The reactionary use of concepts of secularism, pluralism and freedom of expression: implications for education studies

ABSTRACT

This paper is the text of a keynote address given at the Education Studies Association of Ireland Conference on March 31st 2023. Drawing on diverse examples of reactionary politics in Ireland and the UK such as protests against queer-inclusive education, the maintenance of sectarian and Catholic majoritarian schooling, and the use of ideas of 'free speech' arguments to shut down anti-racist education, Karl Kitching argues for vigilance against the use of ostensibly liberal ideas about secularism, pluralism and free expression to damage collective solidarity, equality and democracy in education and wider society.

KEYWORDS:

• Secularism
• pluralism
• freedom of speech
• reactionary politics
• education

Opening

It's a real honour to be invited to give this keynote lecture, and I want to thank Céline and the organising committee for the invitation. In this paper, I am going to discuss how ideas nominally associated with secularism, pluralism and/or freedom of expression are used in education contexts in ways that damage collective social solidarity both inside and outside education. Taking each concept one at a time, I will make the case that we cannot assume that secularism, pluralism and free expression carry naturally or self-evidently progressive meaning in education policy and political discourse. I’ll argue we need to reject how these ideas become used to damage collective solidarity, and we need to engage with difference and inequalities in education in ways that go beyond business as usual, and that are radically democratic in nature.

Why this topic?

I’ve chosen to talk about this topic for two main reasons. First, as educators and education researchers, we have an ethical responsibility to uphold democratic values and protect collective solidarity across different social groups. Those values are threatened by recent and current events in Ireland, the UK and internationally, such as protests against supports for asylum seekers, and the significant violence faced by transgender people both online and on the street. Democratic values are threatened by the bad faith ways that ideas that we think are simply good, such as secularism, pluralism and free expression, are being used to sow division, hate and harm. As educators, we have a duty to teach and research about these problems and how they affect students, teachers and communities, both online and in person.

But second, we also have duty to move beyond seeing these issues as fringe issues. While there has been some growing, uneven recognition of ethnic and gender diversity in education in some contexts in the past 10 years, we have to recognise the role that the business as usual of our institutions plays in giving fuel to so-called fringe movements. Fringe, reactionary groups are not fringe issues. The business-as-usual maintenance of an education system that rewards competition ahead of social solidarity is alienating for many, and damages the desire and capacity to be generous to different others. I argue it is up to us as educators not to tolerate violence against others, but to recognise the more mundane everyday role of education marginalisation in reproducing alienation and backlash. It’s also important to recognise that sometimes the most overtly hostile groups we encounter are themselves sometimes at the centre of policymaking and not at the fringe (Gillborn, Warmington, and McGimpsey 2022).

So, this lecture focuses deliberately, ambitiously and one after the other, on big ideas of secularism, pluralism and free expression. I will draw out and critique the problematic ways these big ideas and their associations are appearing currently in education contexts that I’ve been or have become familiar with through my work as an education academic between Ireland and the UK. I will draw on examples from different sources, include protests against queer-inclusive schools in Birmingham, the assimilationist concept of pluralism we have in our school systems across this island, and the problematic ways free speech and political expression is understood in current English education policy. Even though the examples from each context have their unique shape, they have relevance for all of us across Ireland, the UK and internationally. Because I focus on big ideas and complex problems, I won’t always be able to give easy answers to what educators should do to respond to them. But I hope that the issues raised will inspire greater confidence in the need to find a way to address these issues collectively.

Reactionary politics

When I refer to reactionary politics in this paper, I’m talking here about two diverse sets of forces. The first is more fringe, and includes racist, misogynist, homophobic and transphobic movements and organisations that are diverse in origins and goals, but share some affinities and interconnections across local, national and global scales. If you’re looking for an example of this, TG4’s Iniúchadh programme broadcast 2 weeks ago gave a very useful account of the existence of anti-migrant and specifically anti-asylum seeker groups. These groups’ demonstrations are taking place in a variety of towns and cities, and their numbers include long-term residents without very strong views on migration but sharing so-called ‘legitimate concerns’ about pressure on hospitals and schools, and activist groups who circulate conspiracy theories and lies about immigrants as a threat to Irishness and to women. Thankfully, counter-demonstrations and anti-racist and pro-migrant rallies have quickly responded. But the circulation of reactionary rhetoric is across social media, and attacks, demonstrations and threats appear to have become more prevalent, as do recent stunts for example, regarding queer-inclusive books in Cork library, and a ‘silent vigil’ to highlight the UN Migration Pact in Belfast.

