The Art of Listening

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Michelle Christian, Louise Seamster and Victor Ray New Directions in Critical Race Theory and Sociology

Join your hosts Neil Robertson and Freya Hellier as we learn about the West Highland region of Lochaber. As Paul Rabinow has also argued, the daring light of the Enlightenment is at once arrogant and humble: ‘It is arrogant in so far as it acts for humanity with the confidence that it is right; it is humble in that enlightenment is an infinite project whose achievement lies in the future’ ( 2003: 94). We cannot any longer claim to act for humanity with such certainty.

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The first point that I want to make is to suggest that if we are to develop ‘global sociological modes of sociological inquiry’ – and I want to argue very strongly for the urgency of this - it necessitates re-thinking the near at hand as well as the elsewhere. This should not be a license for a global scramble for exotic informants in Africa or China who will only be assimilated in an age old and self-serving way. Part of the challenge of global social inquiry is to re-think how we understand the traces and presences of global relations in and across localities.

The changes of the last 35 years have carved deep wounds in the life of our city – huge discrepancies in wealth, housing crises and a situation where for many it hard to imagine a future here. I think we need to do much more work to develop a precise social diagnosis of what is happening. London seems to becoming more like French and European cities where the poor are shipped out to the suburbs at the edges of the city. Much of the work I admire in urban studies is both interpreting those changes and speaking out against their social consequences. Many of the migrants were happy to become more than mere subjects, hence the writing credit for three of them. This is an impressive collection of essays, ranging from the classics to the contemporary cutting edge. The extensively updated third edition of this essential collection again shows the editors’ commitment to providing the scholarly community with a historically rooted, in-depth overview of critical writings on race and racism. The result is a key volume on the theorization of race and racism, sophisticated and inventive in its conceptualization, and deeply attuned to the genealogies that we build on in our work on race and racism. Perhaps even more importantly, it is forward-looking, providing readers not only with an overview of historical developments, but also with incisive readings that focus on contemporary concerns in the field and suggest directions for new work. The lucid introduction lays out the stakes of theorizing race and racism in the current moment, while the readings gathered in the volume present multiple theoretical starting points rather than an argument that ‘one theory fits all’. As a result, the volume provides readers with a critical in-depth starting point for thinking about, conducting research on, and working towards social justice regarding race and racism’. Just a few miles up the road is where you'll find Resipole Farm. Home to a holiday park, and a really beautiful contemporary gallery; Resipole Studios. Luke: The first thing I wanted to ask you about is a concept that’s been very helpful for me that I read first in your early work, which is the concept of the 'metropolitan paradox'. I wondered if maybe you could explain a bit what this concept means to you, and then, perhaps the slightly harder question, how you think the contours of the metropolitan paradox are maybe different now to when you were first writing about the metropolitan paradox.

The Changing Face of Football: Racism, Identity and Multiculture in the English Game (2001) with T Crabbe and J. Solomos Luke: And I suppose the follow up question being how you feel that paradox feels different; this is a big question about London, I guess, how it feels different to then, because you’re talking, I think, about 30 years ago. Alex Rhys-Taylor Coming to Our Senses: A Multisensory Exploration of Class and Multiculture in East London2011 (full-time ESRC Student) Today, Neil and Freya are all about the deep and ancient connections between the land, nature and culture. It’s something that you can feel pretty strongly in the West Highlands of Scotland, and we’ve been learning how all of those things can work together to enrich our everyday lives. Gunaratnam, Y. (2021). Presentation fever and podium affects. Feminist Theory, 22(4), 497–517. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700120969348

Mallaig is the main coastal hub of Lochaber, it’s at the end of the Road to the Isles from Fort William. But like much larger Oban in Argyll further south, it’s also a springboard to wider adventures. You can jump on ferries to the northern Knoydart Peninsula, the Small Isles and Outer Hebrides out west, and of course the ever-popular Isle of Skye. GILROY, Paul 2004. After empire: melancholia or convivial culture. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge CHAKRABARTY, Dipesh 2000. Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press Provincialism clouds critical judgment. Chetan Bhatt makes this point when he characterizes a ‘methodological narcissism’ in much of the debate about identity and alterity in Europe and North America. He writes: ‘It seems puzzling that the overwhelming academic obsession with diaspora, racial, ethnic, mixed, hybrid, syncretic, passing self and all its variegated possibilities is occurring during a period of impersonal, brutalising geopolitics and the greatest relative and absolute impoverishment of large sections of the non-Western world’ ( 2004: 34). The overdeveloped world’s grievances and inequalities need to be set in the context of the larger social cleavages manifest on a global scale. The mind-blowing fact that at the high point of Michael Jordan’s corporate sponsorship from Nike he earned more than the combined labour forces of South East Asian workers who made Air Jordan sneakers. This also involves a critical judgment that is supple enough to cope with the complexity of the relationships between the local and global. For example, unthinking Liberals or sociologists might herald a community organisation in Britain as an example of multicultural or religious diversity. Yet, the same organisation might also be implicated in religious motivated violence and extremism elsewhere.Professor Michael Keith, Director of The University of Oxford's Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), UK MacarenaBonhomme Making ‘Race’ at the Urban Margins: Latin American and Caribbean Migration in Multicultural Chile, 2020