Uncommon Sense

Being Seen, with Shahram Khosravi

The Sociological Review Foundation Season 5 Episode 1

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0:00 | 44:10

**Note: this episode was recorded in late 2025, prior to the extremely violent suppression of protests in Iran, and prior to the strikes by the US and Israel that began in late February 2026**

“Being seen” has become a meme, pointing to the satisfaction felt at one’s true self being understood by another. But can we think more critically? Self-described “accidental” Professor of anthropology and ex-taxi driver Shahram Khosravi joins Uncommon Sense to discuss visibility, power, knowledge and the violence of unseeing. 

Shahram describes how growing up in Iran’s Bakhtiari culture shaped his own way of seeing  and taught him, early on, how some forms of knowing get legitimised while others are  dismissed - including in academia, where asking one question obscures the possibility of another. Here, he calls out the topsy turvy optics by which certain people - delivery workers, taxi drivers - go “actively unseen”, while others are loaded with value, visibility and esteem. Plus, he calls out those who ask “where are you from?” of the migrantised person. This “question”, he suggests, is often really a statement of non-recognition. 

An urgent conversation, with reflection on Édouard Glissant, George Orwell and Hannah Arendt. It is imperative, Shahram shows, that in what - via Arendt - he identifies as our present “dark times”, we challenge active “unseeing” and speak “clearly…with courage”.

Guest: Shahram Khosravi; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense


Episode Resources

By Shahram Khosravi

From the Sociological Review Foundation

Further resources

  • Miranda Fricker "Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing" (2007)
  • Judith Butler "Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?" (2016)
  • Hannah Arendt "Men in Dark Times" (1968) 
  • "For Opacity" in Édouard Glissant’s ‘Poetics of Relation’, transl. Betsy Wing (1997/1990)

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Alice Bloch  0:00  
Hi, it's Alice here. I produce Uncommon Sense. Thanks for coming here to listen to Shahram Khosravi, who talks here about power, being seen, accented thinking and much more. And in what you're about to hear, we also talk about Iran,  Shahram's early life there and his research too. And I wanted to let you know this conversation was recorded back in December 2025 before the latest uprisings in Iran and their violent suppression, and so also before the strikes by the US and Israel against Iran that began in very late February 2026. Thanks for listening.

Alexis Hieu Truong  0:42  
Hello, welcome to what we're so proud to say is season five of Uncommon Sense. I'm Alexis Hieu Truong in Gatineau, Canada, and I'm here as ever with Rosie Hancock in Sydney, Australia. And we're still the podcast from the Sociological Review Foundation that takes an everyday notion and casts it in a new kind of sideways, sociological light. We love sociology, and we believe in getting it out into the world beyond the university without paywalls, without jargon.

Rosie Hancock  1:08  
We're starting this season by talking about being seen, which is something I hear being said colloquially quite a lot these days, like, you know, I feel so seen by you, or perhaps the reverse, they just didn't see me. And somehow we all seem to know what's meant by that. You know, it's not, it's not seen as in exposed or seen as in under surveillance. I guess it's more like another person understands the real you that, you know, what might get called your authentic self, let's say, but there's a lot more to it than that. And the question of who gets seen by whom, how, and on whose terms is very political and actually very current. I mean, we live in this hyper-connected age that you could also say is a time of hyper visibility, and yet it's also a time of gross dehumanisation and gross othering. So I guess we might wonder what that's about and how we do better.

Alexis Hieu Truong  2:14  
So today, we're giving this idea of being seen a bit of a twist and thinking about visibility, about seeing and power with Shahram Khosravi, who's based in Sweden at Stockholm University. Shahram's work covers the anthropology of Iran and the Middle East, migration, displacement and border studies. His recent work has been on what happens to people after deportation, and he's also done work on waiting, including a study of undocumented migrants waiting for resident permits in Sweden.

