Re-learning hope: On alienation,theory and the ‘death’ of universities

Abstract

Informed by Irving Horowitz’s view of the Festschrift, this article adopts both a retrospective and a prospective approach to the work of the sociologist Bridget Fowler. On the one hand, it assesses some of the key characteristics and contributions of her three single-authored books: The Alienated Reader: Women and Popular Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century (1991), Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory (1997) and The Obituary as Collective Memory (2007). On the other, it takes cues from these books to develop a more forward-looking type of reflection that connects some recent sociological and anthropological research on ‘the neoliberal university’ to writing about hope and utopia. The article emphasises that Fowler is attentive not only to processes of social reproduction but also to what John Holloway terms ‘cracks in the texture of domination’, that is, to examples of freedom, resistance and the imagination of alternatives in popular culture and elsewhere. At the same time, it shows how thinking about utopia and hope can contribute to debates about ‘the alienated academic’ and the ‘death’ of universities. The article concludes that Fowler’s sociology is, alongside its many other qualities, a valuable contribution to ‘re-learning hope’, arguably one of the most important challenges facing us today.

‘In miserable times it is easier to talk of misery than it is to talk of hope’, observes John Holloway near the beginning of his recent book Hope in Hopeless Times (2022, p. 15). Holloway describes the latter as ‘an homage’ (2022, p. 257) to Ernst Bloch, the author of the classic three-volume work The Principle of Hope (Bloch, 1986). Against the background of the Second World War, Bloch had argued for the importance of ‘learning hope’ (1986, p. 3). Referring directly to this statement, Holloway asserts that ‘it is time to re-learn hope’ (2022, p. 16), and he proceeds to explore how we might try to ‘think hope’ in our own ‘miserable times’.

As the present article will show, Bloch’s study of hope has also been a key influence on the work of Bridget Fowler, the scholar to whom this Festschrift monograph is devoted. It can in fact be argued, more generally, that hope and contributions to a Festschrift share a common feature. In Communicating Ideas: The Politics of Scholarly Publishing (1991), Irving Louis Horowitz devotes a short, lively chapter to discussing the nature of the Festschrift. One of the key characteristics of Festschriften, he claims, is that:

. . . they are not just retrospective, but prospective. That is to say the Festschrift is a Beruf, a call to further work, effort, and energy, a call to the improvement of learning, of a discipline, a science, an artistic vision, or an intellectual position. (1991, p. 237)

Similarly, Holloway (2022, p. 10) contends that thinking hope involves looking back as well as forward. For him, this means understanding, as a crucial part of the attempt to construct alternatives, how capitalism has brought humanity to the brink of destruction.

In line with Horowitz’s account of the Festschrift, I adopt a dual retrospective and prospective approach to Fowler’s work in what follows, focusing on her three single-authored books: The Alienated Reader: Women and Popular Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century (1991), Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory (1997) and The Obituary as Collective Memory (2007). On the one hand, I examine the contributions these three texts have made to the sociology of culture, the analysis of class and gender divisions, and social theory. On the other, I take an isolated comment she makes about universities in the final paragraph of her study of obituaries as a cue for a more forward-looking type of reflection that connects recent work on ‘the alienated academic’ and the ‘death’ of universities to writing on hope and utopia.

These retrospective and prospective aspects are developed together in each of the three main sections of the chapter. In the first, I begin by discussing Fowler’s analysis of twentieth-century romance fiction in her first book, highlighting how she draws on, among other sources, Bloch’s work on alienation, hope and utopia. I then explore how the same concepts have been used in some thought-provoking writing about academic labour and about sociology as a discipline. The next section focuses on Fowler’s uses of and contributions to social theory, paying particular attention to how she engages critically in her second book with the writing of the French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. I connect this to ongoing debates about the threats to innovative, imaginative scholarship (of the kind Fowler has pursued) posed by research evaluations in UK universities. In the final section, I consider Fowler’s study of obituaries, before exploring how perspectives on hope and utopia might be brought into ongoing debates about the ‘crisis’ or ‘death’ of universities. The article concludes by identifying some features common to all three of Fowler’s books and by arguing that her work offers valuable resources to help us ‘re-learn hope’ in and beyond the university.

Alienation, utopia and hope

The Alienated Reader: Women and Popular Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century (1991), Bridget Fowler’s first book, includes the following sentences in its opening paragraph:

Romantic fiction is so stigmatised at present that it has received very little attention. However, if archaeologists can discover valuable materials for reconstructing entire societies from the contents of prehistoric middens, even the most formulaic romance may reveal important clues to both human needs and the existing social relations within which they are expressed. (1991, p. 1)

This pinpoints what were to become two recurring features of Fowler’s work, as my discussion of her subsequent books on Bourdieu’s cultural theory and obituaries in later sections of this article will help to show more fully. On the one hand, Fowler directs her attention to a topic that previous sociologists and other social scientists have tended either to ignore completely or to consider of limited significance. On the other, she proceeds like an archaeologist to carefully excavate what she finds and, having done so, to analyse what it reveals about central aspects of social life.

