Sideways Sociology: UK Anti-Racism – Details, episodes & analysis

Sideways Sociology: UK Anti-Racism is a special mini-series featuring expert guests John Narayan, A.S. Francis and Hannah Ishmael. They introduce us to three key figures in the story of UK anti-racism – Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Gerlin Bean and Len Garrison – illuminating how their work and ideas speak to sociology, showing us what it means to be anti-racist.

How can archives fight racism? How can progressive educational resources tackle the harm of discrimination? Why have millennia of British history so often been presented through a reductive and harmful white gaze? Hannah Ishmael – lecturer in Digital Culture and Race at King’s College London – introduces Len Garrison, an activist, archivist and determined educationalist who worked to improve education, particularly for minoritised populations – and to disprove and displace assumptions about the history of Black presence in the UK. Garrison was central in creating ACER – the African Caribbean Education Resource project – and became a leading founder of BCA – the Black Cultural Archives – in Brixton, where, with others, he enacted his conviction that archives have the power to change the reality and representation of people’s lives.

After hearing Hannah’s essay, you’ll be led to rethink the very meaning and value of archives – as well as the nature and potential of anti-racist education today. Featuring reflection also on the work of Bernard Coard and Stuart Hall, and the importance of attending deeply to what people do as well as what they write.

Find out more at thesociologicalreview.org

Readings

• How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System – by Bernard Coard (1971)
• More about the life and work of Stuart Hall
• The early Black Education Movement (BEM) and the Black Supplementary Schools Movement (BSSM)
• More about the African-Caribbean Educational Resource project and the Black Cultural Archives
• Obituary of Len Garrison – by Mike Phillips (The Guardian, 2003)
• More about Audre Lorde and the American civil rights activist Queen Mother Moore
• The National Archives introduction to The Brixton Uprisings of 1981
• British Activist Authors Addressing Children of Colour – by Karen Sands-O’Connor (2022)
• Benjamin Zephaniah reads Len Garrison's poem “Where Are Our Monuments”

Episode Credits

• Guest: Hannah Ishmael
• Producer: Alice Bloch
• Sound: Emma Houlton
• Music: Joe Gardner
• Artwork: Kieran Cairns-Lowe

What did Black radical politics look like in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s? What was its relation to the Black women’s movement, which urgently highlighted the multiple oppressions faced by Black women? How, in studying such movements, can we celebrate brilliant activists, without erasing the importance of whole movements and collectives? Here, A.S. Francis – author of Gerlin Bean: Mother of the Movement – introduces us to Gerlin Bean, the Jamaican-born activist who came to the UK as a student nurse and became central to Black British Feminist Socialism. They describe Bean, who passed away in early 2025, as a radical listener and mediator who applied to her entire way of living an acute awareness of how race and gender intersect to create particular types of disadvantage – and spoke to those she helped, on the ground, with a skillset that sociologists and others could learn a lot from.

Through Bean’s determined activism and networking, argues A. S. Francis, we see concepts like intersectionality come alive and be used to inform action. And in studying her life, we also confront urgent questions about why some figures from history are canonised, while others risk obscurity.

Find out more at thesociologicalreview.org

Episode Readings

• Gerlin Bean: Mother of the Movement – by A. S. Francis (2023)
• The History Matters journal
• UK Parliament information on The Race Relations Act of 1965
• The Young Historians and their film “We Are Our Own Liberators”
• The Black Liberation Front in the UK, the Black Unity and Freedom Party and the Black Panther Party
• Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later (Law School, Columbia University, 2017)
• Introductory notes on the concept of Triple Oppression Analysis
• In the Shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, Locality and Resistance – by Shirin Hirsch (2020)
• The archival records for “Black Women Speak Out” (1971) at the George Padmore Institute
• Towards Black Unity – Black Panther Newsletter about the National Conference on the Rights of Black People in Britain (1971)
• The Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD)

Episode Credits

• Guest: A. S. Francis
• Producer: Alice Bloch
• Sound: Emma Houlton
• Music: Joe Gardiner
• Artwork: Kieran Cairns-Lowe

What does tech have to do with anti-racism? Why do we dismiss complex economics at our peril? And how do global struggles for justice connect to those at the local level? John Narayan  – Chair of the Council of the Institute of Race Relations, and a lecturer in European and International Studies at King’s College London – introduces us to Ambalavaner Sivandanan, or “Siva”, a giant of anti-racism who showed us how to truly understand discrimination, and how we can best confront it, together – not just at the interpersonal level or the level of language alone, but through communities of resistance, with an eye firmly focussed on capitalism, colonialism and technology. Here, John celebrates and unpacks the ideas within Siva’s 1989 essay “New Circuits of Imperialism”, which saw him address racism, capitalism and tech at a global scale, and relate this back to state racism at the national level.

Siva, John says, shows us the scope for a truly anti-racist sociology, teaching us that the struggles of “Indian farmers for land rights, those of indigenous Amazonians, and those of Grenfell Tower fire survivors” are ultimately connected – united by “a story of people harmed and marginalised by the market state; and confronting it”.

Find out more at thesociologicalreview.org

Episode Readings

• Communities of Resistance: writings on Black Struggles for Socialism – by Ambalavaner Sivandanan (originally published: 1990)
• From Resistance to Rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean Struggles in Britain – by Ambalavaner Sivandanan (1982)
• New Circuits of Imperialism – by Ambalavaner Sivandanan (Race & Class, 1989)
• The Institute of Race Relations and the journal Race & Class
• More about the history of the journal “Race & Class”
• A collection of essays in memory of Ambalavaner Sivanandan – by the Sociological Review Foundation (2018)
• Obituary of Ambalavaner Sivanandan – by Gary Younge (The Guardian, 2018)
• Black Bodies, Broken Worlds – by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch, 2014)
• More about the background of the “The Pentonville Five” story (Modern Records Centre, The University of Warwick)

Episode Credits

• Guest: John Narayan
• Producer: Alice Bloch
• Sound: Emma Houlton
• Music: Joe Gardner
• Artwork: Kieran Cairns-Lowe

Production Note: This episode was recorded in 2024.