Introduction

Near the start of The Obituary as Collective Memory, Bridget Fowler offers an epigraph from Milan Kundera: ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’ (2007, p. 25). This forgetfulness, Fowler points out, takes various forms. Whilst the lives of those who are without significant social authority are often consigned to public oblivion, discounted in the most immediate sense, there is also a species of forgetting at play in the accounts made of the lives of those who are powerful. Fowler shows how the stories told of such subjects tend to conceal the conditions of privilege which allow them to achieve what they achieve. In so doing they enact a kind of conversion, transmuting the consequences of social advantage into an inevitable aspect of the subject’s own ‘unique’ personhood. Thus, the obituary, in Fowler’s analysis, sheds light on a systematic forgetfulness crucial to the stability of social hierarchies more generally: it offers one example of how distinction comes to be bestowed on social actors ‘as though it were natural to them’ (p. 69; see also Fowler, 2004, 2015b; Fowler & Bielsa, 2007).

It is risky to seek to summarise a sociological contribution which spans, already, more than four decades, which is still ongoing and which is renewed with each fresh intervention. But if we were to do so we might suggest that Bridget Fowler’s work has been characterised by her commitment to a radical remembering in just this twofold sense. A commitment, that is to say, to a sociology which is concerned to challenge the naturalisation of power and to drag into the light everything which reified accounts of social relations, especially those provided by powerful actors, must perforce keep hidden. But that commitment is, by the same token, a commitment to using the tools of sociological enquiry and reflection in order to attend to the lived realities, the experiences and the self-understanding, of those who are socially dominated in various contexts and fields. This double-edged determination was evident in one of Fowler’s very earliest essays – co-authored with Barabara Littlewood and Ruth Madigan (1977) – which explored the unequal employment outcomes faced by children of migrant families living in Glasgow. Central to the authors’ account in this case was their insistence on contesting a public narrative, endorsed by both welfare officers and academic commentators at the time, which erased racism as a causal factor in respect of these inequalities and which attributed them instead to the supposed lack of skills or ‘unrealistic’ ambitions of these school-leavers themselves. Those same concerns have remained a persistent focus in much of Fowler’s subsequent research. A later study, for instance – co-authored with Fiona Wilson (2004) – investigated the experiences of women architects. Drawing on participants’ accounts of their working lives, this research disclosed a deep ‘discrepancy . . . between the egalitarian rhetoric of architecture and its backstage realities’ (p. 114) as expressed in an array of practices and tacit assumptions which had the effect of inhibiting women’s careers and re-inscribing masculine domination within the field. Here again, the research has a demystifying intent, acting to repudiate the casually optimistic assumption that gender inequalities are on their way to becoming a thing of the past in the neoliberal workplace thanks to its celebration of attributes such as ‘authenticity’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘creativity’.

A similar set of questions, if differently inflected, are central to Fowler’s first monograph – The Alienated Reader (1991; see also 1979) – in which she offers an extraordinarily rich account of the development and reception of the popular romance. On the one hand, and as might be expected, Fowler critically assesses the ways in which the romance, as a genre, has often aided a kind of forgetfulness in its own right, its resolutions and happy endings smoothing over those injuries of class and gender which can be glimpsed within the stories it tells. On the other hand, however, Fowler refuses a theoretical position which treats popular culture as a site of sheer conformity. To think as much, she makes clear, would require us to flatten out the multivocal nature of cultural texts and consign to silence all that emerges in the often complex responses of readers to those texts. In that later study of the obituary, Fowler sides with Walter Benjamin against the vision of consecrated culture as a settled patrimony, a taken-for-granted cultural horizon ‘divorced from any practical significance’ (2005, p. 58; see also 2007, pp. 30–33). By revealing how certain lives come to be remembered, by refusing to forget the structures and decisions implicated in the production of public acts of memorialisation, Fowler reveals that the apparently given, once-and-for-all quality of such memorials is, in fact, socially and historically made and is, in turn, a part of how social authority is re-made. In much the same way, in her earlier study, her meticulous exploration of the writing, reading and stories of romantic fiction allows Fowler to recover popular culture from the fixity of ahistorical judgements regarding it. Thus, she agrees with Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and others that popular culture must also be recognised as ‘an arena of struggles over clashing signs where, even within a single text, both subordinate and dominant class and gender contend for legitimacy’ (1991, p. 70).

