Steve Fenton [1942- 15 May 2025] - Tribute

It is an honourable task to write this tribute to my long-term collaborator and friend, Professor Steve Fenton. Steve was a leading figure in the sociology of ethnicity, racism, and nationalism, and will be remembered for his combination of conceptual clarity, empirical commitment, and down-to-earth approach. On a personal note, working with Steve was both demanding in the best sense and rewarding. He was rigorous and taught precision in argument and language, whilst also encouraging humility in making claims. He valued clear reasoning and evidence over what he might regard as conceptual jargon or unsubstantiated assertions! Yet he was always collegial and generous.

Steve’s contribution lay in insisting, and demonstrating, that ethnic classifications and identities be understood with due regard to shared material circumstances and positions within the economic order. Whilst he was not alone in critiquing the reification of ethnic groups, and in emphasising ethnicity as a social process rather than fixed category, his distinctive influence was to connect these processes of ethnicisation to class and economic structures. Methodologically, he was pluralist: he worked with survey data, historical-comparative analysis, and case studies, while also advocating for qualitative explorations that connected ethnic and national identities with broader material structures and lived realities. In his writings on ethnicity, Steve was centrally concerned with the implications of a “class-free sociology” (Carter and Fenton, 2010:1) and the neglect of the economic dimension: the material conditions that shape lived experience. Growing up in Oldham, Greater Manchester, and later becoming an academic at an elite university meant Steve never lost sight of his working-class roots, and this educational journey I am sure informed his enduring insistence that class experience be taken seriously in sociological analysis. I remember him once telling me a story, one of many, that illustrates this: when he was accepted to a local grammar school, a fellow peer came to congratulate him and shake his hand, only for Steve to feel a sharp pain as a hidden nail pierced his hand. This incident, while surely physically painful, would no doubt have conveyed to him the symbolic, hidden, pains of class within his working-class environment. I am deeply grateful to have shared some part in his intellectual journey.

Steve Fenton studied at the University of Hull (BA), McMaster University (MA), and Duke University (PhD). After teaching in the United States, he established his academic career at the University of Bristol, where he rose to head of department and Professor of Sociology and remained actively associated as Emeritus Professor for more than a decade following retirement. Bristol became both his institutional home and the platform from which he built collaborative networks. He played a key role in developing Bristol as a centre of expertise in ethnicity studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century, helping shape the agenda of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship and, within it, the major research grant, the Leverhulme Programme on Migration and Citizenship (2004–2009). Within that programme, he began to focus systematically upon thinking about and researching English and British national identity and nationalism, contributing to what might be regarded as a sociology of the white English ethnic majority. We worked together on the “nation and class in England” project, which between 2004 and 2006 involved a large number of qualitative interviews with white British people in different local research sites, in Bristol and a small town nearby. Throughout his career, he continued to sustain strong global intellectual connections and his writings and teaching on global ethnicities (Fenton 2003, 2004) drew extensively on Malaysia, Fiji, and particularly Hawaii, where he held visiting positions and returned regularly from the late 1970s to the 2000s. These engagements continually informed and deepened his comparative and global approach to ethnicity. In 2010, he was granted a Visiting Professorship at Bangor University.

With a sustained focus on ethnicity/race and class, Steve’s work stretched across multiple domains, His publication of note was a contribution to classical sociological theory, Durkheim and Modern Sociology (1984), in which he drew particular attention to Durkheim’s somewhat sporadic writings on Race. In the chapter “Race and Society: Primitive and Modern,” Steve revealed that Durkheim saw the social sciences as, on one hand, contributing to the “intellectual dismantling of biological race science” (1984: 114) whilst at the same time viewing Race as “destined to disappear in advanced societies” (1984: 139). Durkheim thus formed part of a classical paradigm that conceptualised race in biological terms, effectively removing it from sociological consideration (Fenton, 1984: 5). This early interrogation anticipated Steve's later insistence that sociological thought must reintroduce race and ethnicity, not as natural or essential categories, but as social classifications embedded in material structures and institutional processes (Fenton, 2006).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Steve’s focus turned decisively to ethnicity, race, and health, contributing to major projects exploring the relationships between ethnicity and mental illness, as well as inequalities in cardiovascular health (Hine et al., 1995). These studies exemplified his enduring interest in how social classifications intersect with lived realities. This stance shaped his empirical practice: he was attentive to heterogeneity within minority populations and cautious about over-emphasising uniformity or fixedness (Fenton et al., 1995). He believed that a central task of sociology was to interrogate and demystify the categories it employs, demonstrating how they operate in practice (Fenton and Charsley 2000). This approach was always accompanied by an insistence on connecting such categories to class and economic structures, reflecting his enduring sociological ontology. These interests were bound together by a distinctive and rigorous sociological sensibility, sceptical of reified concepts and consistently attentive to how identities intersect with structures of power, class, inequality, and history. He maintained that identity and ethnicity must be understood through the structural realities of labour markets, housing, and health — the lived material conditions of existence — while also recognising how class is shaped by the politics of ethnicity and racialisation.