Importantly, these reactionary forces don’t always use explicitly hateful or overtly confrontational language, and may consider themselves progressive on various fronts. This leads me to the second set of political forces that are much more institutionalised elements of our liberal democracies. They are different from the first group in that they may genuinely seek to fight against misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. But their progressiveness on issues of gender and sexuality often takes the shape of neoliberal racism. In other words, they are happy to benefit from globalisation but view individualist Western values as superior, and certain nations, and minority religious groups, as intrinsically threatening and in need of surveillance. It’s more uncomfortable to talk about this set of reactionary forces because they are institutionalised, and we live and breathe them through state policies and structures which emphasise essentialist notions of identity and difference, in ways that Kathleen Lynch might argue privilege self-interest over solidarity and care (Lynch 1987; 2022).

So, in thinking about reactionary politics in education, I’m thinking about how secularism, pluralism and freedom of expression can be used problematically at multiple scales: through grassroots groups and demonstrations that seek to demonise, through established policies on counterterrorism and school choice that work to divide and maintain social hierarchies, and through news and social media dynamics that allow false notions of ‘balance’ to platform discredited and dangerous ideas. Conceptually, I’m analysing secularism, pluralism and free speech here as ideas whose meaning is not predetermined or inherently good or bad, but performed in relation to other meanings, to become expressive of deeply problematic socio-political conditions that so-called ‘moderate’ governments themselves have the major hand in producing.

Reactionary secularist politics in education

I’ve written a paper with my colleague Reza Gholami analysing the most common ways secularism is understood in education research in the past 20 years (Kitching and Gholami 2023). As expected, secularism is defined largely as a political ideology which decouples state and religious authority, and may offer religious freedom and equality. All appears well. But drawing on the work of Mary Lou Rasmussen (2016) among others, we’ve identified a clear need for the literature to more systematically examine how both reactionary groups and policy itself can mobilise secular ideas in problematic ways.

A big part of this need to problematise how secular ideas are used comes what Catherine Nash and Kath Browne call ‘heteroactivism’. This is a form of politics that seeks to re-assert ‘the superiority and centrality of hetero- and gender-normative individuals and families as the foundation for strong and healthy societies’ (Nash and Browne 2020, 2). The perceived success of queer-inclusive education is a key target for heteroactivists, as seen in the Don’t Mess with My Kids movements in Latin America, as seen in protests in Belfast and Westport against drag story time, as well as the Enoch Burke case. Studying movements across the UK, Ireland and Canada, Nash and Browne (2020) outline how heteroactivist groups do not necessarily use hateful language or cite conservative theology in public. They instead use secular concepts such as private freedom of conscience, parental rights/home authority and child protection from state indoctrination. This more ‘civilised’ approach to anti-queer politics is partly indicative of the relative establishment success of queer movements.

But I would argue a need to develop a further critical vocabulary about how heteroactivists sow division using secular language and how the education establishment can respond itself by using secular language in almost equally problematic ways. Here I turn to a case from Birmingham, England. Just for some context, minority ethnic groups make up roughly 51% of Birmingham’s population. 30% of Birmingham’s population are Muslim people. The case I’m referring to is from 2019, whereby groups of conservative Muslim parents and activists demonstrated against queer-inclusive education on the street right outside two primary schools in Birmingham. The protests were widely covered in UK media with a concern that they would spread to communities in other cities. Of course Christian conservatives have been attempting to influence policy on sexuality in education in more establishment ways for many years prior.

