Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This article reflects on undertaking PhD work as a form of anti-racist practice from an angle with significant promise for sociology and the social more generally. I argue that amid neoliberalism’s denial of structural discrimination and its attendant war on the sociological imagination, radical possibilities permeate PhD scholarship. They include extending the sociological imagination into the radical imagination via histories of power and resistance, recognising the theoretical and empirical impact of reading on the sociological imagination, writing in defence of the sociological imagination and synthesising the sociological imagination with lived theory to produce critical knowledge about everyday life for community activism. By evidencing what a sociological PhD can be, I contend that the promise of doctoral study to resist intensifying social inequalities under neoliberal arrangements coincides with the broader potential to salvage an insurgent sociology and reclaim the university from neoliberalism’s vice grip as a site of social struggle.

Keywords

anti-racism neoliberalism PhD possibility social justice sociological imagination

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Amin

(2010) The remainders of race. Theory, Culture & Society 27(1): 1–23.

Back

(2002) Dancing and wrestling with scholarship: Things to do and things to avoid in a PhD career. Sociological Research Online 7(4): 16–20.

Back

(2016) Speak out, get feedback and don’t be a consumer: Advice for a new student. The Guardian, 20 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/apr/20/speak-out-get-feedback-and-dont-be-a-consumer-advice-for-a-new-student (accessed 10 June 2023).

Bell

(2013) Normalising the exceptional: British colonial policing cultures come home. Mémoire(s), identité(s), marginalité(s) dans le monde occidental contemporain 10(10): 1–12.

Bhambra

Gebrial

Nişancioǧlu

(2018) Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press.

Brown

(2005) Edgework. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Burton

Bowman

(2022) The academic precariat: Understanding life and labour in the neoliberal academy. British Journal of Sociology of Education 43(4): 497–512.

Butler

(2023) There can be no critique. Boston Review, 13 December. Available at: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/there-can-be-no-critique/ (accessed 5 January 2024).

Campaign Against Racism and Fascism and Southall Rights (1981) Southall: The Birth of a Black Community. London: Institute of Race Relations.

10.

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1982) The Empire Strikes Back. Abingdon: Routledge.

11.

Chowdhury

(2023) After a marking boycott, the university threatened to withhold our pay. That only made us angrier. The Guardian, 15 March. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/15/marking-boycott-queen-mary-university-london-withhold-pay-picket-lines (accessed 26 May 2025).

12.

Department for Education (2022) Political impartiality in schools. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/political-impartiality-in-schools/political-impartiality-in-schools (accessed 4 April 2023).

13.

Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (2022) Inclusive Britain: Government response to the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/inclusive-britain-action-plan-government-response-to-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities/inclusive-britain-government-response-to-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities (accessed 4 April 2023).

14.

Dick

(2012) Stephen Lawrence murder: Nothing in the Met’s history had a greater impact. The Guardian, 3 January. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2012/jan/03/cressida-dick-stephen-lawrence-verdicts (accessed 1 May 2023).

15.

Evans

(2019) Atrocity Exhibition. Los Angeles, CA: The Los Angeles Review of Books.

16.

Fanon

(1961) The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin Books.

17.

Fekete

(2013) Total policing: Reflections from the frontline. Race & Class 54(3): 65–76.

18.

Foucault

(1977) Discipline and Punish. New York, NY: Random House.

19.

Foucault

(2003) Society Must Be Defended. New York, NY: Picador.

20.

Garland

(2014) What is a ‘history of the present’? On Foucault’s genealogies and their critical preconditions. Punishment & Society 16(4): 365–384.

21.

Gill

(2024) What is our responsibility as intellectuals to Palestine? Social Text Online, 5 January. Available at: https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/what-is-our-responsibility-as-intellectuals-to-palestine/ (accessed 7 January 2024).

22.

Gilroy

(1987) There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. London: Routledge.

23.

Gilroy

(2011) Paul Gilroy speaks on the riots, August 2011, Tottenham, North London. The Dream of Safety, 16 August. Available at: http://dreamofsafety.blogspot.com/2011/08/paul-gilroy-speaks-on-riots-august-2011.html (accessed 27 April 2023).

24.

Gilroy

(2013a) 1981 and 2011: From social democratic to neoliberal rioting. The South Atlantic Quarterly 112(3): 550–558.

25.

Gilroy

(2013b) Paul Gilroy interview – 2 June 2011. Cultural Studies 27(5): 744–756.

