The Background

During the period when I was involved in managing the closure of the School for Independent Study and writing The Work of Pierre Bourdieu (1989–92) my developing relations with Bourdieu and the team of staff in the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, Paris, compensated intellectually for my institutional uprooting at UEL. Through the 1990s, I attended some of Bourdieu's seminars at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and some of his lectures at the Collège de France. I was invited to some of the research seminars and conferences which he organized. When I was made a Reader in the School for Independent Study in 1988, I had established a research group – the Group for Research into Access and Student Programmes (GRASP) – which supported pedagogical research. The group continued beyond the closure of the school. It was in Paris that I presented the findings of a project that I supervised, which compared the process of teaching economics between UEL's Economics and Business Studies degrees. This pursued my interest in the extent to which the nature of the institutionalisation of a ‘discipline’ constitutes substantive cognitive difference. I pursued a similar line of enquiry when I next supervised a project which examined the correlation between the kinds of ‘history’ taught in institutions and the social position of those institutions within the hierarchy of the UK HE system. I was exploring, in other words, the extent to which dominant institutions transmitted a perception of state membership to their students, whereas dominated institutions cultivated a subaltern ethos, or, significantly, whether some curricula conveyed a presumption of governing authority while others communicated a sense of excluded supplication.

While pursuing these ‘Bourdieusian’ research projects, I maintained my contribution to the work of UEL's European Unit by editing and contributing to its European Up-date bulletin. In this context, I extended my interest in the social conditions of institutional and curricular difference by projecting a comparison between the post-1968 development of the Paris 8 University which I visited at St Denis and the post-1968 development of NELP/PEL/UEL.