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ERIC Number: EJ1456450
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025
Pages: 23
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0268-0939
EISSN: EISSN-1464-5106
Available Date: N/A
Education Policy and 'Free Speech' on Race and Faith Equality at School
Journal of Education Policy, v40 n1 p66-88 2025
Right-wing populists have recurrently created moral panics internationally about the supposed need to 'protect free speech' in higher education (HE), and 'protect children' from progressive speech in schools. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of how such dynamics function with respect to race and faith equality in a national school policy context. Drawing on a critical post-structural framework, we conceptualise the policy problematisation of "speech" as situated in a wider set of coercion-consent governing strategies used to manage contemporary authoritarian neoliberal contradictions, and to narrow the "speakability" of anti-racist and faith equality concerns. We present a two-stage thematic and discursive analysis of a corpus of primarily school-focused English policy texts from successive Conservative-led governments (2010-2022). The analysis outlines three main policy strategies which narrow speakability: the defining of 'good' schools and citizens with limited/oppositional reference to race equality, the problematising of 'dangerous' speech, and the indexing of school/HE subjects who are "truly" vulnerable to political speech. The paper offers an urgent case study of how possibilities for progressive race and faith-based expression are shaped beyond explicitly speech-focused policies, and argues that engagement of the complex governance of speakability offers nuanced possibilities for analysing bans on progressive education internationally.
Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United Kingdom; United States
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A