Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for September 2020, Robbie Shilliam (Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, USA). His article for Current Sociology, Redeeming the ‘ordinary working class’ is Free Access this month.

Robbie Shilliam

Your article “Redeeming the ‘ordinary working class’” was recently published in Current Sociology. How did you come to research such an interesting topic?

R. Shilliam: I grew up in the 70s and 80s. Brexit Britain, for me, feels very much like a redux of that era, with its unabashed racism, xenophobia and all-round economic-caste nastiness. The fact that these currents remained strong underneath New Labour and the “new” Tories always gave me a feeling of nervousness, which resolved itself with Brexit when they resurfaced. The article comes out of a book I published in 2018, Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit. I wrote that book in the aftermath of the Brexit vote with the aim of conveying the deep and historically embedded linkage between social conservatism and race, on both the right and the left of politics.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

R. Shilliam: The key finding is that racist populism is an attribute of the right and the left of British politics, although I would always assert that there is far more opportunity to defeat it from the left. What is presented as a turn towards social justice – those whom globalization “left behind” – is in fact just one more use of race to partialize the provision of welfare and social security. British imperial history since the early 1800s is in good part comprised of the regular partializing and disarming of social justice movements via the levers of race and immigration. There is no justice to be found in Brexit, of any kind. Empire has many afterlives, which become increasingly morbid.

What do you see as the wider social implications of your research? How could things change in the future?

R. Shilliam: The disastrous response to the current pandemic is only explicable as the next chapter in a fraudulent racist populism currently being mobilized to protect and enhance the material interests of a few via the purposeful neglect of the many. At the same time, one can see in younger generations – especially through campaigns over Grenfell Tower these past years and the Black Lives Matter protests this year – a fundamental calling out of this fraud. I don’t know how this struggle will resolve, but I do know that those struggling have their lives at stake.

Would you like to know more about Robbie Shilliam’s area of research? Read on, and make sure you have a look at the following suggestions he shares with us, adding to his work:

R. Shilliam: Amongst many other excellent scholars working on the UK context, I would look at the recent works of Amal Abu-Bakare, Kehinde Andrews, Gurminder Bhambra, Adam Elliott-Cooper, Nadine El-Enany, Maya Goodfellow, Priyamvada Gopal, John Holmwood, Kojo Koram, John Narayan, Denise Noble, Luke De Noronha, Lisa Palmer, Daniel Renwick, and Sivamohan Valluvan.

How did you come to this field of study?

R. Shilliam: I received my DPhil in International Relations (IR) from the University of Sussex. Ostensibly, IR is a sub-field of Political Science. But at Sussex, it was more like a combination of historical sociology and political theory. I also received my BA from Sussex in International Relations and Development Studies, so I drew upon the political economy and anthropology debates that were associated with the old AFRAS (African and Asian Studies) school. In fact, the AFRAS angle better resonated with my prior social, cultural and political commitments having come back to start higher education in my late 20s. I guess a lot of my work has since been to think about issues of race, coloniality and injustice in relation to – but also besides – he framings of historical sociology and political theory.