as Festival of Ideas. I've seen that people are still coming in, but I think it's probably good to get started. We have quite a lot of exciting ideas, I know encapsulated in the books we're celebrating tonight, albeit in a slightly unconventional way. The celebratory element is a purely intellectual element, but I think no less rewarding for that. The panel tonight is really designed to celebrate two important publications. The first one, which we're going to hear about is Islam on Campus Contested Identities and the Culture of Higher Education in Britain. And that's by Alison Scott Baumann, Matthew Guest, Shurek Nagy, Serea Cherevalial Contractor, Aisha Phoenix, and then after that we will be hearing from Professor Tarek Maudoud on his latest book, which is a collection of essays on secularism and multiculturalism. My name is Peter Maury, I'm the chair for this session, and I would very much invite you to listen closely to the papers and to add any questions or comments that you might have in the Q&A function, which hopefully you can see at the bottom of your screen. What we'll do is we'll begin with the first book that I mentioned there, Islam on Campus, and hear from our three speakers, and I'll perhaps introduce those one by one, and then after that we'll hear from Tarek Maudoud about his new book. I don't think there's anything else by way of housekeeping. I'm very excited and interested to hear, having had a very small sneak preview of the material that's been presented in these books, and it really is very interesting and very timely as well. So without further ado, we'll move on to introductions. I'll say a little bit about Islam on Campus first, although obviously the speakers can talk to it with more authority. Islam on Campus is the result of five years research by a team of academics funded by the AHRC, and it builds on the work that they were all doing actually previously in different ways. It's based on ethnographic fieldwork, 140 hours of interviews and focus groups at six campuses in the UK, and it deals with online responses to surveys by over 2,000 students from actually a wider group of 132 universities and various other media through which responses have been greened. And one of the things the book is trying to do I think is to analyse discrimination and its impact on students and staff, and the current state of Islamic studies understood broadly within higher education. And I think it's an interesting book, not least because of the moment that it captures, which is a moment in the last five years when various narratives about nation belonging, inclusion, exclusion, integration seem to have hardened. So as a snapshot of Muslim students in Britain and the experiences they undergo, and also as a book with some real offerings for how to improve dialogue and improve into cultural understanding, it really is very timely. So I'd like to invite our first speaker, Matthew Guest, to come and talk a little bit about that. Matthew Guest is Professor in the Sociology of Religion and Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University. His research has focused on the institutional context that frame the possibilities of religious expression within Western contexts, including congregations, families and universities. And since 2009 he's been researching how institutions of higher education in the UK shape the status and influence religious identities, including the impact of the university experience of Christian and Muslim students in the changing role of university chaplains. And he's the co-author of Christianity and the University Experience, Understanding Student Faith from 2013, and of course of Islam on Campus, which is what he's going to talk to us about tonight. So over to you, Matthew. Thank you, Peter. It's really a great opportunity this evening for us to celebrate the launch of this book that we've been working on for, must be six years now. And the book has been published just a few days ago. So we look forward to receiving our complimentary copies and hope that others will have time to read and enjoy the volume when it arrives in their local bookstores. This is a long time coming in the sense that we've been working on this for some time. And it really started out as a endeavor intended to respond critically to a tendency within public discourse about Islam. And that was really something that we were concerned about. And we wanted to explore through an academic volume and through some empirical research. To put things into context, there were a series of events that occurred around eight to 10 years ago that really sparked our concern, particularly about the ways in which political agendas were increasingly shaping the life of university campuses. The segregated seating controversy in 2013 at UCL raised the potential tensions between the rights of religious groups versus various equality agendas. We were alarmed to hear various speeches by politicians which, following terrorist incidents, were keen to point out elements of risk and radicalization on university campuses across the country. And of course we were concerned about the development of the prevent strategy and its intention to address radicalization across various public bodies. And in between conceiving the project and receiving the funding to do it, the Counterterrorism and Security Act was passed in 2015, which was an increased concern given that it effectively mandated mass surveillance of the higher education sector in the interests of making it a more secure environment, even though we were concerned it might well do the opposite. So we were concerned with the securitization of Islam within public policy discourse, especially that about higher education and really wanted to ask what is this doing to university life and how are universities reinforcing or resisting emerging stereotypes about Muslims, including stereotypes have to do with violence and aggression, but also that are associated with particular understandings of scholarship, particular understandings of gender, and also particular understandings of what constitutes Islamic identity in popular culture. So to locate the research we really want to sit this within scholarship on Islamophobia, on securitization of Islam, but also within a series of books and publications that have emerged pretty much since the Brown review of 2010, which introduced the more marketized version of the higher education sector as we know it, books that address critically the changing status of the university as a site for fostering critical thought, for speaking critically into public spheres, and for sustaining an educational experience that's culturally inclusive. And we were concerned about these broader processes that might well be compromising the capacity of the higher education sector to achieve those ideals. So Islam on campus, contested identities in the culture of higher education in Britain, result of six years research by authors who are represented here this evening Alison Scott Bowman, myself, Sharut Nagib, but also Saria Sharuvalil contractor Aisha Phoenix, and also we should note our colleagues Dr. Yenli and Dr. Tariq Baal who both contributed to the analysis of the data we collected. This is the first nationwide study of perceptions of Islam and Muslims within the UK university sector, and it also sits alongside a report that we've produced entitled Islam and Muslims on UK University campuses, Perceptions and Challenges, which is freely available online and which focuses much more on the survey analysis of the national questionnaire study that we incorporated into the research for this project. You've already heard about the research that we've done, the survey covers 132 campuses, the more qualitative field work covered six campuses, including two Muslim higher education colleges. We spoke to 253 university staff and students across those campuses in interviews and focus groups, and we learned a huge amount about the experiences of Muslims and their treatment and status within the context of higher education in Britain. What this study really tries to do is offer an examination of what it means for Muslims to be the UK higher education's cultural other. What does this mean for the lives of Muslim staff and students, and what does it mean for the role of universities in challenging prejudice, teaching critical thinking and balancing full and frank debate with religious and cultural inclusivity. I'll leave it to my colleagues to talk through some of the more striking findings and their implications and hand over at this point to my colleague, Shurukh. Thank you. Thank you very much, Matthew. I think the host has disabled my video. Hello. Hello, I'm not sure what's happened to your visuals there. You're back on, Nagy, would you like me to introduce you? I feel you haven't been introduced properly. Okay, please go ahead. Thank you. Yes, I should have introduced you before really, I suppose. Shurukh Nagy, another author of this fantastic book, received her PhD in Islamic Studies from University of Manchester in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies. Her research covers classical and modern Quranic hermeneutics, and she's written on ritual purity, metaphor in post-classical Quran interpretation and Arabic rhetoric, feminist hermeneutics of the Quran, and contemporary female exegetes and jurists in Islam. She's associate editor of the Encyclopedia of the Quran Online and co-author of the book, about which we'll hear more now. Thank you, Shurukh. Thank you very much for this introduction. I'd like to zoom in on some of the emerging issues that Matthew hinted toward. As you have mentioned, I'm interested in the field of Islamic Studies. This is the field in which I train and which I continue to work with an increasingly broadening interest in its interdisciplinarity and in how it relates to other fields. But through the Islam on Campus project, one of the important spheres in which we wanted to understand perceptions of Islam was in the classroom amongst those who teach and study about Islam and Muslim staff and students. And one of the important intersections that came out of our research, one that I expected, but not as powerfully as it has come through, which is the intersection of questions about Islamic studies and questions about gender. So gender was one of our themes and we had four themes as my colleague outlined and I was thinking that the themes will intersect, but I didn't expect them to converge in the encounters and experiences that we had daily on campus. So just to perhaps give you a snapshot of some of the findings, so to speak, with regard to Islamic studies and its convergence with gender in the sense that it is gendered on campus in everyday iteration of the study of Islam in the reception of knowledge about Islam. Two ways I have come across in terms of how Islamic studies is gendered. One is the study of Islam and Muslims seems to be heavily involved in the propagation of reductionist stereotypes still focused on women, despite all the post-colonial critiques that have attempted to unpick this kind of neo-orientalism. But worse than that, the study of Islam and Muslims on some of the campuses where there are specialized departments which may have gone beyond the typical oriental stereotypes. There are certain assumptions about Muslim women as learners which are reductive in the immediate, in the embodied experience of learning. So one example that I would like to share with you is about a female student from Pakistan who identified a Sunni Muslim who attended a class in Qur'anic studies taught by a European trained philologist. And in her encounter with the teacher in the class on an MA course, she only came across authors from non-Muslim backgrounds on the reading list. And when she contested the Eurocentricity of the course or the reading list, the academic white Christian academic explained that Muslims do not want to engage with questions of historicity. And she retorted back, you know, there is a billion Muslims across the world and not one of them has kind of engaged with the questions of