Rosie Hancock  2:49  
Shahram, also a former taxi driver, describes himself as an accidental anthropologist, which we'll get to in a moment for sure, but he was also very intentionally the speaker at The Sociological Review Annual Lecture at the end of last year, where he spoke to an audience in Glasgow about How to Do Migration Studies in Dark Times. Hi, Shahram. 

Shahram Khosravi  3:10  
Hello, hi. 

Alice Bloch  3:12  
Lovely to have you on the show. 

Shahram Khosravi  3:13  
Thanks for having me. 

Rosie Hancock  3:15  
Okay, so we're going to do something pretty radical for this show – new year, new us etc – and we're going to start with something that normally comes a bit later. So, the bit where we ask our guest about someone who gave them some uncommon sense, or someone who shaped their thinking. And that's because, Shahram, you speak about your mother and growing up Bakhtiari, the Bakhtiari being an indigenous people of the Zagros Mountains in South West Iran. It makes sense, we thought, that the start of your story should be the start of the one we're building together today.

Alexis Hieu Truong  3:47  
So Shahram, can you first tell us more about the Bakhtiari people, in particular the Bakhtiari way of seeing and speaking about the world.

Shahram Khosravi  3:56  
Yes, Bakhtiari people belong to a larger group called Lur, they have been indigenous people of Zagros Mountains for long time. My ancestors have been nomadic people. So just like other indigenous people – you know, in South America, in South Africa, in South Asia – they have a particular way of looking at life, yeah, at time, at space. And I grow up in Bakhtiari land, but was sent to school in the city, and during my city-based, modern education system, the knowledge coming from my people and my mother was classified as non-knowledge. Yeah. It was not recognised as knowledge, yeah. I give you one example. My mother, like other Bakhtiari people, used one word for lateness and distance, yeah, which was, according to my education, school, completely wrong. Yeah, so you had to, you have to use two different words for lateness and another for distance, yeah, geographical distance. So I grew up believing that my mother was an ignorant person. And it took very long time that I realised that it was me who was ignorant. It was me who was, you know, colonised mind. So for me, it's important to emphasise this, to start with that, with this confession that what modern education does, which is epistemic injustice, yeah. Epistemic injustice is when you make invisible certain kind of knowledge, yeah, classify people as not knower, yeah. You know, you mentioned that I'm former taxi driver. I put that in my bio because I want to emphasise that the knowledge I produce is not coming only from academia, but also from the years I drove taxi. It was amazing, you know, period of learning about the city, about the people, about, about the mobility in the city. I want to also say when I spent time in a prison at the border between Iran and Pakistan when I was very young, it was the best education for me about border studies. I met many smugglers. I met many people crossing borders illegally, and I learned so much from those people. So for me, it's important to include all these different sources of knowledge.

Rosie Hancock  7:09  
I love this idea of, like, trying to expand what we think about as knowledge and where we get it from, and what counts as kind of a, you know, valuable knowledge. We recently talked to Babalwa Magoqwana about maternal ways of knowing. Babalwa spoke about how, in her context, in South Africa, these sort of official legacies were extremely important and formative for her own academic thinking also, and there too they're not celebrated or documented. And you know, we were wondering if you could, you could tell us more about your mother's way or ways of knowing, because I know you've written about her as a storyteller.

Shahram Khosravi  7:47  
Yeah, I grew up in in a village and we didn't have electricity until I was 14, no TV, no internet. So, during evenings the only thing we could do sitting together and telling stories, and storytelling is not only kind of entertaining yourself or others, yeah, it's about conceptualising what is happening around you, try to create a concept to understand and to show others what is happening to us, yeah. So storytelling is, is a kind of knowledge production which, unfortunately, you know, by anthropologists and other scholars have been classified as folklore, you know, as ethnic culture etc. This is what I want to emphasise again. This is not folklore. This is not ethnic culture. This is also knowledge, yeah, which should be included and recognised in, in our, our work in academia. Storytelling is important because it's also a collective act. So when we sat around fire together or even in dark, you know, and telling stories you know. So someone started saying something, and then it continued, you know, other people, you know, jump in and put, you know, details here and there, and every time story was told differently, yeah, so it was not like a printed story you read and it's always same, yeah. So when in that format, you know, old fashioned storytelling, when it was told it was told differently each time.