As Fowler has recently explained, she developed a research interest in women’s magazines and popular romantic fiction in the mid-1960s (2021, p. 267). This culminated in The Alienated Reader, which is an impressive piece of scholarship in both its breadth and depth of analysis. It begins with an illuminating historical account of the origins, forms and structure of the popular romance, identifying the ‘decisive material conditions’ for the emergence of the latter as agrarian capitalism and the patriarchal mode of domestic production (1991, p. 19). After outlining recent changes in publishing, and reviewing different theoretical approaches to literature and ideology, Fowler then devotes the central part of the book to the detailed study of a wide range of twentieth-century romance texts: 1930s weekly magazines mainly read by working-class women; the novels of Catherine Cookson; and best-selling romances from the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, she focuses on the ‘cultural reception’ of popular romantic literature, presenting and analysing material from interviews she conducted with 115 women from the west of Scotland, and assessing the value of Bourdieu’s writing on cultural consumption.

Fowler was to pursue her interest in forms of popular culture in later work, as I indicate in the next section. In The Alienated Reader, however, she is particularly concerned to emphasise ‘the variability of popular literature, both in terms of the politics and the aesthetic quality of the texts’ (1991, p. 21). Her careful analysis of historical sources and twentieth-century magazines and texts demonstrates this clearly, and she goes on to criticise Bourdieu for failing to take sufficient account of ‘the heterogeneous character of mass culture’ (1991, p. 171). In a similar vein, she insists that:

. . . popular literary genres cannot be reduced to the presentation of underlying conflicts between capital and labour, despite the importance of the latter. I argue throughout this book that such novels and stories are concerned centrally with how women should live and the character of the relationships between public and private, existence and potential. (1991, p. 70)

Careful attention to the relations between class and gender divisions is a key feature of Fowler’s interpretation of both specific romance texts and her interviews with women readers; as I note below, it is also a hallmark of her subsequent books.

The considerable popularity of the romances of a novelist like Catherine Cookson is illustrated by statistics cited by Fowler relating to adult fiction library loans in the 1980s (1991, p. 73). How can the appeal such novels have for large numbers of women readers be explained? To answer this question, Fowler turns to Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope (1986), claiming that:

Bloch has clarified more lucidly than any other writer the nature of ‘escapist’ literature. Moreover, he was also amongst the first Marxists to insist that kitsch as well as more authentic popular culture was worth studying in that it revealed ‘the dream of the world’. Bloch argued that the most ideological magazine story must nevertheless be viewed as possessing a utopian core which constituted in part the pleasure of the text. (1991, p. 32)

It is this approach to literature in terms of ideology and utopia that Fowler finds so helpful in making sense of the nature and appeal of popular romance novels. Briefly stated, her central argument is that ‘such fictions depict both the alienation experienced as a result of dependency and the supersession of such alienation’ (1991, p. 8). In other words, they portray individual women struggling against adverse circumstances, frequently poverty and/or patriarchal domination. By the end of the story, their lives have been radically transformed for the better (through marriage to an upper-class man, for example, in the case of one subgenre). For Fowler, the popularity of the romance lies in this utopian element, the way it meets a demand on the part of certain readers for what she refers to as ‘magical fictions’ (1991, p. 1). The latter provide ‘wish fulfilment’ through the presentation of ‘an idealised vision of an unalienated, yet hierarchical society in which the normal laws of bourgeois society are miraculously suspended’ (1991, p. 175). Women readers nevertheless respond to popular romances in a range of different ways, as Fowler brings out very clearly when discussing her interview material (1991, pp. 115–171).

Consistent with Horowitz’s view of a Festschrift that I mentioned in the introduction, I would like to follow these retrospective comments on The Alienated Reader with an attempt now to begin to sketch a more prospective line of argument, one that I will develop more fully over the rest of the article. (For more discussion of Fowler’s first book, see Andrew Smith’s article in the present volume.) The particular direction I propose to take was initially suggested by a brief reference in the final paragraph of Fowler’s study of obituaries to the ‘university in ruins’ and to the effects of the commercialisation of knowledge and utilitarianism on scholarly autonomy (2007, p. 250). I was then struck by the similarity between the title of Fowler’s first book and that of Richard Hall’s (2018) analysis of recent changes in higher education, The Alienated Academic: The Struggle for Autonomy Inside the University. Putting the two together, I became interested in exploring how Bloch’s writing about alienation, hope and utopia, and later work influenced by it, might provide resources for what Holloway describes as the crucial task of ‘re-learning hope’, but here focused on the specific context of the contemporary university.