historicity. This has left her feeling that there's a sense of in which the Muslim subject, the Muslim mind is being reduced and that limits her ability to engage with the knowledge in the classroom and that knowledge is actually shaping her identity, her subjectivity. And comparing that to another class on gender in which the teacher is non-European, non-white and who teaches a gender course where the reading list is mostly drawing on non-Muslim on Muslim writers, Arab writers and mostly female writers as such. The student felt that finally I was given agency through the knowledge that I was experiencing and encountering in the classroom. So two very different experiences by one Muslim student, a female student in which Islam is constructed in her classroom or Muslims are constructed in her classroom as incapable of critical historical thinking and another classroom in which she felt that Muslim women particularly are capable of producing knowledge and having agency and that she felt she has agency in the sense that as a student she could see your own models on her reading list. But it's not just a question of pedagogy and it's not just a question of discourses about Islam and Muslims which continue to rehash some of the old tired orientalist stereotypes, ones that seem to be paradigmatic because in our survey data we found that two out of five students across national campuses consider Muslim women who are markedly or visibly Muslim to be oppressed within their traditions. An aspect of Islamic studies or of the gendering of Islamic studies on our campuses which one that is less talked about is in the institutional hierarchies which maintain women at the lower ashrams of Islamic studies where you still find that the top main professors in subjects constituted or considered within the field as core Islamic studies proper so to speak they are mostly occupied and led by male Muslim academics or non-Muslim white academics, male academics as well. And we've analyzed curricula as well and so actually only 30% of all holders in the UK within Islamic studies broadly defined are women academics and they occupy the lower ashrams of the field. This is reflected in and not not unsurprisingly this is reflected in the curriculum and the modules that are being taught on Islam and Muslims in which we find gender marginalized in the core subjects of Islam and that most of the females or female academics who are teaching within core Islamic study subjects are working within the are working on teaching languages or supporting the core subjects through auxiliary subjects in in linguistic training or language training. So the status and condition of the study of Islam and Muslims has two converging hierarchies one discursive and one institutional and they limit the horizons of the female agent whether a student in the classroom or a female academic and in both cases the the possibility of of a decolonization of Islamic studies rests on introducing a stronger gender lens and analysis into the field both in the teaching in the classroom that draws on the work of women but also in in terms of not just the knowledge but also the institutional structures in which Muslim women find themselves. So a decolonization of Islamic studies if we were to use that term will have to turn on the dismantling of the gender hierarchies within the field. Thank you. Thank you sure. A lot of thought provoking ideas in there and things you've discovered which I'm sure we want to we want to come back to. We'll move straight on to Professor Alison Scott Bowman who is Professor of Society and Belief and Associate Director of Research at SOAS in Impact Engagement. She and her team have recently completed this project it was a three-year HRC funded project analyzing these representations and this is really only one part of a tremendous body of work on free speech on campus on securitization that's only just in its recent iterations. She has broadcast on Radio 4, she's written for The Guardian, she's written for other higher education blogs and other outlets as well and also gave evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights about free speech on campus and in 2019 was invited to Downing Street to brief advisors on her research findings. Alison really is at the forefront of this work and has been for several years and I've been very lucky to benefit from her scholarship and from her collegiality over that time. I'd like to ask Alison now to give us her money's worth on this fantastic new book. Hi, thank you. You can hear me, you can't see me. Can you see me now? Good evening everybody, I can see myself on a small screen not on a large but that's fine because I know what I look like. Good evening everybody, it's lovely to be here. This as we've heard already this is about a six-year journey. In 2013 I began to wonder whether there were risks attached to general atmosphere in society as a whole which was leading to a chilling of speech on campus and I wondered also if this might have a discriminatory even a racist element to it. So by 2014 I'd completed a draft, I'd created this brilliant team of amazing academics and in 2015 when the Counter-Terror and Security Act was brought in as Matthew said we also started our project and that was very complex because the minute we started to enter campuses to talk to people about Islam they asked us the million dollar question are you associated with the prevent program and we were happy to say no absolutely not we are neutral objective observers but this did mean that there were some people who thought that our work was worth proceeding with but they would not like to be part of it. We could talk about that later if you want to hear more but in order to conclude what has been already quite a rich um diet for you there are three terms I would like to cover there are three negative terms and I will discuss them briefly and then give positive responses which we believe are part an integral part of our research findings. So the first term is democratic deficit, the second term is epistemic injustice and the third term is hermeneutics of suspicion, democratic deficit first. It did seem extraordinary to us in our work of ethnography, class of motivations, interviews and focus groups it seemed extraordinary what the high level of ignorance there was on campus about government actions in the university sector and this is particularly marked at that point in time because of prevent very few students understood it. Clearly they had not been invited to consider what they thought about it and I'm talking now obviously not only of Muslims I'm talking about all students and there were also issues around which I could talk about later if you like about the charity commission inviting student unions to be very cautious about what discussions could focus upon in terms of international politics so this democratic deficit seemed it was almost invisible until you actually started talking to people on campus going about their daily lives. The solution we would propose would be that universities need to stand up for an active enabling of freedom of speech not as a libertarian right-wing populist knee jerk reaction but as a considered approach which would facilitate debate and discussion about difficult issues controversial matters to give you a specific example we realized that issues around Israel Palestine couldn't be discussed but we also realized which was as tragic that when Jewish students were mentioned their identity existed as people who might have view on the Israel Palestine situation so this is a strange kind of shorthand which leads to negative stereotyping we would recommend that active support for the power to speak could function as a really powerful antidote to this democratic deficit that we identified but it would require training it would require practice the skills are all there we had many conversations with highly skilled members of staff who could have easily enacted their competence in this area but it tends to not happen currently. The second term I introduced is epistemic injustice it seemed very clear to us over time that the that there was a lot of discrimination on campus sometimes it was petty sometimes it was thoughtless sometimes it was deliberate and sometimes it was related to people's clothing sometimes it was related to their gender their perceived nationality this epistemic injustice had the effect of diminishing the understanding about whether that individual had anything worth saying so in terms of the first point I make about the democratic deficit being reduced by freedom of speech being empowered this could also be effective with epistemic justice but even more than that we encountered many staff and students who invited us to consider how powerful it would be on campuses to improve the already existing communal opportunities the possibility to be sociable in an atmosphere that is well lit the possibility to be sociable in an atmosphere where there is no alcohol the idea that there are options beyond the excellent work done by chaplains for example and interfaith centers there are options available on campus to have conversations about difficult topics in a relaxed atmosphere but this again needs to be specifically choreographed the third term I mentioned is the hermeneutics of suspicion this belief this belief that by interpreting people's actions we may know more about them than they know about themselves so hermeneutics as you probably know from literature is that the ability to dig deeper into a text to understand below the surface features of written text and it's now been extrapolated to understanding the way we act to looking at our understanding of each other's actions if we were to acknowledge openly and publicly that discrimination against Muslims but also against anybody who is considered to be different from the majority if we accept that then we are halfway to resolving the hermeneutics of suspicion and turning it into perhaps a pedagogy of hope there is plenty of evidence from our research that if we were to expand Islamic studies as Shahrukh suggested we could draw upon the expertise of the Islamic colleges with whom we worked of our sample of six universities for our ethnographic research worked with two Islamic colleges they have immense knowledge and learning and obviously competence in Arabic which would open many doors on mainstream so-called secular campuses for these difficult conversations and I think it's reasonable to say that we were at the end of our study heartened and excited by the potential that exists on the campuses we visited to transform some of our very negative findings into really really powerful and potent thank you Alison I was struck by your idea of a pedagogy of hope which perhaps we can investigate a bit further in the the question and answer session that was one of the things that struck me about the book was that it was very as you've heard it was very forensic in its analysis of some of the shortcomings and the double standards too which we may want to talk about but at the same time it was able to offer ways forward and adjustments to practice things that could be done quite easily in many ways as we've heard which could make a difference so thank you very much to our three presenters on on that book we'll move straight on to Professor Tarik Madhu just the only thing I'll say before that and please do feel free to put some questions in the Q&A and I will attempt to sort of distill and convey then as time goes on a little bit about Tarik's book first and then I'll introduce someone who really needs no introduction at all this book as I said is called Essays on Secularism and Multiculturalism and in a way it begins I think from this question of whether Muslims can be accommodated in as religious groups within European countries and of course it's the one of the central questions of our time reiterated over and over again in political discourse in reaction to incidents and things that we've seen unfortunately very recently but in this particular collection of essays Tarik Madhu argues that to grasp the nature