Race, Empire and Education Collective

In this article we analyse the constructed ‘free speech crisis’ associated with higher education (HE) in the United Kingdom (UK). We examine the media discourses from 2012 to 2022 which led to the establishment of a sense of crisis around speech in universities and, ultimately, to the Freedom of Speech Act in May 2023. We conceptualise the ‘free speech crisis’ as a discursive formation which is part of broader political efforts of conservative elites to maintain hegemony in Britain. Drawing on populism theory and race critical analyses, we argue that the ‘free speech crisis’ is an expression of racial liberalism and a placeholder for a deeper white anxiety over the social reproduction of elites in university spaces, and thus over (cultural) hegemony in the public sphere.

Dragoș, S., & Hughson, T. A. (2024). Furthering racial liberalism in UK higher education: The populist construction of the ‘free speech crisis’. The British Journal of Sociology, 1–14.  doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13119