In a paper on this issue (Kitching 2022), I analysed the media representation of the protestors and those defending the schools. The predominantly Muslim protestors were represented implicitly as using secular ideas to frame schools as politically neutral public spaces, where committed beliefs and ideas (either about religion or sexuality) should remain private. Protestors were routinely quoted as viewing LGBT equality as a ‘belief’ – and in at least one case as a ‘religion’ – that they ostensibly respected, but which schools should not ‘promote’, and which should remain largely private. For example, at one primary school, a parent organising a petition was quoted as saying:

I respect all religions but why should sexuality be taught to primary school age children? (McManus 2019)

Of course, the idea that queerness is a private choice that shouldn’t be ‘promoted’ in schools has been around for decades. But the protestors were using the secular language that ‘belief’ is a private matter and reworking this to say that ‘symbols of belief’ in queerness such as flags and pride marches should be left behind in public education. This form of public political expression hasn’t totally escaped a religious framing, and I don’t mean an Islamic framing as such. What I mean is that the public political language of private belief they are using is historically the language of Christian secular colonisers that portrays other religions as unable to separate their public persona from their private commitments. The arguments of the protestors about removing queer ‘beliefs’ and symbols from schools in some ways mirror the commonly expressed, racialised idea in the West that Muslims should avoid symbols of Islam, such as clothing and prayer, in public contexts. I argue the Birmingham protests were expressive not simply of a fixed set of conservative religious commitments, but of the pain caused by racialised public scrutiny of Muslims’ religious practices inflicted through ongoing counterterrorist surveillance on the one hand and deep socio-economic inequalities on the other. The reactionary secularist tactics used by the protestors focused on privatisation are part of a quest to draw the line ‘between public and private, walling off the family and its patriarchal privilege from the market, where humiliation and dispensability have become the norm’ (Butler 2019, 959).

At the same time, those defending queer-inclusive education were represented as deploying a different secular idea of ‘modern British values’ and the goodness of the law as a response. In so doing painted a false picture of Britain as secular and therefore enlightened. For example, one the school leaders was quoted as saying:

Some parents struggle with aspects of the Equality Act … but the vast majority of parents understand that … living in the UK, you can be different, but you can get along with other people … we want all children in Birmingham to know that their family is normal, that their family is accepted and welcomed in schools. (Sharples 2019)

Here, queer freedom is made the very marker of British sovereign and juridical power and its progressiveness. In contrast to protestors’ framing of LGBT equality and/or queerness as a ‘belief’ that remains under private authority, queerness is presented by those defending it here as ‘an intrinsic part of the individual self, which cannot be repressed … but needs to be confessed and practiced without restrictions’ (Van den Brandt 2018, p. 71). This will to publicly name and categorise sexuality as the only route to being sexually emancipated arguably conflates queer identity with its embodied doing, and aligns it with racialised notions of national belonging.

This is a complex issue, and of course, it shouldn’t be left just to schools to sort out. It requires multi-layered engagement of communities at multiple scales. But it’s important as educators that we don’t become drawn into immediately taking sides and further pitting minoritised groups against each other. I argue we need to be alert to the reactionary use of secular language to require the privatisation or the making public of a small, narrow number of ways of embodying sexuality or religion. We need to engage religious and sexual cultures as complex, dynamic and entangled with social, economic and political interests locally and globally.

Returning to this island, personally and as an academic, I do appreciate the history of how violently religious institutions have handled, and in many cases still handle, sexual and gender identity, and that there’s legitimate mistrust around the engagement of religion, gender and sexuality together for this reason. But we need to be able to distinguish the problem of religious majoritarian dominance from the need for religious youth, particularly religiously minoritised youth, to access sex education in a way they can belong to. We can’t tackle religious domination by just getting rid of religion. ‘More secularism’ or ‘better secularism’ doesn’t automatically mean the dismantling of patriarchal ways of doing things. Put bluntly, I’d rather those desiring a ‘secular’ RSE – meaning RSE without religious values – would focus instead on achieving a common school system that does a reasonably good job at holding conversations about religion and sexuality in a safe and trusting public education context. The question of school systems brings me to the issue of pluralism and how it is used for reactionary, exclusionary purposes.

Reactionary ‘pluralist’ politics in education

It’s worth saying first that there really isn’t a sustained conversation that I can see on what pluralism in education across the island is or what it means – apart from research such as that by James Nelson and Jones Irwin funded by SCoTENS (Nelson and Irwin 2017). So, I tread with added caution here. I’ll start with William Connolly, the renowned American political theorist of pluralism. He has argued that traditional, secular pluralism, that allows different faiths to emerge into the public sphere, is thin and procedural, and it’s too easily swallowed up by ‘thick idea’ of a strong nation. I would argue that thin secular pluralism is also no match for the sheer force of neoliberal cultivation of self-interest. But my critique of thin secular pluralism is not a rejection of common, public education. Thinking about schooling across Ireland, we have a specific type of pluralism that are steeped in the ‘thick ideas’ of sectarian Christianity. These ideas predate current neo-liberal fantasies of individual parent choice being a solution to the problem of providing different school types.