of this challenge we have to see how Muslims have become targets of cultural racism Islamophobia that's his is understanding of that along with I think the the recent definition of the all parliamentary working group which also identified Islamophobia as a form of cultural racism but the problem is not just one of anti-racism it's one of multicultural citizenship and who better to guide us through that particular labyrinth than professor Tarik Madhu as I say you really need no introduction but he is professor of sociology politics and public policy and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship in the University of Bristol he was awarded an MBE for services to social science and ethnic relations in 2001 and elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2017 he served on the commission on multi-ethnic Britain the national equality panel and the commission on religion and belief in British public life his books and so many of them and have been so important to all of us working in this particular field include the two editions of his book on multiculturalism which is a classic in its own right he was co-editor of multiculturalism and interculturalism which is a book I found particularly useful and the problem of religious diversity in 2017 and so the latest book the one we're going to hear about tonight is a really distillation of some of that work I think it's fair to say so Tarik if you could tell us more it would be much appreciated. Thank you very much Peter that was a very generous introduction and thank you Amina Yakin for the invitation to participate in this event. So as Peter says this is a collection of essays in fact across 2005-2018 and I suppose the first distinctive thing I might say about it is that it's an interdisciplinary work perhaps that's not so distinctive these days because we all I think tend to work in interdisciplinary ways but the disciplines that I mainly work in are sociology and political theory and try to bring them together and I think that's only a minority of people people do that. Again as Peter said the book begins with what I call way back going back to the mid-1990s and so on cultural racism and Islamophobia where it's directed at Muslims and at the time that was a fairly novel idea but now I'm pleased to say that it has become the standard interpretation of Islamophobia. A contrast one can see very clearly if one looks at the pioneering first study report on Islamophobia by the Ranimi Trust which was in 1997 which saw it much more in terms of prejudice and hostility to the study their report in 2017 which expressly saw it in cultural racism and as Peter mentioned so does the all-party parliamentary groups definition of Islamophobia and the book offers an account of some Muslim controversies and of Muslims as political actors specifically as what I might call race relations or multiculturalist actors. Again I think that is now widely accepted and is relatively a familiar story as far as Britain's concerned anyway and then more than half the book engages with the idea of political secularism or secularisms. So why do I end up there you know with political secularism why do I take the argument in that direction when probably the the dominant ways in which Islamophobia is being studied these days are security and radicalization or issues around gender and cultural identities ethno-religious identities in fact some of the themes that the the other book Islam on campus has has studied and what have I got to say about political secularism well I think the trajectory to explain why I got to political secularism goes something like this so I understand multiculturalism to be focused on minority identities within a certain kind of range race ethnicity minority religious or of course a mixture of these of these things and the important point about them is that these are not personal identities or private identities they're identities whether they'd be negative or positive whether they'd be imposed from the outside or asserted by individuals you know acting in groups themselves they are public identities and one of the ways in which these public identities has been theorized about and that's certainly been the approach I've taken is following Charles Taylor's idea of recognition how misrecognition is a form of harm and to overturn that to redress that we seek positive identities and these are identities as the bearers of the identities understand their sense of who they are not how they are stereotyped or othered by other people by the dominant group again some of the themes that we've already heard about this evening and in many ways we're familiar with but the problem arises if these public identities that we seek multiculturalist recognition for are religious identities because for quite a lot of people in societies like Britain in Western Europe and other places like that religion has come to be thought of as suitable as a private identity and not as a public issue so you know people wear badges to do with their politics gender identities sexualities and so on but if you're wearing religious badges and insignia and so on that's regarded as a bit intrusive you know I don't I don't want your religion in my face so that's really how I got interested you know going back a couple of decades in political secularism because political secularism is a set of ideas and institutional arrangements about what the relationship should be between the state and organized religion but more generally between what we might call the public sphere public identities civic identities and religious communities religious identities and so on and on what terms they can be accommodated by the state or other institutions institutions like universities like secular universities so that's how I make this linkage have come to make this linkage over many years between the pursuit of a project of multicultural equality and the interrogation of contemporary forms of political secularism which can either enhance that multiculturalist project or at least are compatible with it or they can block it by insisting as they do for instance in certain interpretations of French laicite that religious identities should really be private should be kept out of the public space and so therefore that really creates a impossibility for pursuing a multiculturalist project in terms of what I've got to say about political secularism I'm going to have to be very brief but happy to obviously discuss it discuss it further some of the steps in the argument are really the first one being that the what we might call the knee jerk understanding of secularism is a kind of separation of a church and state or religion and politics and so on is actually a complete misdescription of virtually all the countries in the world including countries that we call democracies even liberal democracies with some partial exceptions like the United States in one kind of way and France in another kind of way but they're only partial exceptions as well though I don't want to spend my time just talking about those countries and those details but if we look at our own country and in fact the whole of northwestern Europe stretching from here to Belgium the Netherlands Nordic countries Germany Austria and so on what we actually have is what I've characterized as moderate secularism because there are quite clearly church state linkages that carry on even if in a residual form to compare to what there might have been 50 years ago or 250 years ago and so on but but they continue and they can have a very big fiscal resource implications like for instance the funding of faith schools or religious instruction in state schools and some people then say well that just shows you that these countries aren't really secularist you know including our own with the church of England as an established church and the queen both as the head of state and the supreme governor of the church of England but my reaction to that is but these countries you know in particular northwestern Europe these countries are exactly where our understanding of political secularism was born if these countries aren't secularist then really secularism doesn't doesn't exist or is a very marginal phenomenon even in democracies and even in western countries so I take the opposite approach which is to say well actually these countries are what we mean when we talk about secular democracies and secular states these are the countries that we are talking about and therefore what exists in these countries is what we should call political secularism and what we need to do is to properly theorize to conceptualize the actual arrangements that exist of political secularism rather than have an abstract idea about separatism from which we conclude that secularism hardly hardly exists in the world and so I characterize the countries that I've mentioned in this region as forms of moderate secularism and I construct a very ideal type to describe what this moderate secularism is and in a way this this reflects it's an important point here reflects my my method namely that concepts analytical and theoretical concepts are built from actual contexts and practices not defined abstractly or a priori and then we create independent arguments and independently try and identify whether our abstract concepts have actual cases um this Vibrarian type I mentioned of moderate secularism has five characteristics which I don't really have time to say very much about at all but maybe I'll just mention one because it's perhaps the most controversial feature when I say the most controversial feature I mean the most controversial feature in my conceptualization not necessarily controversial in contemporary politics though perhaps it can be and that is that I argue that an important feature of countries like Britain and the Netherlands and Sweden and Germany and so on is that religion organized religion is seen as a potential source of public good and of course public harm but that's perhaps taken for granted we perhaps all take it for granted that states have to regulate religion where they think they're doing some harm like for instance causing social divisions or violence or something like that but the important point is that public good is also part of the understanding in moderate secularism of what religion is capable of and that is why the state gets involved that is why we don't have separatism but we have connection involvement because the state wants to enable the public good whatever that might be welfare charity education stable family the building up of social capital whatever these various goods might be including of course national identity because actually the churches have played a large role in the identities of these countries including of course our own and and so on and so if we're talking about the public good for organized religion within moderate secularism then actually we can make a good connection with multiculturalism because I said to you that multiculturalism was about public identities positive public identities defeating negative racialized stereotypes and and othering and unlike Weber my ideal types are normative he expressly said that social sciences couldn't be normative shouldn't try to be in so on I totally disagree with that and I do the opposite I suggest that moderate secularism has some reasonable purposes and that there are some justifications and of course adaptations so it's not an uncritical acceptance of whatever exists but that basically there are arguments foreign against how we might do things already within the structures and institutions of moderate secularism that then leads to the question about multiculturalizing moderate secular states but I can see that I'm being quite tight on time here so I maybe just select one or two final points to conclude on so even though several chapters of the book are engagements with what I might call liberal political theory of secularism showing its limitations either because it misdescribes the world or because it forecloses the possibilities of multicultural recognition I should emphasize one or