seven - Pushing at the boundaries of the discipline: politics, personal life and the psychosocial

Summary

Katherine: Okay, so the first question, as well as the obvious question is: how did you come to be a sociologist? How did you come to be in the situation you are in now?

Sasha: I think one can always tell a lot of different stories in answer to a question like that, but one of the defining moments was when I was doing history A-level and we were studying mercantilism in early modern Europe, and I remember asking a question in class about why capitalism had developed as it did, in the West, in Europe. And my history teacher said, “That’s not really the sort of question that we deal with. It’s not a relevant question.” And somehow, and I don’t know quite how, I came to realise that it was exactly the sort of question that sociology asked. When it came to applying for university, I had been very, very keen on history at school, but I was also politically active and socially concerned in a way that it was hard not to be during Thatcherism, and I came to the realisation that I wanted to do something that was sociological and political.

I applied to Cambridge, under quite a lot of pressure from school, and that meant having to study something else first because, at that point, you couldn’t do social and political sciences straightaway at Cambridge. So I applied to do History Part 1, and Social and Political Sciences Part II, and I got a place. But then, after taking the Cambridge entrance exams, and one term into the second year of the 6th form, I left school and went to live at Greenham Common. I had been involved in various anarchist, peace and animal rights groups in Northampton, and the world felt as if it were on the eve of destruction, and going to Cambridge really didn’t seem very relevant. So, I left school – well, I was ‘asked to leave’, because I had been spending more and more time not at school, but on anti-nuclear demos and at Greenham. And so I went to live at Greenham.