ukraine and narrow notions of revolution as well as decolonisation.

Rosie Hancock  42:59  
Our producer is Alice Bloch. Our sound engineer is Dave Crackles. Thanks for being with us today. Bye.