Two of his major publications, Ethnicity: Racism, Class and Culture (Fenton, 1999) and Ethnicity (Fenton, 2003, 2nd ed. 2010), established Steve as one of the UK’s most prominent sociologists of ethnicity. Within these, he argued forcefully that ethnicity must be understood contextually. To examine ethnicity is to examine “the contexts under which it is situationally relevant” (2010: 2). At this time of writing, sociology was shifting from a “class-exclusive” race relations tradition to the postmodern “cultural turn” and, in this context, Steve cautioned against neglecting class and economic structures and, with others, sought a balance between culture and economy, calling for a reintegration of class analysis (Fenton and Bradley, 2002). Both class and ethnicity gain different meanings through their associations with economic and cultural structures, a concern that underpinned his work across multiple domains — from studies of ethnicity and health to comparative and global understandings of ethnic conflict and the politics of ethnicity, and later, the analysis of national identity in England. Across these fields, he consistently interrogated categories of analysis while maintaining a dual emphasis on culture and economy.

Alongside work on immigrant health, ethnic labour markets, and global ethnicities, his later research centred on English national identity and the ethnic majority. Within the Leverhulme Programme on Migration and Citizenship, and through our collaborations Steve sought to carve out a sociology of the white English ethnic majority, exploring how political devolution to Scotland and Wales, British multiculturalism, and debates over European integration rendered the English majority more visible as a sociological subject. The ethnic majority must, he argued, be understood empirically, as a category whose salience is contingent on politicisation, economic structures, and lived experience. In his own and in our joint writings, he identified at least three trajectories of majoritarian engagement with nationhood: indifference to national identity, nationalist resentment (ressentiment), and cosmopolitan orientations. Such sentiments could be understood and shown through discursive inflection, to take form with reference in part to “class-themes” (for example industry, welfare, deservingness) and could to a certain extent be seen as more or less prevalent across sections of both middle and working class. In turn, the prevalence of more resentful nationalist orientations amongst older working- and middle-class individuals could be understood to reflect a “trajectory” of class locations, and of social classes rising and declining (Fenton 2012: 465). Indifference was most often associated with younger individuals—both middle- and working-class—whose talk about being English and British was aloof, certainly taken for granted, but lacking the sort of emotional intensity or enthusiasm that might be associated with nationalism or national pride (Fenton, 2007). Resentment and expressive grievance around “not being allowed to be English” were certainly more prevalent among those facing economic insecurity or declining local opportunities. Yet middle-class people too, both retirees and those highly educated or in professional or managerial occupations, could produce strong attachments to the nation that intertwined feelings of national loss with material change. Cosmopolitan orientations, meanwhile, reflected engagement with global networks, travel, education, or work, and were often found among younger and socially mobile individuals who embraced more inclusive, outward-looking identities while still expressing attachment to multicultural Britishness and negotiating their Englishness. These trajectories were not fixed but intersected dynamically with class, local context, and life experience.

Steve’s work consistently valued the perspectives of ordinary people and everyday experience, treating these neither as homogeneous nor as mere echoes of political and official discourse. Instead, he emphasised resonances between lived lives and political nationalist narratives, and the points of convergence between those making nationalist appeals and their audiences. In qualitative interviews, rhetorical invocations of national decline – for example, loss of empire or industry – often entwined with examples of everyday decline – litter on the streets, people not caring or working hard anymore. Personal experiences were drawn on to exemplify “political correctness” or “health and safety” as evidence of a people over-governed. These references were sometimes embedded within wider narratives about material concerns, social encounters, or places and spaces in which people live, work, and travel. Respondents also made links to things they have read in newspapers or watched on television. These are all part of the lived contexts in which nation-relevant statements are made. As with his long commitment to “ethnicity”, Steve’s approach to national identity and nationalism was to link these to changes in capitalist societies and class structures, and to their grounding in material experience and ordinary ways of thinking (Fenton, 2011; Mann and Fenton, 2017).

Arguably Steve’s scholarship on nation and class, empirically grounded between 2004 and 2006, anticipated the later political developments of Brexit and the electoral rise of UKIP and Reform UK as populist parties, which have been closely linked to the politicisation of white English identities. Steve’s insights highlight the contingent relationship between nationalist politics and ordinary national sentiments, showing that these sentiments may or may not align neatly with party politics or sovereigntist logics. From today’s vantage point, majoritarian sentiments such as “we’re not allowed to be English” at the start of the twenty-first century, can be understood as early articulations—or, in Raymond Williams’ (1961) terms, “structures of feeling”—affective undercurrents that only later became politically consequential. If so, it affirms the enduring need for the kind of close, contextual empirical research on ethnic and national identities that Steve consistently advocated.