In The Alienated Academic, Hall applies to academic life in the Global North Marx’s analysis of production under capital and of the estrangement and alienation this involves for the worker. Of particular concern to Hall are ‘how academic labour is insinuated in the circuits of capitalist production, and whether those who labour in academia are able to imagine that another world is possible’ (2018, p. 4). It is the second of these that interests me too as a subject for ‘prospective’ thinking. Hall identifies various possibilities for autonomous action by academics within wider local and transnational movements against capitalist social relations, insisting that alienation will only be overcome through the abolition of academic labour in its current form and ‘the liberation of socialised skills, practices and knowledge from inside the University’ (2018, p. 25). For my own part, I would like to explore here how concepts of utopia and hope can be used to discuss some recent sociological and anthropological research on universities.

As Ruth Levitas (2010) has shown, H. G. Wells argued in the early years of the twentieth century that sociologists in Britain should in fact be centrally concerned with utopias. Indeed, he went so far as to claim that ‘the creation of utopias – and their exhaustive criticism – is the proper and distinctive method of sociology’ (Wells, quoted in Levitas, 2010, p. 530). If Wells had been appointed to the first Chair of Sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE), Levitas suggests, utopia would not have been marginalised as a topic in the way it was in the subsequent development of the discipline in this country. Concluding that Wells was ‘substantially right’, she makes the case that contemporary sociologists should contribute much more actively to the imagination of alternative futures in order to help address the range of crises facing societies today (see Dawson, 2016 for a similar argument). Defining utopia as ‘the expression of the desire for a better way of being or of living’ (2010, p. 540), she develops an approach – utopia as method – that I will use in the final section of this article with reference to the ‘crisis’ or ‘death’ of universities.

Not surprisingly, given her interest in utopia, Levitas (1990) has also examined how Bloch addressed the subject in The Principle of Hope. As she emphasises, Bloch made a crucial distinction between two kinds of utopia: abstract and concrete. The former involves wishful thinking about a different future in which an individual person’s situation is transformed rather than society as a whole. The popular romances analysed by Fowler exemplify this kind of utopian thinking, which can be described as ‘compensatory’ (Levitas, 1990, p. 15). In contrast, concrete utopia is ‘anticipatory’, in that it is oriented to a real possible future rather than a fantasy world. For Bloch, only concrete utopia embodied what he considered to be ‘the essential utopian function, that of simultaneously anticipating and affecting the future’ (1990, p. 15). It is concrete rather than abstract utopia, in his view, that is the effective vehicle for hope.

Described recently as ‘a curiously neglected notion’ (Eagleton, 2019, p. xi), hope – and how to think about it – is the subject of John Holloway’s latest book, as I noted in the introduction. One of Holloway’s main arguments is that:

. . . we must see hope not as the positive hope-for, but as the negative hope-against-and-beyond. It is not just a question of constructing alternatives but of understanding that these alternatives are inevitably alternatives-against, negations rather than differences. (2022, p. 37)

It is this perspective on hope that I will adopt while pursuing my ‘prospective’ argument in the next two sections of this article, focusing on examples of sociological and anthropological research about neoliberal ‘reforms’ of universities in Britain (and elsewhere). My main aim is to consider the extent to which this work expresses, implicitly or explicitly, a ‘negative hope-against-and-beyond’ the ongoing process of corporatisation, and in so doing provides ways of re-learning hope.

Theory, research evaluations and collective reproduction

Although Ernst Bloch’s study of hope played a key role in shaping the analysis of romantic fiction Fowler presented in her first book, she has recently written that five sociologists exerted a significant influence on her intellectual development more generally: John Rex, Hermínio Martins, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Lovell (2021, p. 264). (Fowler also reflects on these influences in her conversation with Les Back in the present volume.) There is not space here, unfortunately, to discuss the contributions of all five figures, so I will focus on the ‘fruitful dialogue’ (2021, p. 268) she entered into with Bourdieu. Evidence of this is present throughout her work, but it is pursued in a particularly sustained way in her second book: Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations (1997).

Before exploring Fowler’s critical engagement with Bourdieu’s sociology in a little more detail, however, it is relevant to mention briefly one of the crucial lessons she claims to have learned from Rex. As a student at the University of Leeds in the early 1960s, she followed an introductory sociological course taught by Rex, in which he emphasised ‘the importance of theory construction’ (2021, p. 265). Fowler clearly took this to heart, as she spends considerable time in each of her books painstakingly composing a theoretical framework suited to the topic. In so doing, she displays an impressive knowledge of classical social theory, returning frequently to Marx, in particular, but also to Weber (see 2021, p. 274 for her view of ‘a persistent tension’ between the two). She also draws on the work of a wide range of contemporary theorists, not only sociologists but also historians and philosophers (see 1991, pp. 21–48; 1997, pp. 13–42; 2007, pp. 25–40, 59–80).

Nevertheless, the sociology and anthropology of Bourdieu have been a particularly strong influence on Fowler’s writing over the past three decades. As she herself has written: ‘Bourdieu was to become a great teacher, from whose works I never cease to gain more with each rereading’ (2021, p. 269). Fowler was in fact one of the first sociologists writing in English to provide a book-length exposition and evaluation of Bourdieu’s cultural theory (1997), although an interest in the latter is already apparent in her earlier study of romance fiction (1991, pp. 115–119). Bourdieu’s theories and his own analysis of obituaries also decisively shaped Fowler’s subsequent research on the subject (2007, pp. 59–80). She has argued that ‘Bourdieu’s approach [to the sociology of culture] is the most comprehensive and sophisticated available at present’ (1997, p. 1) and also described his ‘logic of practice’ as ‘perhaps the most powerful synthesis of contemporary social theory’ (2007, p. 59). It is clear from comments such as these how valuable, in Fowler’s view, are Bourdieu’s contributions to the understanding of culture and society.

