Everyday life, Cafe society
Thinking Allowed
BBC
4.4 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 2 December 2015
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Everyday life: Laurie Taylor talks to Les Back, Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, about his study into those seemingly unimportant aspects of life which throw a spotlight on the relationship between history, culture and biography. Returning to the council estate in Croydon where he grew up, and where his extended family still live - it tells a story about community formation, housing crisis and the geography of class through Christmas decorations. They're joined by Bev Skeggs, fellow Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths.
Also, Sarah Neal, Reader in Sociology at the University of Surrey, discusses multicultural conviviality in coffee shops.
Producer: Natalia Fernandez.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a Thinking Aloud Podcast from the BBC and for more details in our terms of use and much, |
| 0:06.2 | much more about thinking aloud. Go to our website at BBC.co.uk. Back in my or |
| 0:15.0 | or tundled days when I was teaching undergraduate sociology, |
| 0:17.0 | I became rather fascinated by the manner in which my students |
| 0:20.0 | would use the word really in order to reinforce their value judgments. So this or that film or |
| 0:26.4 | novel or television drama would not only be described as really good but often as really |
| 0:31.1 | really good and on occasions really, really good. Now I can see that what my students were endeavoring to do with these |
| 0:38.0 | reiterated realis was to mark something out as, well, more authentic closer to life but of course |
| 0:46.0 | looking and sounding real can be as much a product of artifice as a West End musical |
| 0:51.0 | those who promise us gritty reality often only trade in the deviant or the funny peculiar. |
| 0:56.3 | Which is why we properly celebrate those who can show us everyday life, ordinary mundane behavior in a manner that captures its distinctiveness, its richness, |
| 1:05.8 | its salience without being either patronizing or voyeurish. |
| 1:10.0 | And you can find good examples, I mean here, you don't know if much further than radio for, in the documentaries made by Ray Gosling, Tom Vernon, and in that series Lives in a Landscape, and in some of the conversations that I've heard on the listening project. |
| 1:24.4 | But sociologists haven't exactly excelled when it comes to dealing with the every day. |
| 1:29.4 | They have also often seen more fascinated with the, well, with the outrageously deviant |
| 1:34.4 | than the awfully normal, more at home with ghetto violence than suburban comfort, |
| 1:38.9 | more at ease with racial conflict than everyday conviviality. |
| 1:42.2 | Well in this program we're going to be trying to correct that imbalance with the help of three social scientists who all in their differing ways insist upon taking the mundane seriously. |
| 1:52.0 | They are Lesbach, who's professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, |
| 1:55.6 | Beves Geggs, also professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Sarah |
| 1:59.7 | Neal, whose reader in Sociology at the University of Surrey. |
| 2:04.0 | Let me begin by asking you some really rather open-ended questions |
... |
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