In all of this, Fowler treads the same ‘precipitous path’ that she envisages Pierre Bourdieu having walked, avoiding the ‘abyss of mechanistic or fatalistic materialism on one side and that of voluntaristic individualism on the other’ (2007, p. 65). Hence one substantive theme running through her work has been a fascination with the ways in which artistic and literary practices are both determinate – emergent from within, and shaped by, specific historical contexts and social relations – and yet capable, also, of sustaining reflexive insight with respect to those relations. Working in a tradition of non-dogmatic or heterodox Marxism – a tradition in which, she argues, Bourdieu can also be reasonably located (see 2011; see also 2002) – Fowler never loses sight of the margin of disruptive freedom that attends aesthetic creativity. Yet, at the same time, she both rejects the populist romanticism for which cultural practices are only, ever, vehicles of resistance, and the unbridled relativism which wants to burn all questions of literary value or textual specificity to the ground (witness her subtle response to debates about the literary canon: 1987). All of this leaves to her cultural analyses a more nuanced and more painstaking route: the development of intricately historicised accounts of the situated realities of cultural struggle, allied with a deft attention to the complex ways in which art and literature both refract, and intervene within, social contradictions. If, at points, she has been critical of Bourdieu’s tendency to underplay the political potentiality of popular culture (as, for instance, in her account of the working-class British dramatists of the ‘New Wave’ who were able to ride state support in order to create space for their own ‘symbolic revolution’: 2012; see also 2017), she shares with him a sober recognition of the fact that conflicts within the cultural and political fields can end up in tragic misalignment (as she demonstrates, for instance, in her sensitive account of the ‘Satanic Verses affair’: 2000b).

As will be evident, one further, fundamental feature of Bridget Fowler’s work has been the way her ongoing conversation with the broad traditions of European and global social theory. There is in this work also a quality of radical remembering. ‘Remembering’, firstly, as an act of calling to mind that which might be consigned to the past. Refusing to reduce earlier thinkers to a kind of iconographic simplicity, Fowler has constantly sought to engage with those voices in their full and sometimes contradictory complexity. She does this, often, by returning to figures who are in danger of being filed away in some dusty theoretical pantheon, such as Lucien Goldmann (2015a). Elsewhere she offers an introduction to contemporary writers who were, or are, under-recognised in Anglophone sociology: e.g. Luc Boltanski (2014) or Gisèle Sapiro (2021b). In either case, she offers neither a pious defence of a theoretical canon, nor an intellectualist assessment of ideas in the abstract. Rather, working against a logic of consecration which silences as it sanctifies, she treats social theory as a historically determinate product in its own right. This insistence is powerfully evident, for instance, in her book-length study of Bourdieu’s cultural writings, which gives us not only a detailed account of the ‘historical genesis’ of that work – situating it within a longer history of cultural criticism – but also pre-empts recent discussions of the ‘post-colonial’ Bourdieu by tracing the roots of his later ideas back to the research he conducted in Algeria (1997: especially Chapters 1 and 4). Remembering in this context thus means ‘making present’; it means seeking to place the ideas in question at the point of engagement with social life, to explore the ways in which they can, or cannot, allow us a more critical purchase on the world. Almost always Fowler’s test for theoretical ideas is an explicative one: theory is not just a by-product of struggles within the social world, but a constitutive part of those struggles themselves, bound up with the effort to name and make reflexive sense of social reality.