Alexis Hieu Truong  9:53  
The concepts that you're bringing with, like, epistemic injustice – that was theorised by Fricker – is extremely interesting, because when you're situating the experience of Bakhtiari people in the, in its geographical context and so on and talking about migration, there's elements of, of what you, you identify that really allows us to think that the knowledge that already exists, right? It's not just that we don't know that it exists, but there are structures that – culturally maybe,  class elements and so on –  continue in, in kind of reproducing power relations by making those types of knowledge unknown, unvalued and such. So it's really like an action, right? There's something there about an action that reproduces the power. So I was wondering, like, now that you live in Stockholm, could you reflect on, on maybe how the way of knowing that you've inherited in your upbringing in Iran contrasts with those legitimated and authorised by the Swedish state, for example, through its educational institution and also its mainstream culture, because it would kind of be an oversight to imply that the invisibilising or the silencing of different ways of knowing kind of just vanishes right when you hit Europe or even Scandinavia.

Shahram Khosravi  11:21  
Yes, completely. I mean, what is called integration, you know, is exactly what you talked about, yeah. So, integration is about making invisible the knowledge you have from your own people, yeah, from your background. It is not valid anymore in this place. To be integrated here, you have to accept the knowledge we give you. So every time, I mean in the context of migration, or, you know, in relation to minorities, but also generally about academic work in knowledge production, every time we visibilise the question, we make other question invisible at the same time. So this visibilisation and invisibilisation goes hand in hand, yeah. So the question is, when I bring up a question, what question becomes invisible? That is very much about, you know, in the context of migration, become very obvious, as you, you mentioned yourself, yeah, in, in the meeting between the migrant and the state, yeah. But also very much in academia, you know, what we do in academia we produce knowledge in, in a very long process, complicated process called peer reviewed, you know, process. And this peer review process is exactly, you know, a kind of filter, a kind of purification, you can call it too. You know, you purified a text, you purified an idea to fit in, in journals, in conferences, in the classroom, and this means you leave out a lot of knowledges, a lot of concepts and that's very unfortunate.

Alexis Hieu Truong  13:26  
This element that you identify of purifying ideas, right, I think it really speaks to that, that, that idea of how power is organised through knowledge production because the purification is also a cleaning, right, with this idea that the knowledge as it is, on, in the lives of people is a bit dirty, so we need the academics to kind of just clean this information for, for it to become understandable. 

Shahram Khosravi  13:56  
Yeah. Can I give one example? I was invited to a conference to talk about human smuggling, and I wanted to share my presentation with the former human smuggler, but organiser didn't accept that because he was a human smuggler. And I'm not saying that human smuggling is okay. I'm saying human smugglers produce the knowledge which we need if we want to understand what is happening.

Rosie Hancock  14:28  
Shahram, I like how you problematise the word peers earlier, you know, and sort of this conversation around how we value knowledge has really got me thinking about your own trajectory into being a working academic, because you're bringing all of these experiences into, into the knowledge that you yourself are producing. You've described yourself as an accidental anthropologist, and you know, I'm wondering whether you're thinking about this alternative route, like the time that you spent driving taxis, or, like you've mentioned, spending prison in the late 80s after trying to cross from Iran into Pakistan, I think you said. But I wondered if you if you could talk more to us about this word accident here, like, you know, accidental to whom?

Shahram Khosravi  15:17  
To myself. Yeah, because nothing in my early life indicated that I would ended up in academia. During my first 20 years of my life, I spent in Iran, I met more people who have been to prison than people who have been to school or universities, yeah. So, being here in this position was nothing I could imagine, or nothing was indicated by the life I had. And I was driving taxi, and taxi driving was very difficult job, you know, 12 hours driving, and it was before internet. So I was thinking, I have to find an easy job and, you know, academia is easy job. I talk and get paid. 