I will focus here, however, on Fowler’s main criticisms of Bourdieu in Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations (1997), as these form an effective bridge between the retrospective and prospective aspects of my argument. Fowler makes a persuasive case in the book that ‘what is missing from all [of Bourdieu’s] work is a detailed feel for the nature of popular culture within urban modernity’ (1997, p. 160). In the process, she challenges what she describes as Bourdieu’s ‘particularly disparaging’ conception of popular art (1997, p. 65). For Fowler, this is related to a more general problem, namely that Bourdieu’s insightful analysis of symbolic domination downplays actual and potential forms of resistance and change. Thus, she claims that:

Bourdieu has consistently underemphasised working-class freedom (versus constraint) and the culturally creative energies that can come from underneath, as opposed to the many permutations of psychological domination. (1997, p. 4)

Fowler concludes that ‘Bourdieu’s disenchantment is too radical’ (1997, p. 177) and that he under-estimates ‘the potential for art and literature to be critical and to imagine new alternatives’ (1997, p. 11). In the second part of the book, Fowler undertakes ‘critical investigations’ into popular and middlebrow literature, popular art and Impressionism, indicating how Bourdieu’s cultural theory might be developed so to avoid what she has shown to be its weaknesses. Crucially, the latter also include a lack of attention to gender divisions and to the mechanisms whereby women artists are marginalised in the cultural field (1997, pp. 127–131, 138–157). Fowler presents early formulations of these criticisms in her first book (see e.g. 1991, pp. 115–119) and in her third book she updates her assessment in light of Bourdieu’s subsequent work (2007, pp. 59–80). (For further discussion of Fowler’s engagement with Bourdieu’s sociology, see the articles by Winzler and Bielsa in the present volume.)

How does this brief discussion of Fowler’s careful reading and assessment of Bourdieu’s cultural theory relate to the more general themes of hope and utopia that I introduced in the previous section? In Crack Capitalism, John Holloway argues that:

. . . theory makes little sense unless it is understood as part of the desperate effort to find a way out, to create cracks that defy the apparently unstoppable advance of capital, of the walls that are pushing us to our destruction. (2010, p. 8)

As I’ve just indicated, this is exactly what, among other things, Fowler’s theoretical work does: it identifies existing and potential ‘cracks’ in processes of symbolic domination, showing how literature and art in particular can have ‘an emancipatory consequence’ (1997, p. 179). Citing Bloch and Ricoeur, she suggests for example that ‘artists are still potentially the prophets of late bourgeois society . . . giving shape to those anticipations of the future that are based on a feasible utopia’ (1997, p. 178). In developing arguments such as this one, I would contend, Fowler makes a valuable contribution to ‘a critical theory of hope’ (Dinerstein, 2019).

Like Fowler’s other two books, Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory is an original, innovative piece of scholarship that testifies to its author’s erudition and intellectual curiosity. Imaginative work of this kind, however, may be becoming increasingly less common in contemporary UK universities. One of the latest studies that raises the strong possibility this is indeed the case is Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra’s The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences (2022). As Pardo-Guerra (2022, pp. 27–52) explains, academics at British public universities have, since 1986, periodically had their work assessed by panels of disciplinary peers using metrics and other quantified measures of ‘quality’, the most recent exercise being the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF). The conclusion Pardo-Guerra draws from his analysis of a combination of relevant quantitative and qualitative evidence is striking: ‘the effects of quantification . . . are likely pernicious: scientists at the UK’s leading institutions are, over time, conducting less risky, less innovative work’ (2022, p. 11). Using computational techniques, he shows that the British social sciences have become ‘more homogeneous’, thematically and conceptually, over the period during which successive research evaluations have been implemented (2022, p. 111).

According to Pardo-Guerra, it is not quantification itself that is the underlying problem but rather the particular practices through which it has been implemented. He describes this as ‘a hopeful point’ because it highlights the fact that academics have choices between different ways of thinking and acting (2022, p. 191). More specifically, he suggests that:

We can continue to follow a path on which we adhere to a scholarly vocation tied to hierarchies that individuate our work as if the product of isolated effort, rewarding and punishing on the basis of rather arbitrary definitions of value, or we can veer onto a radically different path where, by recognizing academic labour as multidimensional and necessarily diverse, we foster inclusive solidarities, reduce inequalities, and encourage adventuresome thought. (2022, pp. 191–192)

Pardo-Guerra’s call on academics to rethink their vocation is an important intervention. His contention that ‘[o]ur unwillingness to reclaim imagination is our collective sin’ (2022, p. 191) suggests another way of ‘re-learning hope’ in the contemporary university, and I will return to it in the next section.