There is, perhaps, a second sense in which we might describe this theoretical labour as entailing a form of ‘remembering’. We might see it – if the pun can be forgiven – as an effort towards re-membering, a bringing together of that which has been dismembered. In a context where social theory is all too frequently reduced to a set of discrete ideas, or treated as a tray of specialist instruments narrowly applicable to specific and limited operations, Fowler constantly approaches such ideas as part of a wider, dialogical engagement: ‘bouncing Bourdieu off Bloch’ (1991, p. 4) in her study of the romance; making Maurice Halbwachs an interlocuter of Walter Benjamin in her account of collective memory (2007: Chapter 1); contrasting Marx, Elias and Bourdieu on the question of social violence (2022); bringing Sylvia Walby, Anne Witz, Judith Butler and Terry Lovell to bear on an assessment of Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination (2003), etc. None of that should be taken to imply a view in which the goal is some ultimate theoretical synthesis or done-and-dusted ‘grand narrative’ of social life. Social theory, for Fowler, in common with other arenas of cultural production, entails disputation; it is not without its moments of necessary contestation. Yet she shares, with Bourdieu, a sense of ‘realist constructivism’ (2005, p. 65) in this regard: a recognition that whilst theoretical positions are always contextual, situated position-takings – are always, in that sense, ‘interested’ – it remains the case that some interpretations of theoretical texts and ideas are more tenable than others, that we are capable of adjudicating between more or less compelling expositions because the texts in question give us plausible grounds for such judgements. Perhaps the most marked example, in this regard, is her staunch defence of Pierre Bourdieu against those who would reduce him to a theorist of remorseless social reproduction. (See, for instance, her introduction to an earlier contribution in the Sociological Review Monograph series [2001], as well as crucial essays in Theory, Culture and Society [2006] and Theory and Society [2020].)

Les Back, in the preface to his interview with Bridget Fowler which opens this volume, describes the hundreds of index cards which are collected on the desk where she works, recording the detailed notes she has taken on books and articles, often revised and edited in the light of later reading or subsequent reflection. These cards are not the outcome of a merely solitary scholarship. As anyone will know, if they have had the joy of sitting next to Bridget as she makes scrupulous notes during a lecture or a seminar, many also record thoughts and ideas refined in the course of listening to and deliberating with others. Collectively they are a testament to what Les Back calls a lifetime of ‘sociological curiosity and diligence’. They are, by the same token, testament to a particular understanding of what it is that we do when we do sociology. Not even the most neoliberal university has been wholly conquered by the heteronomous logic of the market. Yet, as Robert Gibb discusses in the chapter which concludes this collection, the emergence of systems intended to quantify academic ‘productivity’, the imposition of internal and external auditing processes and obligatory target-setting, makes it easier to conceive of academic labour as a series of self-contained projects, with ‘success’ measured against predefined goals or indicators. The pressure bears, in other words, in a direction which brings academic labour closer to the characteristic experience of work in other sectors – broken-up, fragmented – and which allows a sense of ‘single use’ disposability to settle over the products of that labour. Those accumulated cards, in all of their materiality, are evidence of Bridget’s sustained commitment to a sociological practice which stands against these fissiparous pressures. To say as much does not mean surrendering to the ‘biographical illusion’: it is not the case that our only choice lies between neoliberal fragmentation, on the one hand, or reversion to the liberal humanist ideal of life as a coherent and self-contained project, on the other. Rather creative and critical freedom, as Bridget reminds us at the end of her study of the obituary (2007, pp. 249–250), can be that which we work to achieve with, and not against, others; a consequence of, rather than a contradiction of, our social being, sustained through shared commitment to – for instance – a critical sociology, understood as an open-ended project, a collective struggle against all of the forms of forgetfulness upon which social power depends. In her own deeply generous practice, Bridget has been a consistent model of just that lesson.

Another example: anyone fortunate enough to borrow a book from Bridget comes to know two things. Firstly, that the book itself will not fail to be of interest and, secondly, that the book’s original interest will be much enhanced by her own tiny, careful handwriting, pencilled on the margins of the page. Here we find out exactly what ‘BF’ thinks about the text: the questions that it has provoked, the agreements as much as the disagreements she may have with the writer, and the connections she makes to other writers. But, perhaps more importantly, we find the connections she makes to and for other readers. In this sense, the record of scholarly labour – the traces of the hours spent reading, reflecting, comparing, synthesising, integrating – opens outwards towards those symbolic gift-exchanges – of ideas, insights, problems – which Bridget has always insisted are a key part of how sociological work might most stubbornly resist the competitive, alienating rationality of the market. Here too, in other words, the labour of radical remembering is, at one and the same time, an orientation towards re-membering, towards bringing together, towards a sociological practice that is implicitly dialogical and sustained by an ethic of reciprocity.