two aspects of what I understand by multiculturalism by way of closing I don't understand it as to borrow again from Charles Taylor I don't understand it as subtractive but as additive or what I call equalizing upwards so the issue about how to include groups like Muslims who of course are my central case in my book and in my theorizing in general how to include groups like Muslims without dispossessing other groups for instance Christians or other groups so it's that's what I'd be mean by additive not subtraction so it's a multiculturalism that is sympathetic to historical and majority identities and institutions but it's not majoritarianism that is to say it always wants to identify what are the minorities distinctive needs that must be accommodated must be accommodated in the light of egalitarian arguments especially those to do with respect and inclusion and minority needs shouldn't be judged by majority requirements so it's not good enough to say as they often say in municipalities across France that why should schools provide kosher or halal meals they don't provide any special diet for Christians well that is a total misunderstanding of equality Jewish and Muslim requirements should not be judged by the requirements of some other religious group and so that's how I build up a concept of multicultural equality which is additive not subtractive which is not about dispossessing majority provisions and majority identities but a matter of not using the majority provisions as a way of excluding minority needs and minority accommodation and finally I also want to emphasize commonalities and common identities should also be cultivated and not least a national identity so it's a multiculturalism because it centers on equal citizenship and national citizenship is the strongest form of citizenship that we know so the more we load on to citizenship and I do load quite a lot on to my concept of citizenship the more we load on to it in a way we become closer to national citizenship rather than distant from it but I do argue that national citizenship has to be remade and that means also rethinking our sense of country remaking our national identity because citizenship is itself an identity it's not just about multiculturalism isn't just about minority identities it's also about citizenship as an identity not just a bundle of rights and duties and the highest level of citizenship I believe is where it's able to confer a sense of belonging to all its citizens that they belong together and they belong together to their political community thank you maybe I'll just share a screen of the the books cover so you can see it and as you can see there is a discount code if you want to make a note of it um otherwise you can also find it on my website thank you very much someone someone else perhaps has to stop the sharing I don't know whether I can last time someone else stopped it is that good oh good yeah so I think that stopped it thank you whoever did that thank you very much thank thank you Tarek um we feel time we feel time that's normally taken up with enthusiastic thunderous applause after all our speakers and so I can imagine I can kind of hear virtually that the applause from behind all the the computer screens um thank you for four really very stimulating and all differently angled takes but there are certain things they have in common and I can see we have some questions so I won't delay in moving on to those only really to say that I think it's very interesting that one of the things that appears to be held in common in your two projects in a way is this this thing that Tarek called equalizing upwards in a way in other words it's not kind of stripping away other people's rights or or putting somebody in over somebody else and therefore reducing the other groups bit as it were uh that this is actually about kind of making inclusive structures like the university for example which have desire to be inclusive a lot of the time but don't necessarily allow that to take place in practice and I think that's one of the the findings that strikes you most from uh Alison uh and her team and their book um and the other thing actually which is interesting as well is that I think you both share an idea of religion which again Tarek put into words very well at the end as a potential source for public good which is of course at odds with the very kind of hard line secularist view of where religion belongs or indeed doesn't belong and so I'm sure these are things that we may well come back to as well but I shall not hog the stage because there's some very interesting questions coming in um there are a couple perhaps I can just bring these two together because they seem to be similarly angled for Alison and the team and they're kind of methodology questions so that this is very interesting and important in your work um the first one says Alison you talked about some suspicion towards the project particularly in regards to prevent can you tell us a bit more about the institutional reception and perception of your work how we all perceived treated in doubt with once you had access to campus the other one I want to roll into that rather cheekily but it does seem to be similar uh is the second question about your interviewing and the participants how forthcoming were they in answering your questions and did the the setting or the interview or the method matter much did you feel like they were holding back there are lots of questions all kind of in together in those two but they're essentially methodology ones so Alison sure uh Matthew you can you can um turn your cameras on again if you like to and uh maybe answer answer some of those uh questions shall I shall I start so Yaffa and Eva thank you very much for both your questions I will answer them kind of together although I do see that they're distinct yes people were very suspicious of our activities on campus to start with because the prevent duty was in force now that was in 2016-17 we know that actually from official records in 2017 across the whole of the higher education sector 15 people were referred to channel which is the um the sort of curing arm the arm that will rehabilitate you if you have bad thoughts the channel is related to prevent now 15-15 is a very small number however the level of discontent and concern on campus about students and staff who knew about prevent and as I said before this was a minority but they were very worried about what we might actually be up to so in order to counteract that and this comes on now from Yaffa's question to Eva's question in order to counteract that we set up a really complex system whereby their identity was protected even more rigorously than normal to the best of our absolutability so we we kept separate records of their names and their the number that was allocated to them we also and this sounds ridiculous but it worked brilliantly during focus groups we allocated each person a number and we asked them to address to refer to themselves so I would say number I'm number three I have a point please I want to speak and we thought this might when we first tried it we felt that it was a good idea theoretically because it would allow people to avoid using each other's names because sometimes they knew each other it would allow us to clean the transcripts later more successfully but we thought it might be a terrible failure because they would just find it ridiculous actually they found it delightful and very liberating and they even went to the extent sometimes of saying so so I'm number three I have something to say and I want to say that I agree with number seven so they completely staff and students entered into this fully and so this a first question really I don't I didn't I don't think we felt that they were holding back massively I think we felt that they were as honest as they felt they could be clearly there were issues that they might not want to embark on if they felt that they were on the edge of legality but none of them felt they were at risk on campus and most of them felt that they could speak pretty openly to us and if they were in a focus group to other people so that was a great success but Matthew might want to add aspects of the quantitative material I don't know if you want to say something about that as well Matthew and not not not really I mean the similar issues didn't really come up as much because of the nature of the method and the use of an anonymized online survey instrument but what you've described Allison resonates with my own experience of the fieldwork I mean there's I think it varied significantly as well though across campuses I mean there's the it's interesting to identify which university campuses are especially sensitive to prevent related issues and which are relatively oblivious because there are huge variations and but also patterns which are quite worrying like I remember one particular exchange with a student who was could internalize the need to be suspicious of other people on campus even though she was at a university which had no record of having any problems whatsoever was distant from any examples that had been in the media she'd never heard of anything happening but had still internalized that sensor we want to be a little bit careful about things and change the behavior accordingly so that there was a kind of infectiousness about the anxiety that that kind of policy had fostered thank you yeah that's very interesting I think that she wrote did you have any thoughts on that yes I just wanted to add a point about positionality that with the qualitative data on campuses we actually had one member of the team who was always attending and the other member of the team which was either Matthew, Alison, myself or Saria changed but because the position positionality shifted on the different campuses the how we were received also shifted and shifted also in terms of how the participants opened up to answer Ava's question or to link both questions together so on some campuses Muslim women would open up to me or Muslim staff would open up to me as well as students or feel a certain affinity whereas on on other occasions my Muslim positionality would would either inhibit the discussion in some ways because people would be wary or would open it up in a different direction so one example I remember one of my last interviews was with a right-wing white Muslim student who was very reserved at the beginning of the interview but as we started to talk he he opened up a bit more and in the middle of the interview he said can I ask you a question because you're actually the first Muslim woman that I feel I can ask her questions about these things and he started to to to actually interrogate me as many students and sometimes Muslim staff are interrogated in in the public domain but also in the workplaces in the classroom about their identity and their faith commitment it it was an it was an interesting experience because in his interrogation I learned a lot more about his assumptions than through the actual interview and the actual answers so the ethnographic observations that went along with the qualitative interview method was also very useful was very helpful and the gatekeepers were all people we've known for such a long time so the initial reception was always great and we were grounded in a network of support within each campus through our gatekeepers so thank you to them whatever they are thank you that's great I mean it answers very well that that second question Eva's question about the interview and method and how that works and just just before we we move on there's another one that's that's popped up now which follows on I think slightly from that which is about maybe subject students felt they couldn't openly discuss did you come across much of that sure I mean the interesting thing Robina was that we what we haven't mentioned yet is that one of our methodological processes was to work through the student union whenever possible and this was sometimes difficult because the student union might be suspicious of us but that meant that we were gaining their trust