Despite evidence from Pardo-Guerra’s study and many others about the highly problematic nature and effects of UK research evaluation exercises such as the REF, the next one has already been announced, to cover the period from 2021 to 2027 (UKRI, 2023). This will not have come as a surprise, though, to anyone who had also read Derek Sayer’s earlier short book Rank Hypocrisies: The Insult of the REF (2015). In addition to refuting the key claim made by proponents of the REF that it is ‘a process of expert peer review’, Sayer argues persuasively that:

. . . the British academic establishment’s tenacity in defending the REF, despite its palpable inadequacies as a process of peer review of research quality, is explained by self-interest. The REF may be dubious in the extreme as a means of evaluating the quality of individuals’ research and publications, but it works admirably as a disciplinary tool for university management [and also] provides an excellent vehicle for the legitimation and replication of the country’s established academic elites. (2015, p. 4)

What this highlights is the fact that any project to reimagine the scholarly vocation around ‘inclusive solidarities’, as Pardo-Guerra proposes, will have to challenge forms of elite power, both within individual institutions and within academic disciplines such as sociology. It will have to acknowledge that ‘[l]ike all forms of state regulation the REF is an apparatus of empowerment (of some) and subordination (of others)’ (Sayer, 2015, p. 92) and, consequently, to find more effective ways of opposing the REF’s continued existence.

This brings us back again to the question of hope. Writing in 2004, Keith Hart condemned what he described as ‘a failure of collective reproduction which now sees a few established academics enjoying much improved privileges, while the majority of young anthropologists languish in casual labour and unemployment’ (2004, p. 242). The situation at the time was of course similar for sociologists. Precarity and casualisation remain pressing concerns in British universities today, but the argument I’ve developed above emphasises an additional point. Pardo-Guerra’s (2022) research effectively shows that the situation inherited by younger sociologists (and anthropologists) who do manage to find employment now in UK higher education institutions is one that includes ‘economies of celebrity’ (p. 42), ‘epistemic policing’ (p. 105) and a tendency towards ‘disciplinary conformity’ (p. 109), all of which are fostered by research evaluations implemented by university managers and more senior academics. Just as Fowler identified ‘cracks’ in processes of symbolic domination within the artistic and literary fields, as I’ve shown above, there is an urgent need to find ‘resources of hope’ too in relation to the contemporary university. What these might be is something I will explore in the next section.

Obituaries and the ‘death’ of universities

Thirty years ago, Tony Walter (1992, p. 264) claimed that British sociology, with the exception of the subfield of medical sociology, had been ‘somewhat late on the scene’ when it came to the study of death and dying. Reviewing in turn a series of other branches of the discipline, including theory, gender and ethnicity, as well as teaching, he drew attention to a surprising lack of interest in the topic of mortality. He then considered different reasons why this might be the case, and noted, more positively, that there were ‘indications of a recent renaissance of interest’ in death on the part of British sociologists (1992, p. 264). Looking forward, he posed the question of whether this should lead to the development of a specialist area – the sociology of death and dying – or instead to a much greater concern with human mortality within general sociology (1992, pp. 289–290). A recent call for ‘the mainstreaming of the study of death’ within sociology (Puri, 2021, p. 638) shows that this question is still being actively debated today.

The Obituary as Collective Memory (Fowler, 2007) can be viewed as further evidence of a growing interest in death and dying within British sociology, the early signs of which Walter had identified in the article mentioned above. Impressively wide-ranging, the book includes detailed theoretical, historical and qualitative studies of the obituary; a fascinating account of the ‘microworld’ of obituary editors, based on interviews Fowler conducted with nine editors working for newspapers based in the UK, US and France; and an in-depth sociological analysis of a large sample of newspaper obituaries of politicians, writers, artists, sportspeople and trade unionists published between 1999 and 2006. Fowler proposes a classification of obituaries into four different genres – positive, negative, tragic and ironic (2007, pp. 17–21) – and also a distinction between three different forms of collective memory: dominant memory, popular memory and counter-memory (2007, pp. 27–35). These notions are subsequently used to highlight similarities and differences between the various newspaper obituaries in the sample, as emerges particularly clearly in the chapter on politicians (2007, pp. 159–180). For its theoretical framework, the book draws primarily on Bourdieu’s theory of practice, which Fowler argues is ‘a particularly fruitful resource’ (2007, pp. 80) for studying obituaries, but key concepts from other theorists, notably Halbwachs (pp. 27–30) and Ricoeur (pp. 59, 74–77), are also accorded a prominent place.