But historic support for personal religious conscience in education has become strongly aligned with, and in some cases subsumed by, neoliberal forms of educational self-interest. This has led to a very fragmented form of school governance whereby on this island, ‘public’ ‘common’ ‘equality-based’ ‘multidenominational’ or ‘integrated’ schooling has never been the overarching logic of the school systems. So-called common schooling is just another very hard-won minority ‘choice’, and the other choice is almost always to assimilate. I don’t believe this was ever right, but it’s even less right with major demographic change. I’ll give two examples of the expectation to assimilate in the south from the book Childhood, Religion and School Injustice (Kitching 2020). The first is an example of not being Catholic enough, articulated in an interview with a Nigeran mother:

Esther: Father Howard came (to our home) … because I used to go to St. Joseph’s church. But I just stop it for some time and I went to my (African Pentecostal) church in (the city). And I think they were asking my son Stephen which church do you go to? And my son says we didn't go to this church, we went to church in the city. So the teacher told the Father Howard she doesn't think we are -

Karl: Catholic

Esther: … And I explained to Father Howard we are Catholic … I told him that I loved to come to their church, but they are not friendly … they can’t even say ‘happy Sunday!’ to you! … so I’m not comfortable. I told the Father … the way they just, not all of them, don't get me wrong, some people say hi … (but) the way they just look at you. (Kitching, 2020, 92)

Another example of the expectation to assimilate is from Monica, a white, settled Irish Catholic mother with a child making their communion in a rural Catholic school:

Monica: About the Catholic ethos in the school – I like the way that they get kids who aren’t making their communion, they still get them involved with it. It’s not like they are standing out in the corner, like Billy- no-mates. If they want, if the parents want. They get involved. (Kitching 2020, 95)

Pluralism is certainly a more sustained and overt policy discourse in education policy in the south, and perhaps the continuity of government in the south has facilitated that. But that pluralism in the south is essentialist and assimilationist: it means non-Catholic and non-Christian school providers are welcome to join a quasi-market dominated by legacy majoritarian interests, namely the Catholic Church. Historic forms of parent activism for common forms of schooling, in the form of movements like Educate Together are increasingly channelled into small scale deliberations over a minority of schools to potentially be divested from Catholic control.

Certainly a key part of the need for school change from my perspective is dismantling of the patronage system altogether – which is not the same as getting rid of faith schools. But there needs to be a simultaneous public conversation about what we understand childhood and plurality to be. We’re missing a major trick if we think that plurality is something that exists out there in society only. Each child and adult is plural, contain multitudes and encounter the world in ways that are irreducible to absolute truth claims not just of religion, but also reason, rights and science. The plural child in particular is an epistemological challenge to all of us. Our fixed model of identities works on the basis that each generation transmits some socio-religious essence to the next; we somehow miss in our conversations about maintaining community that liberal families can have conservative children and vice versa. There’s no point in having a child-focused but adult-centred conception of intergenerational relations, whereby only the child has to fit into a prescribed map of plural but fixed identities on the island, or ‘make a choice about what to believe later’ as if their upbringing didn’t shape them in some way.

Second, we need to move beyond seeing pluralism as just about religion or indeed just about humans. It is frustrating that critical pedagogies of neoliberalism and climate are not part of the policy conversation about ethics and beliefs. This to me is reflective of the thin procedural secular pluralism we are using to counter majoritarianism: perversely, by attempting to ‘manage religion’ out of the political sphere in education, we’re defining religion and ethics in extremely thin terms, and allowing political-economic forces like neoliberalism, which sit alongside or profit from majoritarianism and sectarianism, to go untouched. That, to me, is reactionary. So, I argue that we need to engage epistemologically with what we think a ‘good’ childhood is, and what we understand that to mean with respect to the past, present and future.

Reactionary ‘free expression’ politics in education

I’ll come back to the question of deep engagement with plurality at the end, but turning towards free expression: the notion of free speech has often been used to drive division by reactionary movements and commentators. The idea that freedom of expression on questions of race and faith equality is ‘under threat’ in university campuses has become repopularised by right wing social movements in recent years (Titley 2020). The UK government has in turn introduced legislation to regulate the ‘intolerance of ideas that challenge conventional wisdom’ (Department for Education [DfE] 2021, 17).