26.

Gilroy

Goldberg

(2020) Transcript: In conversation with David Theo Goldberg. Sarah Parker Remond Centre, 8 July. Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-david-theo-goldberg (accessed 2 January 2024).

27.

Giroux

(2014) The Violence of Organized Forgetting. San Francisco, CA: City Lights.

28.

Giroux

(2021) The right wing wants misinformation and manufactured ignorance, not democracy. Truthout, 28 July. Available at: https://truthout.org/articles/the-right-wing-wants-misinformation-and-manufactured-ignorance-not-democracy/ (accessed 26 May 2023).

29.

Giroux

(2022) Resisting fascism and winning the education wars: How we can meet the challenge. Policy and Practice (35): 111–126.

30.

Goldberg

(2002) The Racial State. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

31.

Goldberg

(2021) Dread. Cambridge: Polity Press.

32.

Gordon

(2014) On ‘lived theory’: An interview with A. Sivanandan. Race & Class 55(4): 1–7.

33.

Gutzmore

(1983) Capital, ‘black youth’ and crime. Race & Class 25(2): 13–30.

34.

Hall

(2021) The Hopeless University. Mayfly Books.

35.

Hall

(2011) The neoliberal revolution. Soundings (48): 9–27.

36.

Hall

Critcher

Jefferson

, et al (1978) Policing the Crisis. London: Macmillan Press.

37.

HM Government (2011) Ending Gang and Youth Violence. London: Home Office.

38.

HM Government (2018a) Serious Violence Strategy. London: Home Office.

39.

HM Government (2018b) CONTEST: The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering Terrorism. London: Home Office.

40.

hooks

(1994) Teaching to Transgress. Abingdon: Routledge.

41.

Joseph-Salisbury

Connelly

(2021) Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

42.

Kelley

RDG

(2023) On racial justice, black history, critical race theory, and other felonious ideas. In: Kaepernick

Kelley

RDG

Taylor

K-Y

(eds) Our History Has Always Been Contraband. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books and Kaepernick Publishing, 2–15.

43.

Kundnani

(2012) Radicalisation: The journey of a concept. Race & Class 54(2): 3–25.

44.

Kvachev

(2020) Precarity: A political problem. Open Democracy, 20 January. Available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/precarity-political-problem/ (accessed 27 May 2025).

45.

Macpherson

(1999) The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. London: The Stationary Office.

46.

Mills

(1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

47.

Nijjar

(2015) ‘Menacing youth’ and ‘broken families’: A critical discourse analysis of the reporting of the 2011 English riots in the Daily Express using moral panic theory. Sociological Research Online 20(4): 33–44.

48.

Nijjar

(2021) Baptised by fire: An interview with Suresh Grover. Race & Class 62(3): 88–101.

49.

Nijjar

(2022) Racial warfare and the biopolitics of policing. Social Identities 28(4): 441–457.

50.

Nijjar

(2024) Resisting racial police warfare through radical history. Soundings (87): 105–116.

51.

Perry

(2022) Changing Higher Education in the United Kingdom: Examining three trends through a neoliberal lens. Social Justice 48(2): 9–25.

52.

Sharma

Nijjar

(2018) The racialized surveillant assemblage: Islam and the fear of terrorism. Popular Communication 16(1): 72–85.

53.

Sivanandan

(1981) From resistance to rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles in Britain. Race & Class 23(2/3): 111–152.

54.

Sivanandan

(1982) A Different Hunger. London: Pluto Press.

55.

Sivanandan

(1990) Communities of Resistance. London: Verso.

56.

Sivanandan

(2008) Race and resistance: The IRR story. Race & Class 50(2): 1–30.

57.

Stone

(2021) Tory MP says people using term ‘white privilege’ should be reported to the Home Office as extremists. Independent, 9 October. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/white-privilege-tory-mp-jonathan-gullis-b1935308.html (accessed 2 August 2023).

58.

Wacquant

(2010) Crafting the neoliberal state: Workfare, prisonfare, and social insecurity. Sociological Forum 25(2): 197–220.

59.

Webb

(2018) Bolt-holes and breathing spaces in the system: On forms of academic resistance (or, can the university be a site of utopian possibility?). Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 40(2): 96–118.

60.

Zinn

(1990) The Politics of History. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Resisting Neoliberalism’s War on the Sociological Imagination: Reflections on PhD Work as Anti-Racist Practice

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References