Rosie Hancock  16:13  
We're very lucky. I mean, you know, you sort of, you talked a little bit before about being a taxi driver and, you know, you've just said there are aspects of it that was really hard, but previously, you were talking about how parts of it were really good and, and you know, when I was preparing for this interview and I heard that you'd been a taxi driver, I sort of thought, you know, I didn't want to make an assumption, but nonetheless, I was like, that could be great training for being an anthropologist. And, you know, relevant to the topic of today, I wondered about, there is a kind of invisibility that a taxi driver has and I'm curious if you can reflect on that and how maybe that's shaped some of your work.

Shahram Khosravi  16:57  
Definitely. I mean taxi drivers, and also today we have delivery workers, yeah, they are – again going back to who, invisibility, visibility, yeah – they are infrastructure of a city. Without them, a city is not working, yeah? So people as infrastructure, but as you said, they are not visible as crucial actors. And we have many different other actors too, without them a city life collapses, but we don't see them as crucial. We see the police, of course, as crucial. We see politicians as crucial. We see professors as crucial actors, but not taxi drivers, not delivery workers, yeah. Again, it's very much about who is seen and who is actively unseen. I want to emphasise when I say invisible, people are not invisible. They are unseen. They are actively unseen.

Alexis Hieu Truong  18:04  
And reading your texts really, really made me think, because like when you, when you're writing, you're talking about sight, right? Well, literal and figurative also, but also various senses, and how those allow you to understand things about the world and about people's lives, and you have specifically one piece on doing migration studies with an accent. Could you, could you perhaps tell us a bit more about that and about your experience with, with this accented thinking? 

Shahram Khosravi  18:36  
Accent here, of course, as a metaphor, yeah. So it's not, you know, you use it in linguistically, but metaphor to talk about repositioning myself, yeah. I mean, this repositioning is important because, okay, going back about my time in Iran, about my interest in smuggling, about the people who have been out of the law, who have been excluded by the law, like my people, my parents, myself as undocumented migrant, etc, yeah. So to see from the other side is important. It is important, not politically, but very much about epistemologically, yeah. So what happens if we reposition ourselves to the other side? It means that we allow new questions appears to us, or we allow questions appear to us differently. So if we don't do this repositioning, you know, we still in the same way of thinking about smuggling or migration, about borders, about indigenous people. So how can we approach these questions from a new perspective? So accented thinking is part of that, you know, accented thinking is about accentuate, emphasise. It's about speaking forcefully, yeah, this is the meanings of accent as verb, yeah. And I was fortunate to be accented, you know, I was a migrant, I was indigenous. I was accented already in Iran, you know, as a Bakhtiari person. So I grow up as accented already from first year in school, yeah. So accent has always been with me. So instead of seeing as a lack how we can use it as a source of knowledge, same I do with the notion of home, yeah. So when I realised that I have no home and I will never go back to home, even if I return there is no home. So how can this homelessness becomes a source of imagination? Yeah. 

Alexis Hieu Truong  21:38  
What you're expressing, I feel, is extremely rich as it invites us to willfully reposition ourselves. Now, much of your work is concerned with countering the injustices and the harm of incomplete, unjust representation, with readjusting our optics and such. Can you tell us about your book, Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran, and the kind of like silences and gaps that it fills?

Shahram Khosravi  22:11  
That book was my second book about Iran. The first one was Young and Defiant in Tehran. Yes, Precarious Lives is about precarious condition of young people in Iran who struggle to get access to their citizenship rights, yeah. So it's very much about migration studies too. So you know it's about states designing pericarity for people, either migrants here or young people in Iran. The first book, Young and Defiant, is very much the focus is about space, is about urban spaces, yeah, about shopping malls, about streets, about, you know, houses. In the second book, Precarious Lives, my focus is about time, is on time, temporality. I am interested to, to look at what waiting does to people, yeah, and how time is used by the state to regulate population, yeah, to delay them, to keep them in waiting, to send them back to a square one again and again and again, and this is how precarity is constructed through temporality.