But paradoxically, schools in England have been recently cautioned by government about their engagement of race equality issues. For example, headteachers have been told to remain neutral on Israel-Palestine, and schools have been advised that it is unlawful to present race-based social advantage (‘white privilege’) as a fact (The Guardian 2021; Trilling 2020). This is not the first time there’s been a disjuncture between UK higher education policy discourses of ‘protection of free speech’ on the one hand and school-focused policy discourses focused on ‘protecting children’ from anti-racist and other progressive views on the other. For example, in response to anti-fascist, anti-racist and wider progressive student organising, Margaret Thatcher’s government introduced an Education (No. 2) Act (1986) to ensure universities ‘protect free speech’ on campus. In the school sector, the views of so-called ‘loony left’ local authorities and teachers, rather than children and young people, have been the historic focus of Conservative scaremongering (Bonnett and Carrington 1996). Key examples include the introduction of Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988) to prevent local authorities and teachers from ‘promoting’ homosexuality, and moral panics about local authorities’ anti-racism programmes.

In particular, the idea that intolerance can be defeated through rational debate in the seminar room ignores (a) power relations on university campuses and (b) the fact that many young people experience and challenge various forms of intolerance long before adulthood. But there’s been little research on this point, and it’s for that reason that we’ve developed a Leverhulme Trust-funded study on the issue. Using national surveys and in-depth case studies, this project is mapping the conditions that ‘make’ youth expression on race and faith issues across school and public contexts in England, and particularly in Birmingham and London.

Part of the research involves an analysis of UK and English policies, to examine the ways subjects and objects of expression, i.e. who can express themselves, and what can be expressed, are recognised within policy itself. We have read and coded dozens of policy texts from the past 12 years of Conservative government. We are focusing on particular policies that shape the environment for expression in schools, including policies on academies, curriculum, student representation, behaviour, equality, safeguarding and inspection.

I’ll just refer to one of the themes that arose in the first paper Aslı Kandemir, Reza Gholami, Md. Shajedur Rahman and I published on the issue (Kitching et al. 2024), and that’s the theme of vulnerability. The question of vulnerability, and who and what can be designated as truly deserving of protection, is key element of right-wing free speech politics: for example, racialised minorities might argue their political expression makes them vulnerable, but this is not considered acceptable or real to right wing politicians and commentators. Of course, most school-focused policy texts don’t talk about whose political expression is vulnerable or not vulnerable. However, these policy texts also establish an index of who deserves, or in this case, must have, protection. But this index of who deserves protection serves a much wider range of purposes than free expression (e.g. eligibility for Free School Meals).

In fact, youth expression barely registers as a concern. The engagement of children and young people’s voices is only explicitly recommended in two sets of education policy texts. The first is the duty cited in the Keeping Children Safe in Education safeguarding policy (2022, 26) to ensure ‘the child’s wishes and feelings are taken into account’ when acting on a safeguarding concern. The second is the Ofsted gathering of evidence from pupils by school inspectors on issues such as the quality of teaching, effectiveness of anti-bullying and behaviour policies, the climate of peer respect and feelings of safety in the school. Certainly, England’s Political Impartiality Guidelines for Schools state ‘no subject is off limits … as long as it is treated in an age-appropriate way’ (DfE 2022). Age-appropriateness is a term used here to invoke a notion that children all go through the same stages of becoming conscious of political issues. But the adultification of racially and religiously minoritised children through the enactment of counterterror and policing policies is absent from such invocations of development and age-appropriateness. Categorisations of acceptable and unacceptable vulnerability are deployed discernably differently in higher education discourse. But schools are to allow young people to be vulnerable in relation to speech that is itself already exceptional and not regarded as political: namely safeguarding and inspection disclosures. The notion that young people are political is entirely absent.