Over and above the intrinsic value of its detailed analysis of a varied sample of newspaper obituaries, Fowler’s third book demonstrates convincingly what research into death and dying can contribute to general sociology. As she points out on the very first page, ‘obituaries pages, if gleaned studiously and addressed imaginatively, provide an untapped source of sociological information’ (2007, p. xi). The reason is that an obituary usually contains factual material about a person’s social origins, educational background and occupation, not to mention their gender, ethnicity and civil status. In Fowler’s own words, obituaries are ‘socially illuminating’ in the sense that studying ‘whom we choose to remember reveals the underlying social determinants for the celebration of individual distinction or symbolic capital’ (2007, p. 129). Both her quantitative analysis (with Esperanza Bielsa) of 883 newspaper obituaries and her qualitative ‘discourse analysis’ of obituaries for members of specific fields show how information found in obituaries can help to throw light on key social processes, notably the reproduction of elites and patterns of social mobility.

The research Fowler conducted for the book also highlighted ‘a noticeable discrepancy’ (2007, p. 16) between, on the one hand, claims made by editors she interviewed about a recent ‘revolution’ in obituary writing and, on the other, the results of her quantitative analysis of a large sample of newspaper obituaries. According to the editors, the period since the 1980s had witnessed a process of democratisation of obituaries: a much more diverse range of people, in terms notably of social background, gender and occupation, was now the subject of obituaries than had previously been the case. The editors stated that what mattered to them above all was that the person was ‘interesting’ and had made a distinctive and influential contribution to their particular field (2007, pp. 107–109). Fowler’s sample of nearly 900 obituaries published in six different newspapers, however, provides evidence of only a very limited degree of ‘openness’. Analysing these obituaries using Bourdieu’s occupational class categories, Fowler found that a staggering 95% of them were devoted to members of the dominant class, only 20% were portraits of women, and that of the British citizens included 72% had attended public schools (2007, pp. 129–154). Acknowledging that some democratisation of obituaries has occurred over recent years, Fowler nevertheless concludes that ‘the collective memory of the dominants is still uppermost’ (2007, pp. 154, 156). She ends by calling for ‘a re-examination of the public sphere’ so that it is much more inclusive of popular memory and counter-memory (2007, p. 248).

On the final page of The Obituary as Collective Memory, as I noted in the first section of this article, there is a brief reference to universities. Although Fowler’s interests in the book lie elsewhere, it is striking how frequently the equivalent of obituaries for the public university have been published in recent years. Universities have regularly been described as ‘in ruins’ (e.g. Readings, 1996), ‘in crisis’ (e.g. Burawoy, 2011; Hart, 2004) or, if not already dead then at least dying (e.g. Caillé & Chanial, 2009; Evans, 2004; Fleming, 2021; Graeber, 2014; Wright & Shore, 2017). As the intellectual historian Stefan Collini (2017, pp. 61–88) has argued, accounts like these can be understood as the latest contributions to a literary genre on ‘the idea of the university’ that first emerged over a century ago. Making a persuasive case that they fit into a long-standing pattern of calls to defend an institution perceived to be under threat, he suggests that an awareness of the history of debates about the university is important for ‘the antidote it provides to ahistorical alarmism and rampant Cassandrism’ (2017, p. 33). Nevertheless, he admits that while he does not fully share the view of some that it is ‘now too late’ to reverse ongoing changes to British universities, there is ‘a good deal of empirical evidence’ supporting such a perspective and it is not easy to find grounds for a less pessimistic outlook (2017, p. 8).

This leads us directly back to the start of Holloway’s recent book, where he states: ‘That is hope’s question, hope’s anguish. Are we too late?’ (2022, p. 4). Is it still possible somehow to undo the neoliberal ‘reforms’ that have been applied to universities over the past four decades, or has the corporatisation of higher education already been so far-reaching that it can no longer be stopped? One of the most wide-ranging and thought-provoking recent attempts to consider whether the modern university has a future is Peter Fleming’s Dark Academia: How Universities Die (2021). Describing the book as ‘an exercise in uni-pessimism’ (2021, p. 10, italics in original), Fleming declares that:

It is time to ask the old Kantian question of whether hope itself is admissible when it comes to one of our most revered establishments. For all intents and purposes, the bad guys have won. And if so, perhaps it’s time to consider beginning again and escape the impenetrable darkness that’s eclipsing the academy today. (2021, pp. 10–11)

The evidence he presents of the highly damaging effects of marketisation, competitive individualism and increasingly authoritarian forms of managerialism on both university staff and students makes it difficult not to share his gloomy assessment of the institution’s prospects.

Other critics of the commercialisation of higher education have, however, taken a slightly different view, one that is arguably more hopeful. Les Back, for example, has written that:

. . . another kind of university is possible and [we can] resolve to act in a way to make it so. Apocalyptic portrayals of the demise of the university as a place to think are cold comfort for they offer few clues as to how one might act as an academic writer and teacher. (2016, pp. 10–11)

Here Back highlights a crucial question for academics concerned that their institutions may be, if not already dead, then at least subject to a process of decline that risks becoming terminal: what, if anything, can they do about it?

