A year in the making of Recovering Community
We understand community better when we think with others and collaborate with communities rather than claim to speak for them. So much of the research going on within our school has this quality. I’d like you to come along with me and encounter the extraordinary people of this place from the kitchens of Castlemilk to the curators decolonising history in the Hunterian Museum in season two of Recovering Community, which I’ve been working on for the past year.
This opportunity was passed on when I joined the School of Social & Political Sciences in 2022, and it’s been such a wonderful way to meet people and make an intellectual home here as a ‘new Glaswegian’. I am a Londoner, but I’ve always felt a deep affinity and fascinating with the culture and life of Glasgow, from its music, football and working-class cultures to the legacy of ship building and imperial exploits. In the making of this new season of the podcast, I have been meeting the people, stories and ideas emerging here in the city, and beyond, all documented by Freya Hellier’s trusty microphone and her incredible skill as a producer and editor.
Through the podcast I have been practicing my own brand of ‘live sociology’ dedicated to encountering people on their terms and in the ordinary circumstances of their lives. Being a newcomer can mean you hear the stories of society with fresh ears. I hope I’ve achieved this as I’ve heard the stories of the people animating the wastelands that skirt the Clyde, the efforts to tackle homelessness and violence in central Glasgow, the food solidarity taking place in the kitchens of Castlemilk and the decolonisation going on in the Hunterian Museum that as members of staff, we walk past every day.
The story of Glasgow’s mixed fortunes is written into its built environment. Ross Beveridge, a senior lecturer in Urban Studies took me to Clydebank on a very cold, wet December morning, when I met up with him and artists Mary Redmond and Jim Colquhoun by a small hole that Jim called a ‘portal’ in a big blue hoarding by the side of a busy road in the West End. It was an extraordinary and reenchanting experience which overran and, in the end, I had to dash back up the hill to chair the Sociology staff meeting even though I was soaked to the skin.
Then there was the day when I swapped my desk for the kitchen table and travelled to Castlemilk in the south of Glasgow to meet a group of remarkable women working together to feed their community. I first met the women of Castlemilk’s Food Solidarity Soup’erheroes at the University of Glasgow through my colleague Kait Loughlin who is a Community Knowledge Exchange Lead. Kait runs a programme called ‘Community Matters’ that trains researchers how to work with communities, and the insights of the Soup’erheroes have been part of this process of educating researchers. These heroes don’t wear capes, their ‘souper power’ comes in the form of fresh fruit and veg, bags of lentils, free music events and hope and solidarity by the pound delivered every week in Castlemilk.
The next episode focuses on the Hunterian Museum and ‘curating discomfort.’ Glasgow is famous for its museums and galleries - from The Burrell Collection in the Southside, to Kelvingrove in the West End. Jay Sarkar is Associate Professor of Global History of Inequalities and she directs Decolonisation Through Archives; an archives fellows programme and podcast which tackles what Walter Benjamin called the challenge of ‘rubbing history against the grain’. Jay introduced me to Zandra Yeamann, the Curator of Discomfort at the Hunterian and a political activist, which teaches us to learn from the uncomfortable truths about the relationship between empire, slavery, science and the museum itself.
Perhaps my most powerful and moving experience was the day I met Dr Susan Batchelor, Dr Cailin Gormley at Glasgow Central station who introduced me to Jim Thomson of the Simon Community Scotland; a charity providing information, advice, care, support and accommodation to people experiencing, or at risk of, homelessness. To be homeless is more than not having a roof over your head. It is also about a denial of being, a person out of place to look away from, to ignore and not make eye contact with them as you pass busily through Glasgow's Central Station. Jim and the Simon Community partnered with my colleagues Susan Batchelor and Caitlin Gormley as part of a major research project on Repeat Violence in Scotland and this story is told in the episode that features this important research.
We have a bonus episode coming very soon on place-making in Sheffield to add to season two. I hope you enjoy listening to the new season of Recovering Community every bit as much as I did in making it. It features the extraordinary work going on by our colleagues in the School of Social and Political Sciences.
Les Back
Head of Sociology