This collection of new essays, then, is offered in that same spirit of reciprocity and dialogue. As Fowler herself notes, even in the course of dismantling the ‘biographical illusion’, Bourdieu never surrendered to a constructivism so extreme as to deny the significance of individual agency or the capacity of social actors to make choices (2007, p. 14). The lives that people make do matter, even if they rarely make them ‘just as they please’. In that respect, this collection of essays is shared as an act of symbolic recognition for what Bridget Fowler has made and made possible for others: in her commitment to paying critical attention to the socially overlooked and marginalised, in her determination to demystify the practices of social domination, and though her career-long encouragement of others in doing the same. At the same time, we take the view that the best and most fitting way of honouring that sociological labour is to share in it. Thus, the essays here are intended participate in, to continue, and to extend, some of the many critical conversations, theoretical debates and substantive discussions that Bridget has begun or to which she has made an enduring contribution.

***

Questions of sociological craft are explored in detail in the extended conversation between Bridget and Les Back which follows and is accompanied by photographs from her son, the artist Luke Fowler. The discussion provides a long overdue account of an extraordinary life – one that encompasses both welcome and unwelcome transformations in sociology, the university and the production of knowledge more widely (see also Fowler, 2021a). We find here that the structures of power charted by Bourdieu in Homo Academicus (1984b) were sharply and differently felt by Bridget in navigating the necessary, and sometimes treacherous, balancing act between domestic and academic work. In the acknowledgements for The Alienated Reader (1991, p. vii), Bridget thanks her husband, John Fowler, not only for his intellectual support but also for the fact that he ‘cheerfully accepted extra family obligations so that the work could be undertaken’. What comes across also is the extent to which, for Bridget, sociology has never been a narrowly professional pursuit, but entails, rather, a habit of the heart, the embodying of a critical openness and attentiveness which is instinctively brought to bear in all kinds of social settings and encounters. In that respect, her description of Bourdieu’s methodology – quoted in the chapter by Esperança Bielsa – might serve as apt description of her own vocational practice, one that works to establish:

. . . a freedom from the distracted gaze of normal social interchange and brings to it the seriousness of a ‘spiritual exercise’ . . . which sets up ordinary people’s speech for the same skilled attention elsewhere revealed in interpretive struggles to understand Shakespeare or the Bible. (Fowler, 1996, pp. 14–15)

Although Fowler is perhaps most widely recognised for her critical engagement with Bourdieu, her conversation with Les Back and her wider writing attest, alike, to a very broad and eclectic set of intellectual influences. Amongst these, her early encounter with the work of Raymond Williams is perhaps especially worth noting and, as Bridget describes, left an enduring mark on her thinking. It is in acknowledgement of this fact, then, that the title of this volume makes its own nod to Williams. The latter, of course, had his disagreements with Bourdieu, evident in the emphasis he placed on social reformation as opposed to social reproduction, and in his insistent curiosity about those alternative ways of being that might be disclosed in emergent and residual cultural forms. Bridget’s own chapter for this volume takes up that search for the new ways of seeing or envisioning the world which might be hidden in emergent cultural practices. This search for disruptive possibilities is pursued by other contributors here as well, but in Fowler’s discussion it is exemplified through a consideration of photography, a practice which Bourdieu and his colleagues argued in Photography (1965/1990) was doomed to remain a ‘middle brow art’, caught in the hinterland between a ‘noble’ and a ‘vulgar’ aesthetic. On this account, photography could offer its practitioners only a ‘substitute’ for the sense of cultural legitimacy afforded to more consecrated art forms. Decades later indeed Bourdieu still perceived photography as an activity ‘on the way to legitimation’ (1993, p. 131). In fact, as Fowler demonstrated in her study of the obituary, an artistic canon for photography had been long since established: ‘Bourdieu and his fellow writers failed to predict this degree of dynamism within artistic taste’ (2007, p. 205). Photographs now grace the walls of museums and galleries in major metropolitan centres and can command high prices on the art market. It is not simply the case that Bourdieu’s predictions on this score were awry, it is also, perhaps surprisingly, that he did not pay sufficiently close attention to the history and field of photography itself (as he had with literature, for example). For her part, Fowler refocuses attention on the work of the Russian Constructivists and the wider emergence of Workers’ Photography movements across Europe and in North America. In these movements industrial workers were, often for the first time, representing themselves and, importantly, controlled the visual means of production by which they did so. Thus, these new images of an industrial, everyday life ‘made-strange’ did not result from a modernist movement reserved only for artists from art schools. Instead, the emerging concept of the artist-engineer embraced worker and peasant correspondents as both producers and audiences. In reviewing the course by which this radical and popular photographic movement entered the realm of consecrated artistic and scholarly culture she shows the ways in which an emergent culture can indeed come to be absorbed and colonised by the dominant culture. But importantly, following Williams, she recognises that this is never a total incorporation.

