Those of us who knew Steve, or knew of him, will miss him, his contribution to our ways of thinking about the world, and the sometimes gruff but always jovial friendship he shared with us. I’d like to reflect upon Steve’s professional career and the fundamental and lasting contribution he made to his field of ethnicity, race, and nationalism. Steve wasn’t one to trumpet these contributions or achievements, but I’m not encumbered by such inhibitions.
Steve arrived in Bristol in 1969 with interests in communities and individualism from a political economy perspective. Around this time, the newly established Department of Sociology became home to the Social Science Research Council’s first Research Unit on Race Relations under the stewardship of Michael Banton. The Research Unit grew in prominence nationally, and by the late 1990s, Steve, now Head of Department, led the way in helping to consolidate Bristol’s reputation as an important centre for research on race and ethnicity, largely on the strength of his own growing reputation in the field. He played a key role in securing the strategic appointments of both Tariq Modood and Gregor McLennan in the late 1990s and, together with Rohit Barot, laid the foundations for what would later become the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship (formally established in 1999 with Tariq as Director and Steve as Deputy Director).
Steve pursued these interests without straying too far from his foundational commitment to political economy. For him, race, ethnicity and nation were phenomena whose social significance needed to be understood in relation to, and not independently of, other structural variables. Steve distinguished himself as a theorist of ethnicity, race and nationalism by grounding them in the social contexts that lent them their meaning and significance. Although most of these contexts were in England, Steve also drew on his interests in and research from Hawaii, the United States, Malaysia, and, closer to home, Wales and Scotland. These and other cases highlighted the historical and geographical contingency of race and ethnicity. Steve was also committed to drawing out the policy implications of this work (through, for example, his collaboration with the Commission for Racial Equality) and raising awareness of ethnic inequalities in these and other policy domains.
Steve wasn’t keen, however, to draw attention to himself. The big ideas were always there, but they competed with – indeed, were built upon – the nitty gritty of the empirical data he uncovered and the theory-building analyses he undertook. He wasn’t motivated by being the scholar known for this, that or the other thing; he was motivated by helping us understand the world around us better.
We owe a debt of gratitude to Steve for supplying the intellectual foundations and empirical building blocks for the pressing questions, political developments and scholarly work that continue to preoccupy so many of us today. As the field evolves, we would do well to return now and again to some of these foundational insights that Steve shared with us, and which will endure despite changing empirical contexts and academic fashions.
Those who knew Steve well will also appreciate the leading role he played for many years at the Bristol University Football Club (BUAFC), as the acknowledged Club Chairman. He was an outstanding coach who led a BUAFC team to the Universities Athletic Union finals in 1976. Steve was well aware of the importance of sport in bringing people together and forging lifelong friendships, and while students came and went, Steve was the glue who held everything together – always available to give his support. He was co-founder of the Bristol Union Football Club, for those who had graduated from Bristol, still lived in the area and wanted to continue playing. Later, he was one of the founding organisers of the BUAFC Reunion in 1985, an occasion which has continued every two years, to this day.
Steve could be boisterously friendly and avuncular one minute and piercingly focused and serious the next. He would robustly announce his presence with ‘Auntie Mary had a canary up the leg of her drawers', ‘Power to the People!’, or any other (in-)appropriate song or limerick that caught his fancy. He wasn’t one to widdle away the hours in the pub, but somehow he still had the demeanour of someone who was more comfortable there than in the staid halls of academia. He got on effortlessly with his research participants, whose frustrations he understood, disillusionment he listened to, and passion for sport he shared. He was never aloof or condescending, but full of empathy, compassion, understanding, and always good humour.
It’s in these regards that Steve touched the lives of so many and remains an enduring – and endearing – influence on them, not just for his contribution to knowledge, but for his qualities as a human being. He is already missed.*
* I would like to thank Matt Birch, Ruth Levitas, Gregor McLennan, Tariq Modood, and Tom Osborne for sharing their own reminiscences and commenting on earlier drafts. A longer and more academic version of this text appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies (DOI 10.1080/01419870.2025.2584657).