Sacha Hilhorst

This has made me laugh - nothing could better illustrate the divide between our departments. We sociologists just have Fanon quotes up!

Thanks Tim! Catch up soon?

Haha yesss cheers!

Thanks Ben!

It’s still embargoed for now but feel free to email me - Im happy to send it over

Thank you Jane!

I noticed that too. A disgraceful way to cover it tbh

Very happy with this!

Did you know, for example, that Croydon was once the home of Imperial Airways, which "placed the town on the empire’s maps", and compelled fascists with strong ties to empire to make it their home and organising base?

This @renewaljournal.bsky.social essay is so brilliant - the history of the British far right narrated entirely through its activities in Croydon. Every sentence makes it clear it was written by a scholar with a genuine love for history and for Croydon.

renewal.org.uk/articles/sub...

The opening paragraphs - it's like, I don't know, Shakespeare, or Beethoven. You know it's great. Everyone knows it's great. But then you encounter it directly, in its own context, and you can only say, man this is so great.

❤️❤️

Hahaha this joke alone means I’m going to have to listen to the podcast. Teeing it up rn

Thats part of it for sure. But one difficulty of the status loss concept is that it lumps toxic investments in patriarchy and whiteness in with more diffuse and sociological stuff that we can actually work with as progressives. Whereas ‘white people should be respected more’ I can’t and won’t.

Just to add, I think that theres i.a. an indirect path via declinism, which can be partly tied to local trajectories as well as some underappreciated stuff on autonomy at work, as touched on in the essay.

Yeah, agreed that purely pocketbook-based explanations fail (many people who suffer economically hate Reform and vice versa), and I have some sympathy for the status loss frame. But status as what, and lost how? ‘Status’ can get used in a crude, psychologising way, or in service of anti-antiracism.

Reform’s aesthetics of industry Renewal 33.2_HilhorstRenewal 33.2_Hilhorst.pdf110 KBdownload-circle In North Nottinghamshire, Reform UK present themselves as the party of workers, community and coalmining heritage. But this image...

So much talk about Reform voters, but I'm yet to read much about their lives beyond tropes and excuses ('legitimate concerns').

I've been back in the midlands to interview people and learn more. Here's my piece on them and Reform's attempts to present itself as a community-minded, pro-worker party:

This event is looking amazing and do give the @transitionsec.bsky.social account a follow - I hear there’s lots to come on the green transition and the political economy of militarism.

Hugely recommend this to my fellow early-career sociologists - I went last year and it was amazing.

I've been slow to share this because in all honesty I was a little bit hungover on Saturday, but I wrote the New Statesman's weekend essay this week, on why England's ex-mining areas have become especially disenchanted with politics:

www.newstatesman.com/politics/soc...

The mathematics of starvation: how Israel caused a famine in Gaza Israel controls the flow of food into Gaza. It has calculated how many calories Palestinians need to stay alive. Its data shows only a fraction has been allowed in

This is a very clear historical and current summary, and utterly damning. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Five survivors of Rotherham grooming gangs say they were also raped by police officers Three former South Yorkshire police officers arrested in investigation into claims by the women, as young as 12 at the time

God, the number of people who were willing to believe that the South Yorkshire police were too woke to prosecute sexual abuse cases, when in fact the police force was itself an instrument of patriarchal sexual violence. It’s like a case study in the worst excesses of the British press.

...and obviously the marginalia are a delight and deserved to be preserved for posterity! Lots of her scathing notes from the 1980s about Gramsci being moralising and useless haha

For any bookbinding fans interested in the technical specs, Nat says he did a new perfect bind on the spine, then made a photopolymer plate to match the front and letterpressed it onto the new book cloth spine and did a foil imprint.

One of my most prized possessions is my mum's old copy of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, with her marginalia. Last year it sadly fell apart.

Turns out my partner has been secretly working to restore it, as a birthday present. Here it is, all rebound, with my mum's and my initials added on the spine.

Places to come together: Rebuilding local solidarities against the far right | IPPR In late July 2024, the seaside town of Southport in Merseyside burst into the national consciousness when it suffered two different, violent events in succ

Great new @ippr.org report from @sachahilhorst.bsky.social, making very clear the link between the decline of community spaces and the rise of the radical right. Sacha reimagines the 20th century miners' welfare fund as a model for reviving social infrastructure:
www.ippr.org/articles/pla...

who could possibly have foreseen

BS: How was that? How long were you in jail? MM: One night. They let you make one phone call, and I called the Ugandan Ambassador in Washington, DC, talked to him, and he said, “What are you doing interfering in the affairs of a foreign country?” I said, “What? We just got our independence! This is the same struggle. Have you forgotten?” Anyway, he got me out. Two or three weeks later, I was in my room. There was a knock at the door. Two gentlemen in trench coats and hats said, “FBI.” I thought, “Wow, just like on television.” They sat down. They were there to find out why I had gone – because this turned out to be big – it is after Montgomery that King organized his march on Selma. They wanted to know who had influenced me. After one hour of probing, the guy said, “Do you like Marx?” I said, “I haven’t met him.” Guy said, “No, no, he’s dead.” “Wow, what happened?” “No, no, he died long ago.” I thought the guy Marx had just died. So then, “Why are you asking me if he died long ago?” “No, he wrote a lot. He wrote that poor people should not be poor.” I said, “Sounds amazing.” I’m giving you a sense of how naïve I was. After they left, I went to the library to look for Marx. So that was my introduction to Karl Marx.

rare W for COINTELPRO from a legendary conversation between Bhakti Shringarpure and Mahmood Mamdani (h/t Silke-Marie Weineck)

“The future rulers of the void will conquer it with front facing camera.”