Community, with Kirsteen Paton

What’s meant – and who’s excluded – when community is invoked? Does membership take more than presence alone? How can seeing local crises through a global lens enrich our understanding? Kirsteen Paton joins Uncommon Sense to discuss community, class, resistance, solidarity and more – including her experience of community in the UK cities of Liverpool and Glasgow.

As the author of “Class and Everyday Life”, Kirsteen gives hosts Alexis and Rosie a fascinating potted history of the study of “community” in sociology – moving from the early work of Emile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tönnies, concerned with industrial capitalism, to recent studies of gentrification and the rise of identities beyond those tied to concrete ideas of “place”. They ask: how is sociology developing its thinking about online communities? And if there’s a tendency to idealise and romanticise “community” as typically positive, how should we think about and conceptualise those on the far right?

Also: does talking about place-based communities risk missing the fact that communities are also connected across borders and histories, including colonialism? Kirsteen reflects – via Ambalavaner Sivanandan and Doreen Massey – on how what appears to be “local” (whether crises like the housing one or cases of resistance) is often inextricably linked to the global. Plus: a celebration of Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall and more.

Guest: Kirsteen Paton
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

By Kirsteen Paton

• Class and Everyday Life
• Gentrification: A Working-Class Perspective
• Probing the symptomatic silences of middle‐class settlement: A case study of gentrification processes in Glasgow

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Solidarity – Uncommon Sense podcast episode
• Doing Anti-Racism – The Stigma Conversations podcast episode
• World City – Spatial Delight podcast episode

Further reading

• “Coal is Our Life” – N. Dennis, F. Henriques, C. Slaughter
• “Family and Kinship in East London” – M. Young, P. Willmott
• “St Ann's” – K. Coates, R. Silburn
• “Neither ‘Deepest, Darkest Peckham’ nor ‘Run-of-the-Mill’ East Dulwich: The Middle Classes and their ‘Others’ in an Inner-London Neighbourhood” – E. Jackson, M. Benson
• “‘I Probably Would Never Move, but Ideally Like I’d Love to Move This Week’: Class and Residential Experience, Beyond Elective Belonging” – B. Jeffery
• “Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism” – A. Sivanandan
• “A Global Sense of Place” – D. Massey
• “New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s” – eds. S. Hall, M. Jacques
• “All That Melts into Air is Solid: The Hokum of New Times” – A. Sivanandan

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