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I’ve known Carol, as a colleague and a very dear friend, for twenty years. I first met her when I started working in the Department of Sociology, but I knew of her work many years before coming to Warwick through our shared interest in gender and work. Indeed, in 1986 we both had chapters published in a collection of articles from Feminist Review titled Waged Work: A reader.

When I arrived at Warwick, Carol was writing her highly-influential book – Bodies at Work – and was trying to get it finished before her study leave ended and the Autumn term began. I remember her talking about the cover of the book with me and, I’m sure, other colleagues. She wanted an image that illustrated the issues she was addressing, it was a photograph of a man in overalls high above The Empire State building in New York balancing seemingly on nothing and stretching out into thin air. Her insistence on the importance of this image relates to one of her interests which was using visual evidence in sociology – for Carol, images not only made bodies at work visible, but they also contributed to sociological analysis.

Work was absolutely central to Carol’s life, not only as a topic she researched and taught but also as part of her identity; she did not separate work and life and what she called her ‘eclectic approach to the sociology of work’ was shaped by her own and others’ experiences of work in many different environments including home, hospital and train. As a result she did not, in her words, ‘expect either personal life or work’ to ‘remain in their proper boxes’. I’d like to quote from a piece she published in 2009 where she talks about working in Bradford and travelling between Bradford and London by train with a very young Tim.

‘To begin with I travelled from Bradford to London with baby carrier in hand, usually placing it on the table British Rail Intercity trains then provided, and forcing the rush hour business travellers to allow babies and their needs (including breast-feeding) into their world. (I quickly learned to choose a table where women, rather than men, were seated, preferably middle aged.) I particularly remember one occasion later on, after my son and I had moved to London, when I scribbled furiously during the whole journey from London. On arrival in Leeds the man sitting opposite on the Intercity train commented that I had already done my day’s work. And I, while bemused by this everyday deployment of the concept of ‘the working day’, also recognized that having been up with my son at 5am, and fed and played with him before leaving home, this gentleman’s idea of the working day and mine were rather different.’ (Wolkowitz, 2009:854-855).

This different – and gendered - view of ‘the working day’ and what counted as work informed her research and teaching and her interest in both homeworking and body work. Both these topics challenge the boundaries between paid and unpaid work, an approach that she shared with other feminists and which informs her highly influential research on how bodies and embodiment are integral to work, however it is defined. Her book – Bodies at Work - was ground breaking, bringing ideas developed within feminist theory into conversation with the study of work; Carol was always very modest about her own contribution but you only have to read articles and books which have been published subsequently on these topics to know just how much her ideas have shaped the field. Wolkowitz, 2006, is always cited.

Carol’s research on body work grew out of her MA teaching: in the 1990s she was teaching a course on Gender and Employment to which she added ‘a second term on the body/work relation’ (Wolkowitz, 2009:853). This teaching and her enriching discussions with students eventually led to her writing Bodies at Work and, subsequently, generated seminar series, edited books and special issues of journals on the topic. This interest also led to her explorations of Michel Foucault’s work and her creating an under-graduate course on Sexualities in Society. Needless to say this course was immensely popular.

Carol was a dedicated and inspirational teacher. She and a colleague, Phil Mizen, developed an innovative course on Visual Sociology, and he remembers being in awe of her and listening with rapt attention to her lectures. She was the type of academic who is increasingly rare; she didn’t ‘blow her own trumpet’ as we’re all encouraged to do these days. On the contrary, and despite her brilliance and her encyclopaedic knowledge, she was always low key and never pushy. She was hugely generous with her time and ideas and always wanted her students to shine. This did not mean that she was not critical, she was as I know from supervising PhD students with her, but at the same time she provided massive support and encouragement through her very detailed comments on whatever work students submitted. At MA level her teaching was student led, she encouraged independent mini-research projects and facilitated students’ development of their confidence and their sociological imaginations. I witnessed this teaching at first hand as Carol very generously invited me to teach her MA module on gender and work with her when I arrived in the department and I, as well as the students, learnt a lot from working so closely with her.

Carol was involved in the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at Warwick from its inception in 1993 and continued this involvement into retirement. Post-retirement she was also a founder member of the Centre for the Study of Employment and Work at Warwick and its first director, and she continued supervising PhD students for several years. In fact in many ways she didn’t really retire, continuing to research and write and review papers submitted to academic journals. One of the things she was still working on when she died was some research she and I did on therapy dog visits to universities. Carol was particularly interested in animal touch – a form of body work - and how we could understand what the dogs were doing as work. It wasn’t only work she was involved in, she valued department social events and always came to department Christmas lunches; the only one she missed was the one that we had this year – 2025 – a Christmas lunch in the middle of February – something only sociologists could do! Carol died on March 4^th, 2025; her quiet presence and intellectual curiosity are sorely missed by all of us who were privileged enough to work with her and to count her as a friend.

Feminist Review (eds) (1986) Waged Work: A Reader, London: Virago,

Wolkowitz, C (2006) Bodies at Work, London: Sage.

Wolkowitz, C (2009) ‘Challenging Boundaries: An Autobiographical Perspective on the Sociology of Work’, Sociology, 43(5): 846–860.