Why do we keep gifts that we don’t want, or can’t currently use? What role do these play in our relationships with others, with time, and perhaps even our future selves? Sophie Woodward discusses the richly creative research project that took her into strangers’ homes, drawers and cupboards, and led her to consider the gifts that lie “dormant” in our homes. Such items might appear “meaningless” or inactive, Sophie shows, but are far from dead or unimportant: “stuff” matters.

Via examples of gifts ranging from inconveniently big plastic toys to alcohol repeatedly gifted by relatives, Sophie explains how, beyond theories of gifts from thinkers like Marcel Mauss on the function of exchange, or Theodor Adorno on the perfect gift, it’s worth a deeper focus on the recipient – people, she observes, have an obligation not just to receive gifts but also to keep them, at least for a certain amount of time.

Plus, we ask: is it ok for recipients to pre-empt and refuse gifts before they’re given, or is gifting the prerogative of the giver? What can we do to reduce material overwhelm? We also celebrate Jane Bennett, who considers the powers of things, beyond the meanings we attribute to them.

A thoughtful and exploratory conversation, crucial in a time of climate emergency, waste, and cost-of-living crises.

Guest: Sophie Woodward; 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 Sophie Woodward

• Dormant Gifts: Animating the Imagined and Narrated Pasts and Futures of Gifts (2025)
• Live methods and live things: Cultivating attentiveness to dormant things to develop a vital sociology of the everyday (2025)
• Clutter in domestic spaces: Material vibrancy, and competing moralities (2021)
• Object interviews, material imaginings and ‘unsettling’ methods: interdisciplinary approaches to understanding materials and material culture (2015)
• Sophie’s profile at The University of Manchester and the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• New Materialism – Nick J. Fox (2020)
• Shrinking domesticity – Mel Nowicki, Tim White, Ella Harris (2022)
• Discover our lesson plans for use in the classroom!

Further resources

• “The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies” – Marcel Mauss
• The Opposite of Forgetfulness: Adorno on Gift-Giving – from Stuart Jeffries’ “Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School”
• “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things” – Jane Bennett

Read more about Jane Bennett.

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“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