The structured social relations at stake in the production of a consecrated symbolic culture are, as Bourdieu made clear, often disguised by ‘disinterested’ claims of ‘isolated genius’, ‘natural talent’ or ‘giftedness’. These claims, differently made across the distinct but related fields of poetry, dance, wine and art are central to a number of contributions to this collection, all of which take their cue from Fowler’s long-standing determination to historicise and contextualise ascriptions of aesthetic and cultural authority. In his article, for instance, Andrew Smith takes The Alienated Reader as his starting point, addressing the centrality of poetry’s ‘use value’ by asking: ‘What does it mean to lay claim to something like a poem; what kind of relationship is being asserted in such a claim?’ As the poet Tom Leonard has noted, even though some ‘working-class’ poetry has now been effectively brought into the canon:

Generation after generation has been ‘taught’ that a poem itself has to pass an exam before it can earn the right to be called a poem in the first place, but only those people who have passed exams about poems, can give a would-be poem the new exam necessary to decide whether it is a poem or not. (1995, p. 49)

Given this, it is hardly surprising that many of the readers whose accounts Smith considers articulated a resigned recognition of their own alienation from certain forms of poetry. Nevertheless, Smith aims to find in everyday reading practices the traces of a tacit resistance to the lived experience of capitalism. In the oral sharing and ‘gifting’ of treasured poems ‘learnt by heart’ there is something more than symbolic appropriation at play. Everyday relationships to poetry, he argues, may offer us an example of how it is possible to ‘envisage or experience a way of having something which does not depend on denying it to others’.

Lito Tsitsou, in her article, examines the necessary convergence of capitals located in the habitus of what comes to be recognised and exemplified as the ‘talented’ dancing body. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of artistic production alongside both historical and contemporary empirical material, Tsitsou critiques the notion of talent as an innate gift. Through her insightful interviews with an international range of participants from different genres of dance (ballet, theatrical and contemporary) she demonstrates that virtuoso physical performance is a product of specific histories of practice and theory, and that it acquires meaning and aesthetic value only within particular conditions of engagement. All of this comes to bear on dancers in ways that are necessarily embodied, and which are mediated by a series of evaluative judgements on the part of gatekeepers, choreographers and other more or less powerful actors in the institutions of dance. These judgements about the individual dancer – about their intuitiveness, creativity or receptiveness to rhythm – conceal deeply unequal social experiences which give some, much more than others, the likelihood of performing with that particular effortlessness or grace that comes to be commended as ‘talent’.

David Inglis and Anna-Mari Almila likewise echo Bridget’s example in their insistence on a deeply historicised account of a contemporary cultural phenomenon. In their article, the authors offer a tantalising outline of what a Bourdieusian sociology of wine production, distribution and consumption could look like. Wine, as a cultural object, would seem to offer rich ground for sociological enquiry, not least because of the extent to which it has come to mediate, symbolically, a powerful set of interwoven ideas about belonging, territory, authenticity and taste. Yet, as the authors show, even within cultural sociology there has been scant attention paid to wine making and wine drinking. Inglis and Almila suggest that while some ‘natural’, ‘technical’ and ‘scientific’ wine-related phenomena may be more conducive to a Latour-inspired analysis, this type of approach has limitations. The authors thus offer a longue durée account of wine production and its global expansion, showing deftly how its making and use continue to sustain racialised, classed and gendered social relations, and continue to be deployed in ways that inscribe a symbolic boundary between the cultivated and the uncultivated, the cultured and the uncultured. As Bourdieu noted, wine is supremely well-placed to act as just such a marker of symbolic distinction precisely because its production – as well as the acquisition of the knowledge which is taken to be necessary to its proper enjoyment – are the ‘product of two equally rare things: rigour and time’ (1984a, p. 53).