Alice Bloch  23:59  
Hi, it's Alice. I produce Uncommon Sense and I really hope you're enjoying the very start of season five here as we talk to Shahram Khosravi about being seen. I think it's a conversation that ties into our episode recorded a while back on margins with Rhoda Reddock at the University of the West Indies, where she talked to us about who gets centred and why and who gets cast out to the so-called periphery, with reference to the Caribbean. And if that interests you, why not also go back to Angelique Nixon talking about desire, or indeed Nandita Sharma on natives. Those are all shows I think that share similar ground. Meanwhile, if you do like what you hear, please do head to donorbox.org/uncommon-sense, where you can read all about directly supporting the making of this show. The Sociological Review is a charity dedicated to getting sociological thinking out there beyond academia, so any donation you can make helps us to do that via this podcast. And why not check out our lesson plans, linked to Uncommon Sense. They are on each episode's individual web pages over at thesociologicalreview.org in the podcast section of that site. They're ready in there for seasons one to three, with more coming soon. And finally, if you have funding to make a podcast, or maybe you're applying for some and you're interested in how we might be able to work together to get your show out there into the world, do have a look at our page called Podcasting with Us. The link is in our show notes, Thanks, and we'll see you back here soon.

Rosie Hancock  25:36  
Okay, so let's focus in a bit more on being seen. So Shahram, you have a piece in the 2022 book Infrastructural Love –which, by the way, is just a really great title – called Bordered Imagination. And in that piece, you reflect on the perennial question: where are you from? And, and you sort of move on to use, you know, simply as a metaphor we should stress, the notion of face blindness, of – I'm probably going to say this incorrectly – prosopagnosia in Greek. And could you tell us a bit more about your thinking here?

Shahram Khosravi  26:13  
Yeah, I think this question, where are you from, which is familiar question for, for all migrants and even children to migrants, is, for me, is interesting because it's not a question. You know, it's not about asking for information about a geography. It is rather a statement, and that statement put in form of question, where are you from? I don't recognise you, yeah. Where are you from? I have not seen you before, yeah, so, but you have seen me before. You have seen me every single day, and you keep asking that question. So there should be something you don't see. And this is how I came to this concept of face blindness. Face blindness, again I use it as a metaphor, but it is a medical disorder, you know, some people on the earth suffer from this, and they cannot recognise the face of people they know. For me, this is exactly what happens to migrants, yeah, that their faces are not recognisable or are not seen as familiar faces. It is very much about going, again this is also about accented, this is about language, yeah, it's about whose voice is recognised as a speech and whose voice is recognised as noise, yeah. You speak and I hear only noise, yeah. Same about faces. Same about being visible. They are very important elements to be politically recognised in the society. This is very much about Hannah Arendt, this is what Hannah Arendt wrote about, yeah, Human Condition, yeah, how we appear to each other. If you hear my voice only as noise, if you don't recognise my face, then how can I appear as a political actor, as a member of a community, as a citizen to you?

Rosie Hancock  28:48  
I read one of your pieces, a story you told, and this feels, you know, particularly relevant about a time that you gave a talk in Sweden, in Swedish, and afterwards someone, there was some discussion about whether or not you were Swedish, and someone said, no, you weren't. And when you asked why, they said, oh, because you're not, you can't speak Swedish, when you had just given a talk in Swedish. I mean, it's just kind of, yeah.

Shahram Khosravi  29:19  
I mean, this is what I mean. I mean, was amazing experience after one hour speech, I mean my Swedish is very good,  English, yeah. And after that, that speech, I was told you don't speak Swedish and say, ah, what they, I mean they heard only a noise. So in one hour, what they heard was zzzz, and that's also very much about race, yeah. So when you look at the face, then you hear voices also differently, yeah.

