Uncommon Sense

What makes “good” taste? Who decides? And what’s it got to do with inequality? Sociologist Irmak Karademir Hazir grew up watching women in her parents’ clothing boutique. She explains how her fascination for taste emerged from that and why talking about things like fashion, film and music is far from trivial – it’s how we distinguish ourselves from others; how we’re recognised, or dismissed.

Irmak tells Rosie and Alexis how sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu have theorised “distinction”, showing how “highbrow” taste is decided by those with money and other kinds of capital. They also discuss the idea of the “cultural omnivore” and ask: Is what looks like broad consumption – of everything from opera to grime – just elitism in disguise?

Plus: Why are Marvel blockbusters Irmak’s “guilty pleasure”? Why is “symbolic violence” as scary as it sounds? And do we have a moral duty to be honest about our tastes?
Guest: Irmak Karademir Hazir
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker
Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.
Production Note: This episode was recorded shortly before the devastating earthquake in southern and central Turkey and northern and western Syria.
Episode Resources

Irmak, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

• The movies of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe”
• John Waters’ film “Hairspray”
• Agnès Jaoui’s film “Le Goût des autres” (The Taste of Others)
• The BBC documentary series “Signs of the Times”

From The Sociological Review

• “Feminism After Bourdieu” – Lisa Adkins and Bev Skeggs [special issue editors]
• “Aesthetic labour, class and taste: Mobility aspirations of middle-class women working in luxury-retail” – Bryan Boyle and Kobe De Keere
• “Taste the Joy: Food, Family, Women and Social Media” – Smriti Singh

By Irmak Karademir Hazir

• “Cultural Omnivorousness”
• “How (not) to feed young children: A class-cultural analysis of food parenting practices”
• “Do Omnivores Perform Class Distinction? A Qualitative Inspection of Culinary Tastes, Boundaries and Cultural Tolerance” (co-author: Nihal Simay Yalvaç)
• “Exploring patterns of children’s cultural participation: parental cultural capitals and their transmission” (co-authors: Adrian Leguina and Francisco Azpitarte)

Further reading

• “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste” – Pierre Bourdieu
• “Formations of Class & Gender: Becoming Respectable” – Bev Skeggs
• “Reading ‘Race’ in Bourdieu? Examining Black Cultural Capital Among Black Caribbean Youth in South London” – Derron Wallace
• “Stuart Hall: Selected Writings” – Catherine Hall and Bill Schwarz [book series editors]
• “Cultural omnivores or culturally homeless? Exploring the shifting cultural identities of the upwardly mobile” – Sam Friedman
• “‘Anything But Heavy Metal’: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes” – Bethany Bryson
• “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” – Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
• “Follow the algorithm: An exploratory investigation of music on YouTube” – Massimo Airoldi, Davide Beraldo and Alessandro Gandini

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What does privilege look like today? How do the advantaged perform “ease”? And why do some of us feel at home in elite spaces, while others feel awkward? Princeton sociologist Shamus Khan joins Uncommon Sense to reflect on elites, entitlement and more. Reminding us that “poor people are not why there’s inequality; rich people are why there’s inequality”, he highlights the importance of studying elites for studying inequality, as the gap between the two grows.
Being the author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St Paul’s School (2011), Shamus tells Rosie and Alexis about how the way elites justify and see their position has shifted – and how a disability studies perspective helps us to cast a critical eye on the “ease” with which the few seem to nimbly navigate elite institutions. What seems like some of us “have it” and others “just don’t” is, suggests Shamus, socially produced – and what appears to be a “flat” and open world, ripe for the bold to seize, is really far more complex.
Plus: why might people who share the same knowledge be valued differently when that knowledge is held in different – racialised, minoritised – bodies? Also: why TV shows and movies about elites don’t stop at Saltburn, Succession and The Kardashians?
Guest: Shamus Khan
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker
Find more about Uncommon Sense
Episode Resources
From The Sociological Review

• Spatial Delight: Space Invaders – N. Puwar, A. Lisiak
• Uncommon Sense: Taste – I. Karademir Hazir, R. Hancock, A. H. Truong
• ‘Talent-spotting’ or ‘social magic’? Inequality, cultural sorting and constructions of the ideal graduate in elite professions – N. Ingram, K. Allen

By Shamus Khan

• Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School
• Saying Meritocracy and Doing Privilege (co-authored with Colin Jerolmack)
• How Cultural Capital Emerged in Gilded Age America (co-authored with Fabien Accominotti, Adam Storer)

Further reading

• “Flexible Citizenship” – A. Ong
• “Space Invaders” – N. Puwar
• “Learning to Labour” – P. Willis
• “Understanding audience segmentation” – R. Peterson
• “Reality Television and Class” – B. Skeggs, H. Wood
• “‘Oh goodness, I am watching reality TV’: How methods make class in audience research” – B. Skeggs, N. Thumim, H. Wood
• “Capital in the 21st Century” – T. Piketty

Read more about Shey O’Brien, Fabien Acconomoti, Pierre Bourdieu and Frantz Fanon.

