The post-Brexit ‘free speech movement’, nation-building and emergency politics in UK Higher Education

• In Event: Comparative Higher Education and the Populist Turn: Crises, Conflict, Coloniality and Capitalism in Turkish, British and Hungarian Universities

Proposal

This presentation asks how higher education (HE) in the United Kingdom (UK) is increasingly a ‘testing ground’ for wider political projects (Dillabough, 2021). We are concerned with the ‘free speech movement’ within the post-Brexit context, and the populist and nationalist turn experienced worldwide (see Riley, 2020; Smith 2020). We interpret the rallying cry for ‘free speech’ as a paradoxical project through which the British government and its supporters seek to uphold a white, male and elitist understanding of the legitimate British nation after Brexit. This paper therefore makes the case that current UK government rhetoric around equity in HE - ‘widening participation’ discourses - rings hollow, and that a more equitable world is not achievable while HE remains captured by a conservative nation-building agenda.

Theoretically, we attune our analysis to the coloniality (Quijano, 2000) which underpins UK politics, drawing upon ideas of ‘postcolonial melancholy’ (Gilroy, 2004a), ‘imperial nostalgia’ (Tinsley, 2020) and ‘narcissistic nationalism’ (Koegler et al., 2020). We conceptualise the Brexit moment and its political ramifications as a (re)institution of ‘emergency politics’ (Honig, 2009) as the primary modus operandi of the UK government. We follow Dillabough (2021) in her extension of Honig’s (2009) concept into HE, viewing HE as a key site where emergency politics and the violence of the modern nation-state play out.

This focus on post-Brexit imperial longing and Honigian emergency politics allows us to understand the free speech movement as a key space where conservative political actors seek to legitimise certain kinds of political subjects and colonial objects delegitimising others. To make this case, we have investigated two datasets. Firstly, we have analysed all opinion pieces focused on ‘free speech in universities’ in conservative-alligned UK media over the last 12 months. Secondly, we have examined the UK government’s free speech bill and two key sets of paratexts surrounding it: 1) government website material related to the bill, and 2) speeches by government ministers in support of the bill.

This data was analysed through critical discourse analysis (CDA). There is no bona fide ‘method’ for CDA; rather, what is central is interpreting texts in a dialectical-relational fashion (Fairclough, 2002). Following CDA’s focus on understanding discourse as intimately tied to power relations, a particularly important focus was asking questions such as ‘how does this text uphold asymmetric power relations?’ (see Van Dijk, 1993).

Our analysis reveals an HE sector whose autonomy is rapidly eroding as it becomes a space for nation-building. Both influential government-aligned commentators and government office-holders are shown to be demanding ‘freedom’. However, in asking ‘freedom for whom’, we argue that such freedoms are meant only for a particular, narrowly conceived public. While speech in defence of empire or against the rights of trans people is positioned as legitimate and in need of protection, those who seek to push for decolonising projects, for instance, are framed as censorious and illiberal. This thus denies the possibility of Honigian (1993) agonistic politics, instead advancing an agenda which legitimates a view of the sovereign subject as principally white, male and conservative.

Authors

• Taylor Alexander Hughson, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

• Simina Dragos, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge