Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for April 2026, Anson Au (Department of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong). His article for Current Sociology A Black feminist approach to antiracist qualitative research methods: Commemorating the legacy of bell hooks is Free Access this month.

Anson Au

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

A. Au: I am an Assistant Professor primarily working in the areas of economic sociology, social networks, and digitalization. My work examines the capillary ways in which economic inequality lives large in society, especially when it comes to the distribution of capital. I occasionally work on methodological pieces, which is how this piece came to be. It came from a fascination at how the tools of our own craft can be unwilling conspirators in the reproduction of inequality.

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “A Black feminist approach to antiracist qualitative research methods: Commemorating the legacy of bell hooks”?

A. Au: I actually wrote this based on one of my qualifying exams from my PhD studies! I was one of the few ethnic minorities studying in my department at the time, and bell hooks’ work really spoke to me. I think it speaks to everyone invested in studying inequality. Every scholar of inequality envisions a different set of reforms as the remedy to the economic malaise we study. But none of us really talk about the love that has to go into that remedy. We have to love the people we want to help. We have to love life in order to help remake it. For hooks, love was more than affect – it was spiritual. It was a very real ontological structure foundational to the human condition. We have to become the society we want to see. For hooks, oppression was more than the disenfranchisement of people in terms of economic means, but also the loss of joy and purpose of living. So even though hooks was invested in the idea of a revolution, there was no place for solemnity and hatred in her pursuit of social change. She wanted a revolution where you could dance and laugh your way into the halls of government and into a new world. She wanted a revolution of the mind where we “raise our consciousness” and confront our biases in the classroom. That was hugely enlightening for me.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

A. Au: Our methods can easily reproduce inequality if we’re not careful. I connected the dots to say that hooks’ thinking has a lot of promise for thinking about methodology, and at the same time, pay homage to hooks in the little way that I can. Loving the people we want to help means centering them in dialogue, it means being accountable, and using the classroom as a place to rethink our biases. But when we do research on poverty and inequality, the way we use our methods is how we put our reforms into practice. That also means to think carefully about the methodological orientation of our work and to recognize how much of what we know about the social world is reproduced through our biases. Biases in our cultures, our own interpretations, even in the historical construction of our academic institutions. Although I wrote this in the context of qualitative methods, there’s plenty of creative agency and historical baggage that live large in quantitative methods as well. All social research methodology holds the promise of becoming antiracist.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

A. Au: There are so many lessons for how to do things differently in research, public discourse, and policymaking. For one, we have to place people over ideology. I’m an empiricist. We have to decide policies based on what benefits most people, not based on what fits into some abstract ideology. Nowadays, people vote, love, hate, govern, and make decisions based on ideologies that have no bearing on people’s wellbeing.

Second, we have to learn how to disagree properly again, and I think people have forgotten how to do that. Now, if people disagree, they easily escalate that into hating the person themselves. It’s tempting to be polarized, stay in our circles, and hate the same people. But that doesn’t actually help reform, because reform comes from a creative friction between dissenting viewpoints. hooks was a “Buddhist-Christian,” and a core part of her philosophy on love was loving the person we’re disagreeing with.

Third, I think we need to study inequality and poverty more than ever, since it’s gotten worse than ever all around the world. But we might also sharpen our analysis if we tie it to systems of domination. hooks was a sharp thinker. She specified interlocking systems of oppression across race, gender, class, and an industrial complex that benefits from the distribution mechanisms that worsen inequality. This has import today. Look at the way taxes and government budgets are going. There are massive transfers of wealth out of the household sector into the corporate sector.

Moving forward, I’m still an optimist and believe reform is possible. It’s important that there’s tremendous political will for change, as people feel the pinch. What we have to do is refine the fora in which we discuss and orchestrate this change.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

A. Au: Toni Morrison’s terrific. She’s not a social researcher in the classical sense, but that’s part of the point that hooks was making. We have to learn from outside our disciplinary boundaries, which didn’t used to be so rigid. Morrison’s writing accomplishes something that I’ve scarcely found in work by any other writer. One gets the impression of two sets of eyes that move through the worlds she builds, which are often marred by deep, entrenched racism: a jaded pair of eyes that sees the world in all its usual ugliness, and a child’s eyes that sees the world almost like Simmel’s “outsider from within.” That teaches us a lot about how to look at old problems with new eyes as researchers.