and they would then use their own dissemination methodology to attract people to become part of the work but what happened coincidentally as a result of that approach Robina was that sometimes we would meet somebody in a corridor or in the student union offices who would say and I did refer to this earlier in passing they'd say this works really interesting we we need to speak about the counter terror agenda we we as young particularly young male Muslims we are very uncomfortable at being perceived as dangerous but it's absolutely impossible for us to take part in your study because even though you are assuring us of maximal confidentiality we don't think it's worth the risk so they you know we had some fascinating conversations which we couldn't record we didn't we wouldn't dream of attributing them to individuals or particular campuses but they were it was often young Muslim males who felt that they were being that everything they did was perceived as potentially dangerous and you know that remember this may be milder now people may have got used to it we also found that a lot of young Muslims had accustomed themselves to this pressure and just dealt with it in a very gracious generous way but that's that's horrendous that they have to make that effort but Robina the other thing I will just mention briefly if I may Peter that when Israel Palestine was mentioned it was often done in a quite a cautious way because the students and the staff involved realized that this is a very contentious issue they didn't want to be misunderstood so they would refer to the fact that you know we we we've we fixed up a meeting to discuss this it was very difficult to arrange the meeting but we we managed and we had some kind of useful discussion but there's obviously there are obviously issues like that where they feel that they're that it is unsatisfactory it comes back to my point about the democratic deficit that they wish to inform themselves so many staff and students just just rounding off now sorry to go on but so many staff and students said to us we need to talk more about these difficult topics not less if we're being encouraged if we're being discouraged from discussing them this is really bad for democracy and we are the future generations who will be running things when you guys are no longer here we we mustn't be stopped we must be encouraged and helped and supported to have these difficult discussions thank you Alison I mean that relates to the point I was feeling my way towards earlier about some double standards that I think you've uncovered that that Tarik's work over many years is uncovered apparently you talk about those in a moment there is a question for Tarik now which has been waiting for a while and it takes us slightly away from our western european focus and it's just about marginalization within islamic societies the example given by sir one is about a state with sheer rulers who might marginalize summits or vice versa and whether it could be theorized whether there's a solution to that issue within secularism or multiculturalism as you imagine it or does it come out of a particular soil uh you know that doesn't necessarily travel tarik now thank you I saw that question um I think there is an element of where you ended peter that namely that in order for some of the things I'm talking about to be useful to people uh in say the middle east or somewhere else in asia somewhere um there have to be certain institutions and norms um certain kinds of you know political arrangements in place because I'm kind of building on those because my work is as I said quite contextualist even though it's quite normative I'm trying to develop the a certain normative perspective out of a context so I I'd be reluctant to say well yes well on the other hand I think to just say no would be wrong as well because there can always be some points of contact and extrapolation and adaptation to a different context so that you may end up with something that was different to what you started off with but it didn't mean it doesn't mean that you haven't used some of say ideas about multicultural citizenship and so on and one thing to mention here is that I'm currently working on a very large project with um many many partners I think we're 13 all together looking at 23 countries in five world regions and that certainly includes uh Mayna and it includes Southeast Asia and um various other regions and when we were first I'm doing this uh together with uh Anatri and Defiladu who used to be at the European University Institutions now at Ryerson University in Toronto so when we first thinking about this project you know way way back before we even started writing and proposed or anything like that uh we thought and I think Anna more than me thought that are somehow European problems could be um dealt with by learning from what was happening in the Middle East or India or Indonesia Malaysia somewhere like that I wasn't quite as enthusiastic as she was because I felt I knew a little bit more about those countries and I knew that they had their own problems but a distinction that we kind of worked with then right at the beginning and and and now but it's become even sharper is that the I mean Europe has um had a lot of cultural and in particular religious homogeneity if by religion here we mean Christianity obviously there's loads of diversity within Christianity as we all know but it's not like having Christianity and Buddhism and Hinduism and Islam fall together as for instance you know in some parts of the Middle East or certainly in India for instance or Indonesia so but on the other hand Europe has developed certain ideas about liberal freedoms which actually originate with the idea of religious freedom and freedom of conscience and even developing them into human rights and so on it still has the root that the state shouldn't be able to tell an individual what to believe you know what is the true religion as it were and yet we have this as I say this context of relative homogeneity and then if we look at Middle East or India you have a lot more sociocultural and religious diversity you know historical diversity over long long periods of time centuries and yet without the same legal rights and safeguards and respect for freedom of conscience dissent is often marginalized and and curved if not by the state then by organized religious groups themselves like organized Sunni Islam or organized Shia Islam and so we thought could we learn something you know this is if you like a multiculturalist quest could we learn something from the sociocultural diversity dynamics of countries that have known diversity and taken it for granted for centuries and see if we could marry it to the more democratic structures of like Western Europe but what we've actually found when we were writing our proposal and then getting it funded and now the project's about halfway in is that the countries that we'd hope to get this these diversity rich diversity sensitive insights from have been moving quite rapidly towards a more authoritarian majoritarianism than we even know in Europe so India is such a perfect example I mean we talk about Islamophobia in Europe but we don't have mass programs of Muslims in the way that India is now under the BJP now beginning to experience this real persecution of Muslims in India even though you could say historically Muslims and Hindus found ways of living together across many generations and not just learning to live together but sometimes also in very respectful ways of joining in other people's holy days religious celebrations you know pilgrimages to shrines and so on not because they wanted to say well I believe the same as you do but to show that I join you in your religious sympathies you know that there is a meeting point in our religious understandings even though we have different holy books and different you know clergy or authoritative structures and whatever so it's rather worrying because a lot of people who don't look across the globe but have transfixed on Europe and North America think that all the populist nationalism is here and they're associated with white supremacism and so on actually there's a lot of populist nationalism across many parts of the world and the one that Muslims are suffering most under at the moment is in India and of course Xinjiang province another part of China so our kind of quest to marry the social richness of the Middle East and Asia with the democratic norms and law structures of Western Europe isn't quite working out as we'd hoped thank you very much that was a very rich answer I might well I will invite other panelists to address it as well but you raised the dreaded P word in terms of populism there and I wonder if you feel not discouraged exactly but but populism you know the way it operates in terms of saying well well you this group here you're the real people and this other group isn't the people and that seems to be one common denominator in a very diverse set of authoritarian moves as it were but that's kind of pulling in a completely opposite direction to what you described as moderate secularism isn't it yeah so I mean there are a lot of developments in the world well let's just say Britain that I can't be optimistic about thoughts that I think oh yeah this is how I'd like things to go I certainly agree with that and a lot of them are attitudinally and politically tied up with Brexit by which I don't mean whether we are for you know being in the European Union outside what I mean is there's a whole cluster of political and cultural attitudes often to do with identity and a sense of being marginalised by dominant narratives by dominant narratives I mean the kind of narratives that we pick up from the BBC or the media or the children are being introduced to its schools and so on so in many ways the brexit constituency which then of course also you know voted in our present government has managed to combine those who feel excluded and marginalised by the way the British public life and British identity is being developing i.e. in a multi-ethnic direction and they don't feel that they're being sufficiently included in a respectful way or in a way that they believe is their entitlement it's married that group of people with an elite who well in many ways is a perhaps a traditional elite certainly a kind of neoliberal elite and this is part of our predicament and multiculturalism is therefore caught in this Pinson movement by a kind of resentful kind of folk feeling that people like us are being ignored in favour of all those minorities in Birmingham and London and on the other hand a more transnational elite that are very mobile both in terms of their own personal movements but in very mobile in terms of you know their money and their interests and their careers and everything like that so yeah lots of things are happening that aren't good for multiculturalism but i don't think uh i mean i've probably already taken too long i'll just say i maybe leave it to later for elaboration i don't think that it'd be true to say as some people say we used to be moving in a multiculturalist direction now we're moving in reverse i don't think that's true i think we've always had uh countervailing movements and some of the forward movement for multiculturalism is actually continuing even while there are all these what there are some of these negative trends that i've just referred to thank you that yeah that's fascinating um i mean i did do any of our other authors want to come in on that there's further to take that particular question was there anything you have said because obviously you are conducting this research in a way at this this Brexit moment or thereabouts that Tariq has mentioned did you feel that came to bear in any of the responses that you had or the ways you could conduct yourself well it was certainly fascinating the ways in which right-wing populism um as we understand in Britain is definitely contaminating the campus i mean there are not many right-wing populist students or staff there are some the majority are either the majority of