Since 2015, universities in the United Kingdom have been charged with a legal duty to implement the counter-extremism policy ‘Prevent.’ The Prevent policy has been widely criticized by human rights organizations and grassroots groups for perpetuating racist surveillance. Within universities, the requirement to report people to police channels for their seemingly dangerous ideas and feelings would seem to be in tension with espoused institutional commitments to critical and open-ended thinking and non-discrimination. The policy effectively marks some topics unspeakable, and especially so when the speaker is (perceived as) Muslim. This lecture considers how administrators and educators have attempted to resolve these apparent tensions by framing counter-extremism as an unexceptional mode of care. Prevent has been instituted as a way of caring for the psychological well-being of students who might be vulnerable to extremist thinking in the future. In its fixation on preventing future violence, this approach to care renders past and present harm nearly unspeakable. The implementation of Prevent then reveals a troublesome temporality of care that shapes and is shaped by the racial politics of counter-extremism.

Speaker

Niyousha Bastani is a scholar of politics and international studies, currently based at the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. After receiving her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2023, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Evasion Lab at the University of Toronto. Her current book project elucidates how educational approaches to counter-extremism deploy dominant measures of care as racial measures of the human. Her most recent publication can be found in Theory, Culture, & Society (2024).

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