Support our work. Make a one-off or regular donation to help fund future episodes of Uncommon Sense: donorbox.org/uncommon-sense

Lonely? Mean? Hostile? Cities get a bad rap. But why? Romit Chowdhury has lived in cities worldwide; from Kolkata to Rotterdam. He tells Alexis and Rosie about the wonder of urban “enchantment” found in a stranger’s smile, our changing ideas of the “urban”, and why anonymity is not always in fact the enemy of civility and friendship in the city.
Plus: how did “walking the city” emerge as a revolutionary research method? And why is Romit so fascinated with public transport – from exploring auto-rickshaw drivers’ masculinity in Kolkata, to studying sexual violence on the busy trains of Tokyo.
Romit, Alexis and Rosie also share their tips for thinking differently about urban life – from Japanese film to novels that explode norms about bodies in the city.
Guest: Romit Chowdhury
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker
Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.
Episode Resources
Romit, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

• Claudia Piñeiro’s novel “Elena Knows”
• N. K. Jemisin’s book “The City We Became”
• Shinya Tsukamoto’s filmography
• Teju Cole’s novel “Every Day is For the Thief”

From The Sociological Review

• “Karachi” – Shama Dossa
• “Whose City Now?” – Ray Forrest
• “Trash Talk: Unpicking the deadlock around urban waste and regeneration” – Francisco Calafate-Faria
• “Rising with the Rooster: How urban chickens are relaxing the pace of life” – Catherine Oliver

By Romit Chowdhury

• “Sexual assault on public transport: Crowds, nation, and violence in the urban commons”
• “The social life of transport infrastructures: Masculinities and everyday mobilities in Kolkata”
• “Density as urban affect: The enchantment of Tokyo’s crowds”

Further readings

• “Dangerous Liaisons – Women and Men: Risk and Reputation in Mumbai” – Shilpa Phadke
• “For Space” – Doreen Massey
• “The Metropolis and Mental Life” – Georg Simmel
• “The Arcades Project” – Walter Benjamin
• “Delhi Crime” (TV series) – Richie Mehta
• “The Country and the City” – Raymond Williams
• “Why Women of Colour in Geography?” – Audrey Kobayashi
• “‘Delhi is a hopeful place for me!’: young middle-class women reclaiming the Indian city” – Syeda Jenifa Zahan
• “The Way They Blow the Horn: Caribbean Dollar Cabs and Subaltern Mobilities” – Asha Best
• “Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City” – Brandi Thompson Summers

Support our work. Make a one-off or regular donation to help fund future episodes of Uncommon Sense: donorbox.org/uncommon-sense

EDUCATORS! STUDENTS! LISTENERS! We want to hear from you ...
We’re taking a short summer break, and will be back in September ready and refreshed for the new term, and with a new episode for you!
So, while Rosie and Alexis have some well-earned time-outs – and catch up on reading for forthcoming shows on things like cities, emotion and noise – we have a request: Could you use just a few of those spare 45 minutes this month to share some of your thoughts with us? To be precise, we'd like to know how we can help you ...

• If you're an educator – at whatever level – we'd like to know, do you use podcasts in your teaching? If so, how? And which ones? Maybe you've even asked your students to make their own? And if you don't use them, then why not? What gets in the way of that? And how could Uncommon Sense do more to help you to promote and explain the sociological imagination?
• And if you're a student or a researcher, we want to know what Uncommon Sense has done for you so far? Has it made you think about how you explain your work to non-academic friends? Maybe even that most challenging of audiences, your parents!?
• And if you're neither of the above, you're still very much part of the Uncommon Sense community! We want to know what keeps you listening? And whether we've prompted you to "see the world afresh through the eyes of sociologists"? That's what we promise at the top of pretty much every episode ...

Share your thoughts with us by email, by Instagram, and on Twitter. You can also read all about using podcasts in the classroom from The Sociological Review's podcast lead Professor Michaela Benson.
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We'll be back in September – See you soon!

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Too often, talk about security seems to belong to politicians and psychologists; to discussions about terrorism and defence, individual anxiety and insecurity. But how do sociologists think about it? And why care?

Daria Krivonos – who works on migration, race and class in Central and Eastern Europe – tells Alexis and Rosie why security matters. What’s the impact of calling migration a “security threat”? How does the security of the privileged rely on the insecurity of the precarious? And, as Russia’s war in Ukraine continues, what would it mean to truly #StandwithUkraine – from ensuring better job security for its workers abroad, to cancelling its debt?

Plus: pop culture pointers; from Kae Tempest’s “People’s Faces” to the movie “The Mauritanian” – and Alexis’ teenage passion for Rage Against the Machine.

Guest: Daria Krivonos
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

Daria, Rosie and Alexis recommended

• Kae Tempest’s song “People’s Faces”
• Rage Against the Machine’s song “Without a Face”
• Kevin Macdonald’s movie “The Mauritanian”

From The Sociological Review

• “Brexit On ‘Plague Island’: Fortifying The UK’s Borders In Times Of Crisis” – Michaela Benson and Nando Sigona
• “Organised State Abandonment: The meaning of Grenfell” – Brenna Bhandar
• “Food Insecurity: Upsetting ‘Apple Carts’ in Abstract and Tangible Markets” – Susan Marie Martin

By Daria Krivonos

• “The making of gendered ‘migrant workers’ in youth activation: The case of young Russian-speakers in Finland”
• “Ukrainian farm workers and Finland’s regular army of labour”
• “Who stands with Ukraine in the long term?”
• “Racial capitalism and the production of difference in Helsinki and Warsaw” (forthcoming)

Further readings

• “The Death of Asylum” – Alison Mountz
• “What was the so-called ‘European Refugee Crisis’?” – Danish Refugee Council
• World Food Programme Yemen and Ethiopia statistics
• “In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All” – UN Secretary-General
• “Ukrainian Workers Flee ‘Modern Slavery’ Conditions on UK Farms” – Diane Taylor
• “Bordering” – Nira Yuval-Davis, Georgie Wemyss and Kathryn Cassidy
• Anthony Giddens’ sociological work; including “Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age”

Support our work. Make a one-off or regular donation to help fund future episodes of Uncommon Sense: donorbox.org/uncommon-sense