staff of students are either leftish or liberalish or agnostic but we did find very clear evidence that this this interference from right-wing populism is confusing people so you know that the right-wing populist accuses the student of being a snowflake who melts at the slightest whiff of constrovisy or being a proto-terrorist who's going who's encouraging extremists onto campus in order to radicalise others obviously the student body can't be both snowflakes and terrorists because you're you're melting or burning simultaneously it just it doesn't work but this doesn't matter the these two extremes are the way in which the right-wing populist discourse functions so you've got for example spiked online with a libertarian approach quite self-eviled libertarian is quite open they would argue that students are snowflakes and they should just wise up and smarten up and encourage free speech of of all sorts it's not really what they mean what they mean is encourage free speaks of of the areas that spike likes but this is quite an extreme position and there's plenty of accusation in the public discourse of a country like this which asserts this and then on the other side you've got the Henry Jackson Society who argue that students are not snowflakes at all they're proto-terrorists they should be stopped from encouraging Islamic speakers to come and address the students on campus and no platforming should be used so again this free speech argument is deliberately polarizing itself I mean spiked and Henry Jackson are not averse to each other's ideas they just adopt a particular extreme position and it it definitely confuses the possibility of open and balanced discourse on campus and I think that's another reason why a lot of people have given up trying to have difficult conversations it's something that Matthew actually raised I think in his chapter was it chapter one or chapter two early on in the book and I think you referred Matthew to the segregated seating controversy at UCL in 2013 which I remember because we had an event scheduled for the following week and I got a very concerned phone call from somebody high up in the university at East London at that point going they're not going to be segregated are they and it was the speaker was Onor O'Neill who was talking about trust and I said no I think in guarantee they won't be segregated in that one but but you were talking about that one and I wondered because you also bring the story up to very much the present moment really I mean to the COVID moment if you like about this trend that you identify there for direct government intervention in HE that's grown in recent years I mean we see it very much now in a sense because you know with COVID and concerns about university finance there's always a sort of idea that you know well well we'll bear you out but we'll bear you out on condition you do this or that and of course one of the latest ones is the the Williamson stipulation about free speech on campus so I wondered if what feeling you got from your interviewees about that it's we're back to this thing about double standards aren't we that in a sense you know certain kinds of debating positions are not being allowed or not being encouraged or being discouraged certain topics are off limits and yet at the same time the government's pushing this idea that what they want to do is secure free speech on campus I think it's a fascinating political move on the part of the government which presents universities as part of a in a way it presents them as a foil for the populist argument it's it's the the accusation that universities conspire with a liberal agenda to elevate the interests of minority groups at the expense of the of the white majority which given the marketized nature of the of the sector which of course has emerged at the same time there's has been an acceleration of state intervention and regulation makes many universities you know Oxford and Cambridge probably exception accepted makes them very nervous about about doing things that might be perceived as dissenting from a government line so I think that there's there's there's a cynical strategy that drives this that encourages universities as institutions to be more risk averse than they already are I don't think there's a major problem with freedom of speech in universities I think there is it's a cynical use of that accusation on the part of political actors to push things in a particular direction there are of course cases of no platforming and and an exaggeration of the whole safe space agenda that pushes against that but in most cases from from what I can gather that that's it's it's not a an endemic problem in the sector but one thing that we have to do is find ways of disagreeing respectfully I mean I think that's one thing that the university sector has become very bad at is is finding a way of fostering a context in which disagreement could be public but also respectful and debate can be constructive but also full and frank I mean the when you have some reactions to that being a closing down of debate and on other reactions being the elevation of certain agendas to dismiss others then you have the worst of both worlds so I think there's work that we can do but universities can only do that if they feel empowered to do so without being unfairly sanctioned by government agencies thank you yeah I think it's very interesting because for the most part this is now kind of personal gripe of course but you know the universities have been whipping whipping boys girls persons you know for a while and now and today I think that they're in their good books again because they're doing something they like about with with COVID and keeping that eating students locked up and whatever so I don't quite understand how your your analysis of it was was very good I thought and absolutely right um there was another question actually for Tariq about Canada embracing multiculturalism whereas Europe and the UK feels threatened with the concept and the question that goes on to talk about the quality of political leadership and and divisiveness and I suppose that takes us back to the the populism question again and without wanting to steal or all kind of gloss in an unwelcome way the question I wonder whether one of the things that that might be worth thinking about there is is the fact that actually you you're outlining thank you by the way for for sending your your introduction this this afternoon I had a look and it struck me very forcibly that you do make a distinction there between the moderate secularism in large parts of Europe and the the French model which I think you described as religion marginalising radical secularism so that is kind of to rather steal and manipulate the original question but those international variations do do matter don't they and the French are the French outliers in that respect sorry are the French what are they are they sort of outliers in that respect to the rest of Europe actually I thought you were raising the uh point about France because in a sense Canada includes a little bit of France that's right you got me yeah so um thank you for that question uh I'm a great admirer of multiculturalism in Canada I think everybody agrees that in terms of uh state enactments and political leadership and formal policies Canada is the pioneer you know in the modern period is the pioneer of multiculturalism and certainly I hold that view and I think you know the fact that so many Canadians I think it's about 80 percent or more uh think of multiculturalism as part of the Canadian national identity um is of course you know a great success for multiculturalism and uh I wish we had a bit more of that here but having said that I think um there are certain qualifying um points one should be aware of so that one doesn't see everything uh into you know too dark and too fair a comparison that there are kind of qualifying um issues so the first one is if we're talking about post-migration multiculturalism and that is all I work on but of course in Canada some theorists like Will Kimmlerka for instance when they talk about multiculturalism are often talking about the relationship between the Canadian federal state and indigenous peoples and the Canadian federal state and the province of Quebec so those are different issues but if we're just talking about post-immigration multiculturalism I mean the first thing to note is how selective Canada has been not just recently but always about who it lets in so I remember once uh my sister by the way uh migrated to Canada in the 1970s because she married a Canadian and I thought well yes I'd like to join uh and um I was a post-graduate student hoping to finish my PhD and then look for a job but when I wrote to the Canadian consulate because you were invited to see whether you were a suitable person they sent me a list of occupations that you had to have qualifications in in order to then be even given an application form to fill in and university lectureship which is what I wanted to do was not on that list so Canada has been very selective on the basis of skills and occupations now this is spread across the world and we ourselves employ those criteria as well and Australia is another country that led the way in doing that but what is interesting is that some of the countries that stand out in terms of political multiculturalism have been very selective in basically if you like choosing middle-class people or people who have the potential to become middle-class professional people if we look at migration into Western Europe this country included it hasn't been like that you know if you look at it over say 75 years the post-colonial migration from you know Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, the Caribbean and and the French colonies and the Portuguese colonies and the Dutch colonies and so on was not like that people came from rural Punjab and rural and places like that and they came from the West Indies with relatively minimal qualifications having left school at 15 or 16 and so on so if you like the composition the population composition is very different and another difference is religion. Religion is much more marginal has been you know from the start in Canadian multiculturalism then we've made it central in Britain and Western Europe and of course it's mainly been Muslim activism and Muslim anger about various things and so on that have made it so but so European multiculturalism works with religious groups in the way that Canada finds it even more difficult than we do and the worst case is Quebec where some of the intolerance for religious minorities including Muslims well primarily Muslims is actually as bad or not worse than what we would find anywhere in in Western Europe so yes two cheers for Canadian multiculturalism but there are things that we are doing which they are not they're failing to do or haven't been sufficiently challenged to do. That's very a very rich and much more nuanced for you I think of the Canadian model than you you usually get. We're moving towards the end and so therefore I wonder if this might be a moment because both books do pick up on positives as well as negatives and suggestions as well for for things to improve and for how to improve them so maybe Alison, Matthew and Shurek and perhaps you could address this say a bit more about about this pedagogy of hope which is a wonderful phrase by way of another question which I'm sneaking in there's a fascinating moment I think it comes in the introduction but it recurs later where you distinguish between the emphases I think I'm right in saying on on how to improve between Muslim and non-Muslim respondents and you say that the non-Muslims advocated things like greater intercultural literacy but the Muslim students emphasise barriers and limitations and so I don't know if that's a seagine to the pedagogy of hope or it maybe it's an obstruction to the pedagogy of hope but I wonder if you could speak to that at all. Shall I start and then hand over to you Matthew and Shurek okay so pedagogy of hope yes I think what was extraordinary and