Cities, with Romit Chowdhury

10/21/22 • 45 min

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

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

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

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

Previous Episode

Bodies, with Charlotte Bates

We each have a body, but every body’s story is unique. In this intimate conversation, sociologist Charlotte Bates tells Alexis and Rosie why studying bodies – and how we talk about them – matters in a society where some are privileged over others, and why ableism harms us all.

Charlotte talks about her co-authored work on wild swimming, arguing that despite its commodification, it holds subversive power. She also considers how the unwell body collides with the demands of capitalist life – revealing just how absurd it can be. Plus: what “wellness” fails to capture – and why health is not a lifestyle choice.
Guest: Charlotte Bates
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

Charlotte, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

Nina Mingya Powles’ book “Small Bodies of Water”
Andy Jackson’s poem “The Change Room”
Viktoria Modesta’s song “Prototype”
Mark O’Connell’s book “To Be A Machine”

From The Sociological Review

“Making Visible: Chronic Illness and the Academy” – Anna Ruddock
“Race and Disability in the Academy” – Moya Bailey
“Embodying Sociology” [Supplement Issue]

By Charlotte Bates

“Vital Bodies: Living with Illness”
“Conviviality, disability and design in the city”
Research on wild swimming with Kate Moles – including this article and this forthcoming publication.

Further readings

“Beyond the Periphery of the Skin” – Silvia Federici
“Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” – Donna Haraway
“Moving Beyond Pain” – bell hooks
“On Being Ill” – Virginia Woolf
“Believing Your Pain as Radical Self-Care” – Jameisha Prescod (in this publication)
“Wellness Culture is Ableism in Sheep’s Clothing” – Lucy Pasha-Robinson
The Polluted Leisure Project – Clifton Evers and James Davoll
The Moving Oceans project
“Illness: The Cry of the Flesh” – Havi Carel
Alexandre Baril’s scholarly work
“Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure” – Samantha Walton
“Why climate justice is impossible without racial justice” – Georgia Whitaker
On maternal mortality – Divya Talwar

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

Next Episode

Emotion, with Billy Holzberg

Emojis! Feminism! Rage! Sociologist Billy Holzberg joins us to talk about emotion. Why is it dismissed as an obstacle to progress and clear thinking – and to whose benefit? How can we let anger into politics without sanctioning far-right violence? And why are some of us freer than others to play with emotional abjection? Billy reflects on all this and more with Alexis and Rosie, celebrating thinkers from Sara Ahmed to Karl Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois to Yasmin Gunaratnam.
Billy also reflects on queerness, childhood and shame; the emotional precarity of TV’s Fleabag; the playfulness of emojis; and the desperate but subversive power of the hunger striker. Plus: a welcome clarification of the slippery line between affect and emotion.
Guest: Billy Holzberg
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
Billy, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

Jim Hubbard’s documentary “United in Anger: A history of ACT UP”
The idea of thinking sociologically with Emojis
Robert Munsch and Sheila McGraw’s children’s book “Love You Forever”
Lesley Jamison’s essay collection “The Empathy Exams”

From The Sociological Review

“Everyone shows emotions everywhere but class photos” – Laura Harris
“‘Serenity Now!’ Emotion management and solidarity in the workplace” – Jordan McKenzie, et al.
“Diane Abbott, misogynoir and the politics of Black British feminism’s anticolonial imperatives: ‘In Britain too, it’s as if we don’t exist’” – Lisa Amanda Palmer

By Billy Holzberg

Further readings

“The Cultural Politics of Emotion” – Sara Ahmed
“Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care” – Yasmin Gunaratnam
“Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” – Karl Marx
“Postcolonial Melancholia” – Paul Gilroy
“The Souls of Black Folk” – W.E.B. Du Bois
The work of psychologist Paul Ekman
“The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” – Audre Lorde
“The Politics of Compassion: Immigration and Asylum Policy” – Ala Sirriyeh
“Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy” – Carolyn Pedwell
“The Spiritualization of Politics and the Technologies of Resistant Body: Conceptualizing Hunger Striking Subjectivity” – Ashjan Ajour
“On Heteropessimism” – Asa Seresin

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

Uncommon Sense - Cities, with Romit Chowdhury

Transcript

Alexis Hieu Truong00:00:09.000

Hello, and welcome back to Uncommon Sense from the Sociological Review. I'm Alexis Hieu Truong in

Rosie Hancock00:00:15.300

And I'm Rosie Hancock in Sydney. Each month we look sideways at a theme that seems self explanatory – let's say bodies, care, intimacy – and we work together to see it differently. We're all about seeing the world afresh through the eyes of sociologists. Even when, Alexis, in your