The Stigma Conversations

How are racism and stigma power linked? How can education empower us to face the past and tell new stories? And why must we break historical silences? Sociologist Imogen Tyler talks to fellow activists from Lancaster Black History Group, formed after a Black Lives Matter Vigil in the city in 2020 – which few know was once the fourth largest slave trading city in the UK.

Teacher Geraldine Onek – who came to the UK as a child refugee from Sudan – describes working with schoolchildren to teach them about slavery and centre the lives of Black Lancastrians. Student Jasmine Patel describes her research, with fellow school pupils, into the city’s slavery family trees. Together, they show how facing the past is empowering - and what anti-racism means.

Note: This episode was recorded in Nov 2022, at which point The Tate had not responded to this letter described by Jasmine Patel. .
Credits

Host: Imogen Tyler
Guests: Geraldine Onek & Jasmine Patel
Executive & Development Producer: Alice Bloch
Project Lead: Imogen Tyler
Project Officer: Danielle Galway
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music & Artwork: Bruce Bennett

Episode resources

• Lancaster Black History Group feat. resources for schools
• The slave trade and the economic development of eighteenth-century Lancaster Melinda Elder (1992)
• Race, the Floating Signifier Stuart Hall (1997)
• Doing reparatory history: bringing ‘race’ and slavery home Catherine Hall (2018)
• Ghostly Presences, Servants and Runaways: Lancaster's Emerging Black Histories and their Memorialization 1687–1865 by Alan Rice (2020) in Britain’s Black Past ed. Gretchen Gerzina
• Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London - Simon Newman (2022)
• The Liverpool Slave Trade, Lancaster and its Environs Melinda Elder (2007)
• A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution Toby Green (2020)
• Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage Sowande’ Mustakeem (2016)
• The Slave Ship: A Human History Marcus Rediker (2008)
• Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora Stephanie Smallwood (2008)
• Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family’s Story of Slavery Alex Renton (2021)
• Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire Andrea Stuart (2012)

Find extended reading lists and learn more about The Stigma Conversations at The Sociological Review

Take Action!

The Slavery Family Trees project
Lancaster Black History Group
The Judges’ Lodgings Museum
International Slavery Museum

Food banks. Fuel poverty. Heating vs Eating. Why has poverty become the new normal in the UK, accepted as “just the way it is” in one of the world’s richest countries? Stigma, says sociologist Imogen Tyler, has been part of this normalisation: it’s dehumanised some of society’s vulnerable people, devaluing lives and destroying compassion to boot.

Helen Greatorex, Chief Officer at North Lancashire Citizens Advice, tells Imogen what she’s seen working on the welfare frontline over the years. It’s a story of desperation – working families needing food and fuel help; reworked personal budgets still unable to cover essentials; people shut out from the most basic social life that makes existence bearable.
But Helen also shares a story of hope, as she describes how her CAB office is transforming how it helps people in need – and gives a rallying call to stay outraged at destitution, no matter how common it is.
Credits:

Host: Imogen Tyler
Guest: Helen Greatorex
Executive & Development Producer: Alice Bloch
Project Lead: Imogen Tyler
Project Officer: Danielle Galway
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music & Artwork: Bruce Bennett
Episode resources

• Changing life expectancy and why it matters An animation from Glasgow Centre for Population Health
• Danny Dorling’s work on austerity and excess deaths
• Poverty propaganda: Exploring the myths Tracey Shildrick (2018)
• Benefits broods: The cultural and political crafting of anti-welfare commonsense Tracey Jensen & Imogen Tyler (2015)
• Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain Imogen Tyler (2013)
• The Violence of Austerity Vickie Cooper and David Whyte, eds. (2017)
• Crippled: austerity and the demonization of disabled people Frances Ryan (2019)
• From disability to destitution Joseph Rowntree Foundation (2022)
• The Care Manifesto : The Politics of Interdependence The Care Collective (2020)
• Bread for all : the origins of the welfare state Chris Renwick (2017)
• Good times, bad times : the welfare myth of them and us John Hills (2015)

Find extended reading lists and learn more about The Stigma Conversations at The Sociological Review
Take Action!

The Poverty Truth Network
North Lancashire Citizens Advice Bureau
Morecambe Bay foodbank
Joseph Rowntree Foundation

“Change can happen. Change has happened...”

Poverty makes us unwell. GP Andy Knox sees this in his North Lancashire consulting room, meeting people whose lives could improve if stigma and destitution went away. He tells sociologist Imogen Tyler about the burnout facing doctors and frontline workers trying to care for their communities on scant resources, and reflects on how we need to ask “bigger deeper questions” about what’s making our society sick.
But, inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s idea of hope as an “axe” – as something to practice, actively – Andy says change can happen if we have the humility to listen and the audacity to act differently. Describing working alongside his area’s Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community, he shows how listening can be an anti-stigma practice, and also reflects on the power of social movements. We must not scoff, he says, at “being woke” – indeed, in this time of “apocalypse” and revelation, refusing to “wake up” is not an option.
Note: **In this episode, Andy mentioned suicide rates among female GPs. For recent research on this, see Claire Gerada's work in the British Journal of General Practice.