Rosie Hancock  29:52  
You write that the person exposed to this sort of metaphorically, face blind gaze is, and this is a quote, "deprived of the right to singularity". And it just feels so important to consider this, you know, we mentioned in the intro this idea of the authentic self that's implied in the idea of being seen, but the minoritised, migrantised person is denied that, and instead, sort of disaggregated into bits. Some bits are visible, some bits are invisibilised or outright denied. And I'm wondering if you can reflect more on this, this kind of split thing that goes on, where the migrant is both hyper visible but also denied a face until, as you write, until death.

Shahram Khosravi  30:37  
Yes, this is what I'm working on, and it was my also focus when I talk in Glasgow. It is about the figure of migrant. And in the field of migration studies is full of metaphors. Generally, in knowledge production, we need metaphors to make  unfamiliar things familiar, but we should be very careful not forgetting that they are metaphors. What happens in migration studies is that we have forgotten that these were only metaphors. Take integration, take the notion of people with migrant background. All these segregation, you know, all these are metaphors, but we take them as categories, as real categories, and then we, you know, create methods, and then we study them, and we create statistic or description, and we give them life, yeah. I would even say that the migrant is a metaphor, because we don't have such a thing as a migrant. We don't have, you know, who is a migrant? A person is a migrant only in the moment of interaction to borders and bordering practices. Say, like a student, you know a person is a student only during a period she or he is in school or, you know, at university. But we don't keep calling her student the rest of her life. We don't keep calling her children, children of a student. Yeah, we don't do that. You know, I'm talking about the border regime, yeah, how the border regime reduced such plurality of person to one fixed category identity.

Rosie Hancock  32:59  
Yeah. I mean, it's like the border extends temporally and spatially, like, well beyond the site of literal kind of geographic borders, but only for certain, only for certain. It's very racialised as well, because I find this fascinating, I'm a migrant, I'm a migrant, I'm, I'm, I'm like a white person who was born in New Zealand to migrant parents, to a British father and an Australian mother, and I moved to Australia, but at no point what really have my parents been treated like migrants in New Zealand, nor have I really been treated like a migrant in Australia, either. So our experience of migration is literally, literally occurs at the border, in the moment of, in the in the moment itself of migration and then it ends. But for other people, this, as you say, it sticks to them and the board, like the border never goes away in a sense.

Shahram Khosravi  33:59  
So you keep crossing border again and again and again, and you never arrive. And this is like magic, yeah, so, and also what you say is, of course is about race, you know, the figure of migrant, but also class. So colour line is always a class line.

Alexis Hieu Truong  34:21  
I'd like to bring back this, all this to the idea of understanding, because a lot of what you say tells us about how that informs the way that you think and critically write about the idea of understanding. And in some of your texts, also you you connect this to Édouard Glissant's ideas of transparent universality,

Shahram Khosravi  34:47  
You know, going back to my background as Bakhtiari, then becoming undocumented migrant, and then asylum seeker, and then racialised member of society in Europe, I think you know the attempts to understand by the state, by the authorities, by bureaucrats, by anthropologists, by sociologists, yeah, has, you know, it's not a kind of understanding which is about promoting life, is not about a knowledge in order to survive disasters, yeah. That understanding is about domination, which is, you know that, that demand of transparency. And I can tell you, you know, migrants and indigenous people, they are two categories have been the most studied people in the world. You cannot find any, any aspect of migration which is not studied, yeah, but those information we have, they don't help us to solve the problem, yeah, to help migrants, to help the state to solve the problem. So the question is, what kind of knowledge is that? For whom do we produce knowledge? Yeah, who is the audience for our knowledge, yeah? But also, going back to this understanding, you know when, when Édouard Glissant is about the right to opacity, yeah. So, the right to opacity, fugitivity which is also coming from, you know, slavery, plantation history and black, you know, resistance is about, not everything should be studied. Not everything we should tell authorities, anthropology, sociologies, yeah. So some, some part should be hidden, should be protected in order to survive, yeah, it's not only metaphors here.