remarkable and very exciting was that we constantly find ourselves having conversations with participants either in interviews or in focus groups who as I mentioned before clearly had the skills and the understanding and the desire to improve the quality of campus life for everybody but they felt somewhat restricted because they understood that they should watch their peas and queues uh this there is Matthew's quite right there isn't actually a serious problem with freedom of speech on campus but there is enough of a problem to mean that people take care with how they express themselves so the three points I mentioned earlier on that we recommend that that there is support for the power to speak freely in discussion about difficult issues because a lot of young people who spend so many hours online are filled with the opposite of the pedagogy of hope they are they are faced with despair end of civilization type debates and yet they know that the university could help them to resolve these issues I think the other aspect of the pedagogy of hope which I would emphasize before I go on to the other two points we recommend is that it must be necessary it must be possible to move away from the right wing populistic extremism of creating two polarities you're either in or out you're in you're either a yin or yang you're either a steve lake or or a terrorist we have to break away from that by accepting that if we start a difficult conversation we may not be able to resolve anything but it's still worth having if we started a conversation we may come to understand each other better but still realize they were a long way apart in other words the provisionality of interpersonal discourse is so crucial and it's not a black-white polarity it is much more muddled and that we should use the dialectical discourse approaches of continental philosophy for example so that's the first point about the power support for the power to speak the second point is that a lot of people quite chatterly and quite casually pointed out as I mentioned earlier on that the opportunities for being truly communal for having conversation in well-lit areas for having conversation with somebody you don't know in a non-alcohol situation these are these could very easily be facilitated and we had frequent comments from people about literally this is so awful before I came to university I thought Muslims were terrorists now I'm sharing a room with a guy who's great he's a muslim he happens to be a Muslim and I now realize that I was completely wrong so coming to university had transformed them but they also recommended that this this could be enhanced and rolled out more inclusively and the third point we recommend is which sure it can speak to with great expertise is the need to expand Islamic studies that there must be some coming together between Islamic experts from beyond the campus with those within and some emancipatory drive could easily be activated there's plenty there's fantastic expertise within Britain which the continentals are quite jealous of they realize we've got very strong models for Sunni and Shia higher education we need to increase that potency so would you like me to to come in on on that last point just to first to trace back to what to trace what I'm going to say back to what Alison said about the pedagogy of hope so in trying to conceptualize the idea of a pedagogy that is that is configured by the different structures of the university and the different actors within the university and not just within the classroom one of the things that seem to come through our various encounters is that the hope is needed not just for within the teaching setting but also the learning that takes place throughout the university at in different sectors of the university or different parts of it different layers of it it's it's one of the one of the things that the student I quoted earlier on when I spoke when she had that hallelujah moment in the gender and Arab women's writing class is that the pedagogy of hope here was shared with a teacher who was herself trying to create a knowledge that gives her agency so the within the universities that where we've done qualitative research we've often come across the the limits of the pedagogy that was being practiced especially with assumptions about the secularity of critique or the limitations of religious commitments in in terms of being open to forms of knowledge which challenge religious affiliation or identities so these assumptions somehow despite the fact that most of the module material that we looked at had aims and purposes which highlighted criticality as a purpose so staff often taught that criticality is important but we came across material and ideas and experiences in which the criticality seemed to have a limit and the limit in often comes with with encounters with religion and students with religious commitments so a pedagogy of hope is necessary for university where criticality seems to have stalled or to have become limited by the secular assumption by the way by the ways in which we are doing criticality but not reflexively thinking about how to push its frontiers so these questions that are coming through Muslim subjects and others it's not just about the academic freedom or the ability to debate but the ability to delve into the deeper structures which shape knowledge production and which shape the university as an idea itself in this case the idea of criticality so a pedagogy of hope is one through which I see the horizon of the contemporary secular university in in the UK could be could be pushed towards more merging with forms of knowledge that could enrich the university and going back to the final point that Allison has made we have done research in two Muslim colleges of different kinds of persuasions and in these Muslim colleges the the richness of the past the the past the plurality of the of Muslim of Muslim different Muslim regions that plurality was preserved in the teaching in the in the traditions some of the colleges actually spoke multiple languages and came from different schools were not just so these were accredited colleges with an academic program so the possibility of enriching in Islamic studies on secular campuses is actually lying there but there are all these assumptions about religious commitment hindering critical academic knowledge and hence the the reluctance to merge and and work and cooperate with these with these colleges so a pedagogy of hope is goes beyond the classroom it's at it's something that actually cuts it you know cuts across various questions but it's the heart of the idea of the university and potentially also important for its future if the students are to to continue to believe in the university and just I need to say this for my daughter's sake who has contracted COVID and is locked down in a campus in Manchester and has asked me in the first week does the university really care about knowledge or is this just a financial transaction so I couldn't answer that question anyway thank you yes there's a very good question actually to to to sort of end that part with Matthew did you have anything you wanted to add just just briefly I mean universities are very often idealized places I mean that they're idealized by those who who seek to attend them and are idealized by those who advocate for them and one of the one of the great things about this project has been able to explore in such empirical depth the ways in which on the negative side universities are complicit in broader patterns of prejudice and stereotyping on the positive side though it's really identified the the rich resources available in the communities on campuses across the country and that universities have great potential to contest some of these misunderstandings and prejudices that we've that we've on earth and just to echo something that Alison said a few minutes ago and it's kind of a methodological point really which is the the really striking power of the focus group as a basis for conversation there were times that we we did several focus groups on every campus that we studied and often that involved it wasn't our intention to do this but we brought together people who'd never met before and who had conversations they wouldn't otherwise have had and who expressed an intention to continue having those conversations after we'd left and I think that really taught us a lot about good intentions and the great potential of enriching conversations on campus across staff and students and across the country thank you that's yes that's that's a kind of partial answer to a question that's popped up now about whether I think media outlets give a chance to kinds of moderate Islam to be introduced I mean that's a separate question I suppose but it does it does raise that question and the point that you made actually very effectively there about the university still when all said and done with all its neoliberal pressures and everything being a space where ideas can be discussed in a in a more subtle and you know less hotheaded manner than sometimes takes place within social media or the media in general with its with its particular agendas and with that in mind Tariq I wonder whether I could possibly I don't know invite you to start a political career by addressing something that you say right at the very start of your book which is where you say you talk about multiculturalism behind this so-called crisis of secularism and you say and this is a paraphrase from uniformity of treatment to respect for difference that move requires a rethinking of liberalism and liberal democratic institutions so as you're now a politician what what liberal democratic institutions could be reformed or would need to be reformed for your model to come into into being gosh oh god I had an answer already to join in about hope because I once in a guardian article talked about multiculturalism of hope and I was going to talk about that but reforming it's easier for me to start with liberalism and then let's see where we get to with institutions so of course the liberalism can mean a lot of different things neoliberalism for example is one thing but in the United States as we know as we're watching their election when they call someone a liberal they mean they're kind of center left or someone like Bernie Sanders who's called you know a rabid liberal is like what we might think of as a social democrat or something so but even within political theory and academic liberalism there are lots of different different positions the the ones that I think are limiting in understanding multiculturalism and therefore also guiding politics are those that are overly focused on individuals because as I said in my account of multiculturalism people have a sense of belonging to groups and they particularly have that sense but not only but particularly have that sense when they are collectively excluded or victimized or othered and then they seek to have a more positive sense of who they are and at that point what liberalism and liberal institutions need to do is to reach out to those groups and enable them to have more positive identities which you know they'll have their own agency perhaps their own you know political mobilization and so on but nevertheless they'll only be a small group they'll need lots of political allies and they'll need space within the broader public including the media outlets as one question relates to so I think that an acceptance of groups and group identity as part of ordinary democratic life and and that in many ways has happened so liberalism has kind of shifted from a very individualist position to one that for instance is very concerned with marginalised groups like women or gay people and all the other varieties of sexual identities and so on so but as I said at the beginning there is a particular stumbling block for a lot of people when the identities and the group identities are connected to a religious community because they say ah that is not how we do things here that is not our tradition so one of the things that I've been trying to do in the idea of