The current free speech debate suppresses free speech, causing a potent 'moral crisis' narrative that deliberately jams the machinery of common communication with false binaries. On university campuses, chosen for attack as they are reputedly the site of left wing extremism, students are accused of being either snowflakes or proto terrorists.  Government intentions to intervene with a free speech champion will damage even more the possibility of discussing, debating and understanding difficult issues.  Universities need to actively support open debate and consciously use a variety of different approaches (liberal, guarded liberal, libertarian, no platforming).  Universities also need to consider the intrusion of social media into campus disputes and create limits to protect staff, students and the possibility of open debate. We need to create our own free speech debates that displace these false narratives to address the urgent issues at stake: race, gender, economic decline and environmental catastrophe. An example for this is my work with Westminster to increase contact between evidence based academic research and policy makers. We work on urgent issues: FOI, universal basic income, Myanmar, COVID19 etc. This is partly intervention in democracy, partly impact, partly lobbying, partly matching up MPs, peers, academics and students to create opportunities for communication; influencing the corridors of power is, I believe, the sort of ‘free speech’ we want.

The talk will be based upon the new book, Freedom of speech in universities: Islam, charities and counterterrorism (A. Scott-Baumann and S. Perfect), London: Routledge, 2021.

Biography

Professor Dr. Alison Frances Scott-Baumann, BA, BSc, MSc, C.Psychol., PhD, AsFBPS

I am Professor of Society and Belief and Associate Director of Research (Impact and Engagement) at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), University of London. I and my research team recently completed a three year AHRC grant to analyse representations of Islam and Muslims on university campuses (2015-18). This complements my work on free speech on campus and pathways to securitisation. The project required rigorous ethical arrangements, as Muslim students felt themselves to be a suspected subgroup on campus. I was commended by ESRC for the care I took to anonymize respondents. In early 2019 I was commissioned by the government to work with Muslim community groups and improve young Muslims’ access into higher education. I speak on BBC Radio 4, Radio 5 live and Radio Wales, and have written for Guardian e.g. most recently https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/17/free-speech-champion-universities-campus?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other and several higher education blogs. I apply modern philosophy (Ricoeurian) to social justice issues. I gave evidence in 2017 to the Joint Committee on Human Rights about free speech on campus and in 2019 I was invited to No. 10 Downing Street to brief advisors on my team’s research findings. I work with UK government to improve higher education for minority voices and I am also conducting a deep mapping of curricula and extracurricular provision for Jewish and Israeli studies in the Bloomsbury area universities, to establish excellence, gaps and room for improvement.   

The seminar will be run as a Zoom webinar. Please click the link below to join the webinar:  

https://bristol-ac-uk.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_FFh-BY1ETmKcvXWoNMkTQw