Sideways Sociology: UK Anti-Racism
Three activists. Their ideas, their work, their lasting importance.
In this special short series of audio essays from the Sociological Review Foundation, three expert guests introduce us to key figures in the story of UK anti-racism, illuminating how they show us what that term really means – and what it takes – but also how their work and ideas speak to sociology, too, and deserve to be better known.
Starting the series, John Narayan – Chair of the Council of the Institute of Race Relations – explains Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s take on global technology, exploitation and anti-racist resistance. In the second episode, A.S. Francis celebrates Gerlin Bean as the “mother of the Black women’s movement” in the UK, whose life of committed activism exemplified theory in action – and whose story leads us to ask how we represent individual activists who so passionately valued the collective. And in the third episode, Hannah Ishmael – former archivist at Black Cultural Archives – describes the importance of the determined archivist and educational activist Len Garrison, whose work raises crucial questions about history and identity, self-esteem and self-recognition.
Episodes
4 episodes
Len Garrison, Archives and Self-Esteem – by Hannah Ishmael
How can archives fight racism? How can progressive educational resources tackle the harm of discrimination? Why have millennia of British history so often been presented through a reductive and harmful white gaze? Hannah Ishmael – lecturer in D...
Gerlin Bean and Black British Feminist Socialism – by A.S. Francis
What did Black radical politics look like in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s? What was its relation to the Black women’s movement, which urgently highlighted the multiple oppressions faced by Black women? How, in studying such movements, can we c...
Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Tech and Anti-Racism – by John Narayan
What does tech have to do with anti-racism? Why do we dismiss complex economics at our peril? And how do global struggles for justice connect to those at the local level? John Narayan – Chair of the Council of the Institute of Race Relati...