Alex Law takes up those same notions of taste and connoisseurship which have been no less central to the sometimes bitter artistic struggles for legitimacy and consecration. Law revisits New York’s mid-century artistic milieu, the context in which Abstract Expressionism came to be championed by the critic Clement Greenberg. Just as Fowler, in her study of obituaries, paid close attention to the hidden but symbolically pivotal role of the obituary editor – those who are most directly able to determine which lives are accorded a public remembrance – Law shines light on the art critic’s role. Whilst ostensibly occupying the position of ‘cultural intermediary’, in the same way that the obituary editor, ostensibly, acts as a mere ‘reporter’ of significant deaths, Law unveils the symbolically constitutive power of the critic, their capacity to inaugurate new languages of artistic reception and new aesthetic expectations. Drawing from Norbert Elias’s under-recognised theorisations of art and literature, he sets out the fascinating social conditions of possibility in which Greenberg emerged ‘from a position of artworld outsider to hegemonic dominance as the leading notable of modernist art criticism’. At the same time, Law demonstrates the extent to which Bourdieu and Elias shared a common concern to establish a relational sociology, albeit one that is approached in distinctive ways.

Greenberg might be considered, in Bourdieu’s terms, something of a ‘parvenu’ or upstart. In that sense he is the kind of figure whose potentially disruptive, even revolutionary, presence Fowler emphasised in the course of reasserting Bourdieu’s acknowledgement of the possibility of social change (Fowler, 2020). It is just this question, of the ‘parvenu’ as an agent for potential social and symbolic transformation, which is explored further in Tim Winzler’s account of the intellectual alignments and choices of German economics students, and of the ways in which they decide to accede to, or depart from, the reigning disciplinary orthodoxy in their field. Winzler examines the tensions resulting from exposure to different milieus and the work of self-adaption that may be necessary for these students to survive in a new social context. Through an analysis of detailed qualitative interviews, he shows that the lived experience of what he calls ‘structural misfit’ can lead towards a reconciliation with, or a symbolic break from, hegemonic understandings. Making sense of these divergent responses, he argues, requires an increasingly fine-grained analysis of the trajectories at play, as a key part of how an adequate empirical application of Bourdieu’s theory of social transformation might be established.

It bears repeating here that questions of the politics, theory and practice of social transformation have been central not only to Bridget’s writing and scholarship, but to her work in a broader sense, and not least in her capacity as a leading member of the Centre for the Study of Socialist Theory and Movements. The Centre has been pivotal in creating, and keeping open, the space for a broad and interdisciplinary conversation about resistance and social transformation, ¹ bringing together those working in a wide variety of disciplines as well as artists, film makers and social activists. Amongst the diverse list of contributors to the Centre’s activities Sheila Rowbotham is notable. Rowbotham’s Hidden from History (1973) was more than an archaeological endeavour to recover the lives of those women typically overlooked by a masculinist documentary culture. She offered an active feminist intervention in, and disruption to, historical studies more widely; a field that her husband, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, later shamefacedly admitted had been largely blind to women’s experiences (2002, p. 94). Bridget’s own unflinching commitment to both feminist and socialist scholarship and politics is reflected in the later articles in this volume.

In his contribution Kieran Durkin recalls to attention the work of Raya Dunayevskaya, whose writings on gender and anti-racist struggles, as they are connected to a wider anti-capitalist movement, have also been largely neglected within Socialist and Marxist traditions. Focusing specifically on Dunayevskaya’s ‘ontology of struggle’ in its various dimensions, Durkin draws out her innovative interpretation of Marx and outlines the ways in which she worked to establish a new and revitalised account of social transformation. In particular, Durkin positions Dunayevskaya as a critical figure within a distinctively humanist version of Marxism, one which, on the one hand, refuses to treat anti-colonial, feminist or Black struggle as mere annexes to the politics of class, but which, on the other hand, refuses the cul-de-sac of a thorough-going relativism. Amongst other things, Durkin recovers Dunayevskaya’s striking argument that the implicitly humanist perspective in Marx’s writing is most fully evident not, as has been widely argued, in his early social and economic manuscripts, but rather in the heart of Capital itself.