modern secularism is to show that actually we do do these things we're wrong to say we don't do them because we do actually do them our political life our state is connected to the Church of England to the monarchy to the whole legacy of a certain kind of Christian ethics Christian culture which is also of course reflected in some of our laws not to mention simple things like that we don't have to work on Christmas day but we do have to work on the on the Sabbath or at Eid or whatever so I think one of the things I've been arguing is that Britain approximates less approximates less to a liberal society in quote marks to a purest liberal society and this is a jolly good thing because this is how minorities get included because if it was only about individuals as they say for instance in republic and France then they have a justification a legitimacy for wanting to dissolve groups because they say groups are you know commuter they are divisive they don't respect the republic and so on of course we've got that this week you know for reasons we understand so I've tried to show that multiculturalism isn't purely a liberal movement and that's a good thing and that Britain isn't a purely a liberal society and that's a good thing because these two things then can be bridged together people who have a sense of their own collective identity are in a better position to include minorities who are struggling against othering and are struggling to get recognised for what matters to them for their own sense whether it's a faith identity or a black identity or a sexual identity and so on so I would say that the transformation the gradual evolution of liberalism into a more inclusive group inclusive philosophy if I can call it that is good but it's getting stuck at this point when the most important groups who want to be included who have to be included are religious identity groups so I think that's the reform of secular institutions like the universities really need to embrace religious identity in the way that we've embraced gender identity and sexual identities and at the moment I don't know about other universities I assume they're the same as Bristol University we're making very big public statements and actions in terms of embracing you know the whole black lives movement and so black identities and the legacy of slavery and Bristol certainly has a big slavery story so I think we need to include groups like Muslims in exactly the same kind of way we mustn't exceptionalise and problematise religion in general or Islam and Muslims specifically. Thank you very much I mean of course for some optimism now I think in the end and that's certainly true of both of these fantastic books I see their question still coming in but unfortunately we we've run out of time and I can in this virtual world I can still hear the thunderous applause that I'm sure is going on from everybody watching and so on their behalf and on mine can I thank our panelists for a fantastic discussion and also for two more groundbreaking books which will keep us talking and give us food with thought for a long time to come thank you thank you for the thunderous applause thank you everyone and hope to see you again in the flesh as soon as possible. Thank you Peter thank you Armina for the festival of ideas it's brilliant thank you Arina bye bye bye bye bye thank you bye


Good morning, folks. For me, it's a tremendous pleasure to be here talking to such an interesting audience, right? I love the presentations that I saw so far. The DNA archive idea, it's brilliant, it's awesome, so I love to see that. And also, I love to see the presentation from the folks from Amazon. So very happy to be here. I only have 10 minutes, so I'm going to focus my presentation of how we can combine machine learning and user experience. We've been talking a lot about machine learning and how we can do incredible stuff, right, with machine learning. But I'm going to focus more today of how we can use this incredible technology to improve your life, to improve the life of the user who has experienced this technology. And that will be my approach today. So I'm going to start with this guy. This is Steven Melinowski. He's a pianist and an engineer. And he had an idea in the 70s. Actually, he had a hallucination in the 70s, probably with the help of some artificial, not our intelligence, but some artificial help. He had a hallucination when he was playing his piano at his house. He saw the notes from the paper, right, came into life. He saw the notes. He was playing Bach. Try to figure this out. He was playing Bach. And he saw the notes came from the paper. And he saw the notes dancing in the paper. And he was so delighted with this experience that he decided to develop something to replicate this hallucination, to develop a user interface where a user could see the music happening. And he learned how to, he bought a computer at the time. He learned how to code. And he developed the user interface that I'm going to show in the next video, interface. He changed, not just listen to the music, but also see the music, see the flow of the music. For example, I can say from my own home, this is my son, Miguel, he's six years old. And he loves now to listen classical music because he can see the flow of the music. And most of all, he can foresee what you happen with the music. For example, in the last clip, you had some ups and downs through the music. For example, my son, he gets really excited when he see that something is about to happen in the music. So through a user interface, this guy, Steven Malinovsky, he changed the way we can consume music. Another example that I have, and I know that probably we have folks here who like basketball. I know that Greg, I don't know if Greg is here. I know that they were a big fan of basketball. So this guy, Kirk Goldsbury, he used to be a cartographer who was doing research in Harvard, but then he decided to develop a map of how the basketball players was shooting from the court. So he came up, he had the idea to figure out who was the best shooter in the NBA using maps, using how they shoot from the court. And by the way, Steven Nash was the best shooter at the time in 2011. When he combined all this data, he realized that in terms of points per attempt, if you shoot from three or do a layup, that was the best shot at the time combining all the data. If I analyze points per attempt, the probability of you make the point from a three point or from the layup, from the paint, right? Your chance to make, to convert the point will be greater. So with that, in 2012, by the way, he presented this in the MIT, his Long Sport Conference, and he left the conference as a San Antonio Sports employee and because of this paper, and of course because of the studies that came after this paper, the NBA changed completely. If you're watching the NBA in the last year, for example, you're noticing that either people shoot from three or try to do a layup or a dunk, right? It's all about that because of course, in terms of economics, that's the best shoot that you can have in the NBA. And it's funny because here, the blue dots here on our left, it's the poorest shoot in the NBA right now, right? So that's exactly what made Michael Jordan, for example, immortal, right? So if you think Michael Jordan completely challenged the economics of the game. And this, for example, is Brook Lopes. He is a center, but basically he shoots a lot from three because he changed the way he plays because of this graph. So the reason I'm talking about this is to show you guys of how through a user interface we can change the way people interact with data, right? When people interact with the assets. And that's exactly what we're doing for Platform. We develop a platform 100% visual because we understand that people deal better with the asset, deal better with the data when people can see the data, when new users can navigate the data, can see, can manipulate the data. And sometimes we're using some device, you can touch the data, right? On your left here, for example, you can see all the metadata, all the metadata tagging, all the good stuff from machine learning, but most of just using machine learning, you need to see the data, you need to touch the data, you need to be able to navigate that. And of course, I understand that you guys probably were thinking, yeah, that's awesome, but I have so many assets, right? So how am I gonna browse 25 minutes of assets as the folks from Amazon mentioned earlier? And of course, here we need machine learning. We know that we need machine learning to help us to filter the noise, to help us to bring structure to this huge pile of unstructured data. But at the same time, we know, and I'm rushing here guys because I think I'm running out of time. But at the same time, we know that machine learning is awesome, but we're still just evolving with the technology, right? This is one of the famous paradox that you have with artificial intelligence, the Moravex paradox. Here, we know that the machine learning can solve very complex problems. No, machine learning can beat the best goal. Players can beat the chess players. But for example, in this video here, I'm getting a train coming out of the wall, right? What the machine learning is lacking in the picture from the right is, it lacks context, right? The same context that my daughter, my four-year daughter has, that she understands that a train, you not come out of the wall, the machine learning doesn't have this context yet. And this is as obvious as I can sound here. What drive us, what drive our product is, how we can combine machine learning and user experience to make you guys to combine all the machine learning intelligence with the context that you guys bring to the equation and how we can design products, these solve problems to this combination of machine learning and user experience. And I thought that this slide is so obvious that I can sound, that I try to make a little bit cooler with this headset and this chamber. Anyway. And here, this is gonna be probably my last slide. I love what the Amazon folks said about working backwards because that's exactly the way we think we should solve the problems. Here I have the gap between you guys or between a user who wants to find some content and here I have some content bagging to be found, right? The way we go here, it's literally backwards. I need to understand from the user perspective how the user wants to navigate the data, how, which kind of searches the user wants to apply. If the user wants to search by using questions, by using a natural language, if it's speech is more important than the visual, I want to understand from the user how I can make the data available to them. Then of course, I need to use machine learning, right? I need to have some power to filter the noise here. And then, by the way, in some case, I have the physical data that I need to digitalize, that I need to preserve, and we can do this when to end. For example, in this case, I want to see the user experience is you guys wanting to see all the clips from a particular camera cut, for example. Here I'm using machine learning to do similarity, to do image similarity, to find all the clips with this image from this camera. Here, for example, I have the act of pitching, right? The user interface here is, you guys trying to find players pitching the ball, and probably I want to combine this with logo from companies, right? You guys are giving me the feedback of what you expect from the data, and I'm using machine learning in the backend to provide the data. And finally, this one, I think it's awesome. This one, we search, right? Some archivist, for example, can have the idea of searching Willie Mays talking about Sandy Kofox, right? The biggest rival in the secrecy. And by doing facial similarity, for example, by searching by keywords, I can find this clip from Willie Mays, and in this clip, he's talking about what he thinks about Sandy Kofox, and his answer was strikeout. So, which is pretty awesome. And that's all, guys. That's all that I have for you.