To be fair to Fleming, he does consider, in the final chapter of Dark Academia, several strategies that might be adopted in response to the ongoing corporatisation of universities (2021, pp. 158–165). Moreover, one of his previous books is ‘a post-capitalist survival guide’ (2018) that offers ‘tips’ intended to help people navigate life under ‘neoliberal capitalism’; many of these are clearly relevant to those working in higher education. It is also the case, of course, that many university staff in the UK and elsewhere are involved in long-running campaigns to improve their pay, working conditions and pensions. In addition to all these, however, where might other ‘clues’ (to borrow Back’s term) be found that could help academics who are opposed to recent ‘reforms’ of universities resist fatalism, despair and resignation?

One such place, in my view, is the work on hope and utopia discussed in the first section of this article. More specifically, I want to suggest that using what Levitas (2010) has referred to as ‘utopia as method’ or the ‘Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (IROS)’ could be a way for sociologists, anthropologists and other academics to re-learn hope. Levitas argues that ‘in thinking about [utopia] as a method rather than a goal, we can think more effectively about alternative futures’ (2010, p. 542, italics in original). The utopian method she proposes has three ‘modes’. The first she describes as ‘analytical’ or ‘archaeological’: this involves bringing to light the utopian project or ‘model of the good society’ that underpins a given political discourse, programme or policy so that it can be subjected more easily to public examination and criticism. The second mode is ‘constructive’ or ‘architectural’: it consists in ‘a holistic modelling of alternatives’, an imaginary reconstitution of society that expresses the desire for a better life. Levitas refers to the third mode as ‘ontological’, on the grounds that ‘the imagination of society otherwise involves imagining ourselves otherwise’, including different ways of being in the world and relating to others (see 2010, pp. 543–545).

Although not presented in these precise terms, examples of all three modes of utopia as method are easy to find in sociological and anthropological research about the changes British universities have undergone over the past four decades. The equivalent of the analytical or archaeological mode is the one that has been used most extensively, as illustrated by the many studies that now exist of ‘audit cultures’ (Strathern, 2000), research evaluations (Pardo-Guerra, 2022: Sayer, 2015), forms of governmentality and managerialism (Fleming, 2021; Shore & Wright, 1999) and academic labour (Hall, 2018; Ivancheva & Garvey, 2022). This work has shown (and usually also criticised) how recent ‘reforms’ of universities have been underpinned by models of subjectivity, social relations, institutions and society associated with neoliberal capitalism.

According to Levitas, the second mode of the utopian method, the imagining of alternatives, has tended to be much less prominent in British sociology because it conflicts with a dominant tradition within the discipline emphasising scientificity and rejecting normativity (2010, pp. 538, 543). Similarly, Keith Hart regretted 25 years ago the absence within anthropology of ‘a concern for alternative futures’ and of ‘a forward-looking vision for society’ (1998, pp. 21, 22). As far as thinking about higher education is concerned, however, the past decade or so has witnessed many important attempts to construct alternatives to the corporate university. Raewyn Connell, for example, has suggested key ‘criteria for a good university’ and, inspired by science-fiction writers such as Stanislaw Lem and Ursula Le Guin, also imagined different model universities of the future (2019, pp. 171–192). Other alternatives to ‘dark academia’ are presented in work on ‘decolonising universities’ (e.g. Bhambra et al., 2018; Jansen, 2019), academic labour (e.g. Hall, 2018; Kristensen et al., 2023), ‘slow’ scholarship (e.g. Back, 2016; Berg & Seeber, 2016) and the ‘undercommons’ (Harney & Moten, 2013), as well as in recent writing about the nature of education (e.g. Ingold, 2018; Meyerhoff, 2019). Manifestos such as the one launched by the Reclaiming Our University movement at the University of Aberdeen in 2016, and others originating in different countries across the world (for some examples see Connell, 2019, pp. 177–179), can be viewed too as instances of an architectural mode of utopia as method with respect to universities.

How, finally, have academics tried to imagine ‘otherwise’ their own selves, their sense of being in the world and their relationships with others, i.e. to use the third – ontological – mode of utopian thinking distinguished by Levitas? The sources I have just cited as examples of the archaeological and architectural modes applied to universities usually also analyse the effects of recent ‘reforms’ on how academics think about themselves and their colleagues, before often going on to suggest alternative ways of being and acting. Thus, Back calls on academics ‘to trade envy for admiration’, claiming that ‘[i]ntellectual generosity can be a survival strategy and prophylactic against the corrosive aspects of intellectual cruelty that have been instigated by the audit culture’ (2016, p. 115). As I mentioned in the previous section, Pardo-Guerra for his part emphasises that academics have choices, and he encourages them to reflect on the benefits of ‘choosing solidarity over the politics of prestige’ (2022, p. 6) and ‘making care and the lives of others more precious to our professional lives than sheer productivity’ (2022, p. 191). He concludes that these could be key elements of an ‘alternative vocational vision’ (2022, p. 194) to the one promoted by research evaluations such as the REF.