Many of these same questions about the politics of intersectionality and the framing of representation in political movements are concretely explored in Maud Anne Bracke’s article, which centres some of the voices and movements of resistance which have been marginalised in the standard narrative of Western second wave feminism. Through assiduous consideration of primary and archival sources she reframes the battles for reproductive rights in twentieth-century France – including the liberalisation of contraception in 1967 and the legalisation of abortion in 1975 – showing how the political struggles of migrant women in France, and of those living in France’s Départements d’Outre-Mer, showed up the partiality of the claims made by ‘mainstream’ feminist movements in the country. She demonstrates how the pro-natalist ideologies of post-war French nationalism had, as their unspoken counterpart, practices aimed at controlling and limiting reproduction in the colonial context, honed on racialising assumptions about the supposed fecundity of colonised peoples. It is in this context of ‘colonial difference’ that the supposedly universal nature of Western feminist claims came to be challenged by those ‘at the margins of reproductive citizenship’, those who recognised or had direct experience of the forms of violence and control integral to the operation of colonial power, and who insisted on the need to attend to the racially differentialised ways in which that power was asserted over women’s choices and bodies.

C. W. Mills argued that ‘The master task of the historian is to keep the historical record straight, but that is indeed a deceptively simple statement of aim’ (1959/1967, p. 144). If the apparent simplicity of that task is deceptive it is so because, as Mills went on to insist, the historian is necessarily also a translator, not just of facts and documents but also as a consequence of bringing their perspectives and critical understanding into the very framework in which the historical record is built. And the task of the translator, as Walter Benjamin well knew, is then equally deceptive in its aims. For Benjamin, translation necessarily went beyond the transmission of information and entailed instead, the kinship of language, thus marking a new stage in the continued life of the original (1923/1992). In her chapter Esperança Bielsa examines this often occluded labour of the translator within sociology using, as her initial example, Fowler’s own translation of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘Comprendre’, which appeared originally at the end of the collectively authored book the La Misère du Monde (Bourdieu et al., 1993). Whilst translation is all too often considered a marginal or transparent undertaking, it is and should be recognised, Bielsa argues, as a creative and constitutive practice in its own right, one that is alert to the forms of language it employs and which is inextricably linked to both interpretation and theoretical consideration. By exploring Fowler’s translation itself, in parallel to her own introduction as it appeared in Theory, Culture and Society (1996), Bielsa demonstrates that the act or art of translation can provide ‘an original and unexpected point of view that sheds light on little considered sociological matters and relations which usually escape from critical consideration’. Just as Bourdieu – and, indeed, Fowler – emphasise the critical reflexivity which is central to sociological enquiry, Bielsa calls for a conception of translation as a practice no less reflexively attentive to, and explicit about, its own creative and interpretive implications. In this sense, her article shares with Fowler’s account of the obituary editor, and Law’s chapter on the art critic, a focus on the often unspoken, or taken-for-granted, political and creative consequences of work all too easily dismissed as a matter of mere ‘transmission’ or cultural intermediation.

The final contribution to the volume also reflects on what is at stake in undertaking academic labour and, in this sense, returns the collection to some of those questions raised in the conversation with which it opens. Robert Gibb takes account of the dual aspects of the Festschrift itself as a form which is both retrospective and prospective in its orientation, which asks us to take stock but also calls on us to raise our eyes. Gibb weaves together a consideration of three of Fowler’s major studies with a wider set of critical reflections, taking up the prospective challenge of the Festschrift as ‘a call to work’. In this context, and in the face of the various structural and institutional processes that threaten to erode the spaces of critical enquiry, Gibb reminds us of the possibility and necessity of re-learning hope in the contemporary university, and of the continued, disruptive resources available in a commitment to a grounded, utopian sensibility which is expressed, not in the longing for some other-worldly transcendence, but in the persistent search for what Shelley called ‘the future in the present’ (1840, p. 7). In pursuing this kind of work, in seeking to sustain our capacity to re-learn hope, we can be stimulated and enriched by paying our own skilled attention to Fowler’s practice. As Gibb emphasises:

Fowler is attentive not only to processes of social reproduction but . . . to examples of freedom, resistance and the imagination of alternatives in popular culture and elsewhere. Alongside its many other qualities, then, Fowler’s work can be regarded as a valuable contribution to ‘re-learning hope’, one of the most important challenges facing us today in and beyond the contemporary university.

Indeed, as Fowler herself has noted, whatever their other differences, both Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu shared this commitment to the possibility of a ‘reasoned utopia’ (2000a), a commitment which Bridget, in her ongoing work and wider engagements, continues to embody.