Credits
Host: Imogen Tyler
Guest: Andy Knox
Executive & Development Producer: Alice Bloch
Project Lead: Imogen Tyler
Project Officer: Danielle Galway
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music & Artwork: Bruce Bennett
Episode resources

• Andy Knox’s forthcoming book Sick Society (2023)
• Hope in the Dark Rebecca Solnit (2004)
• The dictionary of alternatives utopianism and organisation Martin Parker, Fournier, ValeÌrie & Patrick Reedy (2010)
• Poet, writer, activist Dionne Brand receives her honorary degree (2018)
• Doughnut economics : seven ways to think like a 21st century economist Kate Raworth (2017)
• The work of Katherine Trebeck
• The value of everything: making and taking in the global economy Marina Mazzucato (2018)
• Learning from the Sixties A lecture by Audre Lorde lecture (1982)
• Andy Knox’s blog at The King’s Fund
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project

Find extended reading lists and learn more about The Stigma Conversations at The Sociological Review

Act!

Trussell Trust
Independent Food Aid Network
Enough is Enough
Disabled People Against Cuts
Everydoctor
Healing Justice
Shelter
Southall Black Sisters
The Peoples Assembly
Acorn

Stigma is nothing new. In Ancient Greece the word meant ‘tattoo’ and referred to writing on people’s skin as a means of punishment and control. Recognising that, says sociologist Imogen Tyler, is a game changer; it means we can start thinking about how stigma literally marks and divides us - and start thinking about how to resist.

Here, Imogen hears from sociologist Alice Bloch about her research with descendants of Holocaust survivors who have chosen to tattoo themselves with the numbers inked on their ancestors at Auschwitz. Such an act, she says, is about love - and resistance to stigmatisation. Alice also reflects on her work with adult children of refugees - and how stigma makes silences that weave through generations. Plus: how stigmatising undocumented migrants serves capitalism, but makes for a poorer society.

A powerful conversation about stigma and subversion, solidarity and resistance.

Read more about Alice here. Her research on descendants of Holocaust survivors and the concentration camp tattoo is funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research grant in partnership with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Credits

Host: Imogen Tyler
Guest: Prof. Alice Bloch
Executive & Development Producer: Alice Bloch
Project Lead: Imogen Tyler
Project Officer: Danielle Galway
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music & Artwork: Bruce Bennett

Episode Resources:

By Alice Bloch and co-authors:

• How Memory Survives: Descendants of Auschwitz Survivors and the Progenic Tattoo (2022)
• Talking about the Past, Locating It in the Present: The Second Generation from Refugee Backgrounds Making Sense of Their Parents' Narratives, Narrative Gaps and Silences (2018)
• Inter-generational Transnationalism: The Impact of Refugee Backgrounds on Second Generation with Shirin Hirsch (2018)
• Living on the Margins : Undocumented Migrants in a Global Britain with Sonia McKay (2016)

Further reading :

• The Stigma Machine of the Border in Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality Imogen Tyler (2020)
• If This Is a Man Primo Levi (1959)
• The Generation of Postmemory : Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust Marianne Hirsch (2012)
• Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language Eva Hoffman (2008)
• Modernity and the Holocaust Zygmunt Bauman (2000)
• The British Citizenship, Race, and Rights lectures Connected Sociologies

Find extended reading lists and learn more about The Stigma Conversations at The Sociological Review

What’s missing from mainstream thinking on stigma? And why must we confront power, politics and history if we are to fight dehumanisation and shame?
Imogen Tyler, author of "Stigma, The Machinery of Inequality", tells friend and fellow sociologist Michaela Benson how her thinking on stigma evolved through the time of Brexit, the “migrant crisis” and Trump – and why stigma power is alive in the widening “war on woke”. They discuss the need to celebrate movements and thinkers – from Du Bois to Black Power – long neglected by ‘stigma studies’. And they consider the deep entanglement of stigma with migration – from colonialism to Brexit, to the dehumanisation of asylum seekers.
Plus: how can we amplify marginalised voices without reproducing the stigma they face? And how did Imogen’s experience as a working-class student lead to her fascination with the subject – and to a tattoo?
Read more about Michaela Benson and The Stigma Conversations at The Sociological Review
Note: This episode was recorded in Winter 2022, after Manston processing centre was emptied. Read more about the death of Hussein Haseeb Ahmed at Manston here. You can also read the coroner’s report of Nov 2022 into the death of Awaab Ishaak in Rochdale, plus this statement from Awaab Ishaak’s family, and this from Rochdale Boroughwide Housing
Credits

Host: Imogen Tyler
Guest: Michaela Benson
Executive and Development Producer: Alice Bloch
Guest: Michaela Benson
Project Lead: Imogen Tyler
Project Officer: Danielle Galway
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music and Artwork: Bruce Bennett
Episode resources:

• Shame lives on the Eyelids in Imogen’s book Stigma: the Machinery of Inequality - (2020)
• The Condition of the Working Class in England - Friedrich Engels (1845)
• Never Again: Refusing race and salvaging the human - The Holberg Lecture given by Paul Gilroy (2019)
• Du Bois: Addressing the Colour Line - Gurminder K Bhambra, The Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project.
• From Stigma Power to Black Power - Imogen’s graphic essay with Charlotte Bailey (2019)
• Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity - Erving Goffman (1963)

From Michaela Benson:

• Who Do We Think We Are? – Podcast
• Read more about Michaela’s research on Brexit, Migration, Citizenship and Borders

Find extended reading lists and learn more at The Sociological Review

Take Action!
Citizens Advice
Poverty Truth Network