Interpreted in this way, as illustrations of different modes of the utopian method, the sociological and anthropological studies of universities mentioned above provide, in my view, valuable ‘resources of hope’. They do not involve the kind of wishful thinking Bloch viewed as characteristic of abstract utopia, but instead are effectively expressions of concrete utopia. In Holloway’s terms, they can be viewed as representing ‘negative hope-against-and-beyond’; refusing to accept the ‘miserable times’ brought about by recent ‘reforms’, they set out to construct alternatives which are defined against the current reality of the corporate university.

It could be objected that the chances of success of such utopian projects relating specifically to the university are very much dependent on an Imaginary Reconstitution of Society as a whole, one that is part of a wider struggle ‘against-and-beyond’ capitalism and the state. This seems to be the implication of the following remarks by Fleming at the end of Dark Academia:

The corporate university is essentially a symptom of powerful constellations lying beyond its own remit. Managers, scholars and students still have agency, of course. But the institutional field is overdetermined and formidably delimited by the state first, the market and economic matrix second and the corporate industrial-complex third, which increasingly define the macro-rules of the game we must play. (Fleming, 2021, p. 165, italics in original)

Fleming makes a powerful argument here, one that might appear to lead inevitably away from hope and back towards pessimism. However, as Sara Ahmed points out in her recent book on complaints, power and institutional change:

We cannot always perceive the weakening of structures until they collapse. When structures begin to collapse, the impact of past efforts becomes tangible. Complaints can participate in the weakening of structures without that impact being tangible. Impact is a slow inheritance. (Ahmed, 2021, p. 310)

I would argue that the same is potentially true with respect to using the different modes of utopia as method – archaeological, architectural and ontological – to help construct alternatives to the corporate university. Although the effects of these are not always immediately visible, they can nevertheless be viewed as part of what Holloway describes as:

. . . the proliferation of refusals and other-doings that open up the bounds of possibility and create the bases here and now for a different way of living, a different way of relating to one another. A multiplication of cracks in the texture of domination, a proliferation of spaces, moments, areas of activity where we say ‘No, here we will not follow the rule of money, here we shall do what we collectively consider necessary or desirable’. (Holloway, 2022, p. 9)

The risks associated with undertaking actions of this kind in contemporary universities should not of course be under-estimated, given the prevalence of institutional violence (Ahmed, 2021, pp. 179–219) and increasingly authoritarian forms of management (Fleming, 2021, pp. 50–65). Nevertheless, using the utopian method as part of a wider struggle against-and-beyond the corporate university can still be a vehicle for re-learning hope.

Conclusion

In a passage on Bourdieu in The Obituary as Collective Memory, Fowler notes perceptively that ‘his sociology often [took] the apparently peripheral, such as photography, and reveal[ed] its centrality’ (2007, p. 59). As I have aimed to demonstrate in this article, the same can be said of Fowler’s own sociology. Her first and third books explored cultural forms that had previously been neglected by sociologists – the popular romance and obituaries, respectively – and showed how studying them could yield important insights into human needs, social relations, status classifications and processes of social reproduction and change. In her second book, she focused on Bourdieu’s writing on culture, an aspect of his work that had until that point not attracted significant attention in Anglo-American scholarship. The result was a wide-ranging and insightful examination of Bourdieu’s cultural theory that brought out its impressive explanatory power while at the same time indicating how it might be further developed so as to avoid several key weaknesses.

There are a number of other features that Fowler’s three single-authored books also share. These have all been mentioned in the course of the preceding discussion, but it is worth briefly re-stating them together here. The most obvious, perhaps, is a strong commitment to the careful construction of theory, informed by extensive reading of both classical and contemporary social theory. The crucial importance Fowler attaches to historical sociology also emerges clearly in each of the three texts, as reflected notably in her tracing of the origins of the modern romance back to feudalism, her thorough investigation of Manet and early Impressionism, and her ‘sociogenesis’ of the obituary. Two additional characteristics of Fowler’s work, as emphasised above, are its attention to relations between class and gender divisions and to forms of popular culture. Although, strangely, the subject of only a passing comment in her recently published ‘autoanalysis’ (Fowler, 2021), a further crucial component of Fowler’s sociology, I have suggested, is its grounding in the nuanced interpretation of rich empirical material taken from sensitively conducted interviews with women readers of literature and obituary editors.

As well as providing a retrospective assessment of some of the key characteristics and contributions of Fowler’s three books, I have also attempted in the preceding pages to take a more prospective approach to her work. Specifically, I have argued that it directs us to possible ways of re-learning hope today, notably in the context of ongoing debates about the ‘death’ of universities. In The Alienated Reader, Fowler drew on Bloch’s study of hope and utopias to help her analyse the nature of romance fiction and its appeal to certain readers. Taking my cue from this, I have explored here how other scholarship influenced by Bloch, particularly that of Levitas, can be used to identify different modes of the utopian method in recent sociological and anthropological research on universities. In addition, I have emphasised that Fowler is attentive not only to processes of social reproduction but also to what Holloway terms ‘cracks in the texture of domination’, that is, 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 ‘thinking hope’, one of the most important challenges facing us today in and beyond the contemporary university.