Rosie Hancock  37:16  
I mean, I think it's so interesting you just talking about being a fugitive or opacity, or, in effect, kind of hiding in a way, in order for survival. And yet that too is sort of a privilege because I wonder if, I just think that there's, like, a whole lot of stuff happening in pop culture where invisibility or being unseen is presented as a power, almost like a superpower. The first thing that comes to mind, if I'm totally honest, is like Harry Potter's cloak of invisibility. But, you know, like superheroes, or, you know, that kind of thing. And I mean, it kind of seems like a bit of a con, probably, and it's exaggerated in the way that it's sold to us, and yet this idea of sort of going incognito is also a luxury of the privileged.

Shahram Khosravi  38:06  
Yeah, but also not. You know, what I had in mind when I said that was all those people who forge passports to cross the border. They change their name, they come and they lie, yeah. They lie to survive. They change their identity, religion, you know, background to survive. So yes, you're right when you talk about, you know, that kind of privilege to be invisible. But I mean, of course, you know, in Japan, there is a company getting a lot of thousands of thousand dollars to helping people to disappear, and those people have money to pay and privilege to disappear. But we have also people who disappear at the border, along European borders we have graveyards with unknown migrants, yeah, and their families they don't know what happened to them. They also disappear, yeah, but they are not privileged.

Alexis Hieu Truong  39:12  
This is quite an important element, because, like, there are moments where people can pay to be less, less visible or invisible. And there are moments where people are made invisible or disappeared in an act of violence, right? And so it is absolutely clear that this, this whole aspect of seeing, being seen and not, is is about power, is political and people's profit from that also. If I may, you gave The Sociological Review Annual Lecture at the end of last year, as we mentioned, that was on Doing Migration Studies in Dark Times. For us, for those of us who were not there, can you tell us what's the answer? What is darkness, exactly, and how can our work really, like, genuinely, counter it?

Shahram Khosravi  40:15  
Darkness. I take it from Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt wrote about thinking in dark time in the last century. And what she meant with darkness was not only horrible things, like the Auschwitz, you know, but about how horrible things can happen, but still remain hidden or be represented as something else, yeah. So, how we can start a war in name of democracy? How can we invade a country in name of liberatio of that people, yeah? So how horrible things are renamed, denamed, misnamed. So darkness is very much about language. And this is also what George Orwell, you know, talked about, fascism starts always with language, and how during fascism language become a tool for defence of the indefensible. So I was thinking, when we are in a new dark time, when language is so misused. Look every day what Trump talk about, he says, I want to build the wall against Mexico and it is an act of love. So for me, it's important how we in migration studies, but also in other fields, should protect the language and, and how to do migration studies in dark time is very much about protection of language, and speak clearly and speak with courage, because we live in a time that the language is used against us, yeah. So doing, I don't have a clearer answer for that question, it's more, the title was more to provoke, yeah. And this is something I'm thinking about, this is something I have been starting, you know, we, first time was in this accented, you know, doing migration studies with an accent and now I continue to think about, you know, who needs migration studies? Yeah, I think for me the main question is that: for whom we produce knowledge? Yeah, who needs that knowledge we produce? 

Rosie Hancock  43:04  
Shahram, thank you. We have so enjoyed talking to you today. Your work inspires us to see differently, to see better, to speak clearly and with courage as you do. So, thanks for joining us. 

Shahram Khosravi  43:16  
Thank you.

Alexis Hieu Truong  43:22  
What an important way to start season five of Uncommon Sense. We'll be back soon, thinking about endings and time with Patricia Kingori. As ever, please take a look on our archive on the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org, and there you can also find the transcripts, the reading lists, lessons plans.

Rosie Hancock  43:40  
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that if there was an award for the most comprehensive podcast show notes, we would definitely be in the running. So, there are loads of resources there waiting for you.

Alexis Hieu Truong  43:49  
And do take time to rate and review us on the app you're using to hear this. It makes a difference.

Rosie Hancock  43:55  
Our producer is Alice Bloch. Our sound engineer, Dave Crackles. We'll be back here soon. Thanks so much for listening.