“What is the effect of receiving something from someone who is not your biological kin?” Anthropologist Delwar Hussain introduces his new project on Queer Inheritance, born when a friend welcomed Delwar and his partner to enjoy items belonging to her late uncle – a man they had never met. This led Delwar to wonder: how are queer people today preparing for their deaths? How, with this in mind, can we think of “inheritance”? And what does the “good death”, of which inheritance is a key part, mean to queer people?

While the word “inheritance” often leads us to thoughts of taxation and legislation, class and inequality, finance and family feuds, this episode heads in a different direction. Reflecting on both physical items, but also those things that remain intangible and untaxable – wisdom, life stories, mentorship, communion – this conversation unites two classic areas of anthropological thought: kinship and the gift. Inheritance, Delwar reminds us – particularly at the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis, for example, and when homosexuality was illegal in countries like the UK – can be a radical and communicative act. At other times, it reproduces dominant norms, among them heteronormativity and the privileging of biological kin. And then there’s disinheritance, too…

A fascinating and exploratory conversation about family, choice, meaning and death. Plus: the enduring popularity of Kath Weston’s “Families We Choose”.

Guest: Delwar Hussain; Hosts: George Kalivis, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Delwar Hussain

• ‘Just who do I leave my worldly possessions to, darling?’: A Study of Queer Inheritance – research project funded by a Wellcome Accelerator Award
• Boundaries Undermined: The Ruins of Progress on the Bangladesh/India Border (2013)
• Delwar’s profile at The University of Edinburgh

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Uncommon Sense episodes: Love & Reproduction, with Alva Gotby (2025); Performance, with Kareem Khubchandani (2023); Desire, with Angelique Nixon (2025)
• Discover our lesson plans for use in the classroom!

Further resources

• “Families We Choose” – Kath Weston
• “The Gift” – Marcel Mauss
• “Forgetting Family” – Jack Halberstam, in “A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies”
• “How to Survive a Plague” – David France
• “Abolish the Family” – Sophie Lewis
• “Anthropology and Inheritance” – Current Anthropology special issue featuring the pieces by João Biehl, Adam T. Smith and Tim Ingold, mentioned by Delwar

Read more about the work of Judith Butler and Resto Cruz.

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How have maternal - and grandmaternal - ways of knowing been sidelined and undervalued? What role has sociology’s focus on its ‘founding fathers’ played? And what’s the cost, in South Africa and beyond? Babalwa Magoqwana, Director of the Centre for Women and Gender Studies at Nelson Mandela University, joins us from Gqeberha.

In this fascinating conversation on knowledge and value, gender and care, Babalwa celebrates her grandmother - “a learning space, a space of imagination” - who provided her with “ways of knowing” that remain sidelined in academia. By foregrounding such maternal and grandmaternal figures, Babalwa argues, not only might we reduce the dissonance felt by students whose experience jars with that shown to them by classic sociological theory (of the “nuclear family”, for example); we also quickly see how the production of what we value as “knowledge” has been a colonial imposition - including rigid gender binaries, or notions of seniority rooted solely in chronology - that did not originate in Africa itself. Motherhood, says Babalwa, has been reduced to the identity of a single female person. We must de-gender it and recognise that all of us need to care.

Plus: Babalwa celebrates the work of Ifi Amadiume, author of ‘Male Daughters, Female Husbands’, and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, author of ‘The Invention of Women’. She also reflects on the unrecognised labour of black women in the neoliberal university. And we ask: can we speak of “African Sociology” in general? Babalwa explains why we may.

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

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Episode Resources

By Babalwa Magoqwana

• Inyathi Ibuzwa Kwabaphambili: Theorising South African Women's Intellectual Legacies (2024, with S. Magadla and A. Masola)
• On maternal legacies of knowledge, ukwambathisa, and rethinking of the sociology of Eastern Cape, South Africa (2023, with P. Maseko)
• Thirty years of Male Daughters, Female Husbands (2021, with S. Magadla and N. Motsemme)
• Reconnecting African Sociology to the Mother (2020, with J. Adesina)
• “Forced to Care” at the Neoliberal University (2019, with Q. Maqabuka and M. Tshoaedi)

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Uncommon Sense episodes: Margins, with Rhoda Reddock (2024); Natives, with Nandita Sharma (2022); Love & Reproduction, with Alva Gotby (2025)
• Discover our lesson plans for use in the classroom!

Further resources

• “I Write What I Like” – Steve Biko
• “Three Mothers” – Anna Malaika Tubbs
• “Male Daughters, Female Husbands” – Ifi Amadiume
• “The Invention of Women” and “What Gender is Motherhood?” – Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
• “Forced to Care” – Evelyn Nakano Glenn
• “Scholars in the Marketplace” – Mahmoud Mamdani
• “Eating from One Pot” – Sarah Mosoetsa

Support our work. Make a one-off or regular donation to help fund future episodes of Uncommon Sense: donorbox.org/uncommon-sense

What’s behind the reductive pursuit of “paradise” in travel to the Caribbean? How does tourism continue the legacy of colonialism? And how is this being resisted? We’re joined by Angelique Nixon, a scholar and activist at The University of the West Indies at St. Augustine, whose book “Resisting Paradise” examined how tourism shapes Caribbean life and identity, including via deep-rooted notions of “paradise” grounded in colonialism and exploitation. Angelique describes how the Caribbean, a region of such diverse islands, has been constructed a site for the fulfilment of particular desires, while other forms of desire have been suppressed in mainstream narratives. Angelique joins us to discuss this, as well as her new project, “Submerged Freedom”.

Plus: Angelique reflects on writing as a “black sexual intellectual”, and describes how Franz Fanon led her to reflect on tourism as “the stagnation of decolonisation” – as reproducing and reinforcing existing racialised inequalities. Also, we celebrate thinkers including the sociologist Kamala Kempadoo, authors Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid and Erna Brodber. And we profile the radical Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter, whose work challenged the assumptions of western liberal humanism and highlighted the importance of working on ourselves as part of decolonial work.

Guest: Angelique Nixon; Host: Rosie Hancock; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense

Episode Resources

By Angelique Nixon

• Resisting Paradise (2015)
• On Being a Black Sexual Intellectual (2019)
• Angelique’s academic profile, including information on her latest project, “Submerged Freedom”
• CAISO – feminist non-profit civil society organisation committed to ensuring wholeness, justice and inclusion for Trinidad and Tobago’s LGBTQI+ communities

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Uncommon Sense episodes on: Europeans, with Manuela Boatcă (2023) and Margins, with Rhoda Reddock (2024)
• Len Garrison: Archives and Self-Esteem – audio essay by Hannah Ishmael (2025)

Further resources

• “Island Futures” – Mimi Shiller
• “An Eye for the Tropics” – Krista Thompson
• “Sexing the Caribbean” – Kamala Kempadoo
• “Paradise and Plantation” – Ian Strachan
• “The Repeating Island” – Antonio Benítez-Rojo
• “The Wretched of the Earth” – Franz Fanon
• “After The Dance” – Edwidge Danticat
• “A Small Place” – Jamaica Kincaid
• Sylvia Wynter: Beyond Man – short introductory video by Al Jazeera

Support our work. Make a one-off or regular donation to help fund future episodes of Uncommon Sense: donorbox.org/uncommon-sense