Deep engagement with plurality

To come towards the end, a key aspect of right-wing free speech politics is what Titley (2020) critiques as ‘viewpoint diversity’, namely the need for lots and lots of ideas, even offensive ones, to be articulated to reach ‘the truth’ in a ‘civil’ debate. You couldn’t find a more shallow or bad faith example of engagement with plurality than this. The absolutist prizing of viewpoint diversity has clear limits, given the emboldening of far-right, racist, misogynist, transphobic and homophobic sentiment internationally. So what are we to do? Drawing again on William Connolly, meaningful engagement with plurality requires education scholars and practitioners to use our judgement to:

Embrace certain things in this particular place, to be indifferent to some, to be wary of others, and to fight militantly against the continuation of yet others … pluralists set limits to tolerance to ensure that an exclusionary … movement does not take over an entire regime. (Connolly 2005, 42–43)

Many would argue that there is not a real risk of reactionary movements taking over politics on the island of Ireland – but assumption relies on a very narrow view of what reactionary means. As Mondon and White (2020) outline in their book Reactionary Democracy, we need to consider the role that liberal, mainstream thought plays in enabling hate, through the maintenance of deep inequalities, the labelling of all forms of populist response as equally bad, and the blaming of socio-political problems purely on ignorance, rather than on ordinary, racialised (neo-)liberal governance. This is where weak notions of political impartiality in education fall down; they present whatever equalities and rights that are currently institutionalised as something that just benignly administered by the state, rather than something that was and is fought for by social movements, including educators. While posing fears about indoctrination, prevailing notions of pluralism, secularism and political impartiality in education discourage necessary critical pedagogies about racial neoliberalism, using children’s vulnerability as an excuse. So to put it directly, education studies need to be researching and talking about reactionary movements in education, and education institutions need to teach about them, not as a fringe that pops up now and again, but as having deeper roots in the exclusions that occur in our institutions.

So the task for Education Studies in Ireland is to take heed that:

• Liberal secular ideas of the religious being private are insufficient and easily turned against queer movements to argue for everyone’s privatisation. We need to re-affirm education spaces as political, and in so doing, challenge articulations of religion and sexuality as entirely public or private issues.

• Attempts to change school systems for public/common purposes are needed, but they need a strong consideration of what pluralism/plurality is, in ways that complicate and enrich people’s identities and conceptualisations of what a good childhood is (including whether a neoliberal childhood is what people want).

• The bad faith use of ‘free expression’ arguments by racist groups is not just a fringe issue: it’s embedded in the ways that we define acceptably vulnerable forms of expression from children and young people, and the ways we do not listen when, for example, Traveller children raise their voices.

I believe that those who can should fight for collective solidarities both within and outside of education institutions, as neither one on its own is sustainable. It is necessary to imagine and continue to build movements and spaces of solidarity inside and outside education institutions on multiple scales that are attuned to education becoming public and becoming democratic. I use the term ‘becoming’ public after Biesta (2012), but also becoming democratic to focus on process, because that’s what a radically democratic perspective is: it’s not about assuming we have a model that works, it’s about emancipatory practice. It is a necessarily agonistic, not consensualist process, where reasonable conflict is inevitable and things we don’t choose are necessary. Becoming public and becoming democratic also call for an anti-essentialist approach to our identities and commitments that don’t see them as fixed and focus affirmatively on enriching and nuancing rather than rejecting our deep commitments (Kitching 2020). The capacity to engage with the fallibility and contestability of our worldviews is absolutely central to this process, but majority and dominant groups have to put in more work than anyone else. Becoming public and becoming democratic has to utterly reject the concepts of meritocracy and equality of opportunity as effective ways to bring about social change and call for the factors outside of education which impact so heavily on education outcomes: housing, employment, income and health to take responsibility. Becoming public and becoming democratic cannot be satisfied with thin, uncritical forms of secular pluralism that only focus on religion and fail to engage multiple aspects of our personal and social lives such as household organisation, caring labour, climate and non-human life. But if all this seems too much to take in, or its somewhat new to you and you’re feeling unsure where to start, I’d ask you to do two things. First, avoid assuming that the concepts associated with secularism, pluralism and freedom of expression carry self-evidently good meaning, and watch how they’re being use to either advance social justice or worsen inequalities. Second, I invite you to ask which children and young people are we protecting when we don’t talk with them about difficult issues of inequality and build the conversation from there.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karl Kitching

Karl Kitching is Professor of Public Education at University of Birmingham, UK. He has published several papers on questions of race and religion in education in Ireland. These include the books The Politics of Compulsive Education: Racism and Learner-Citizenship (Routledge 2014) and Childhood, Religion and School Injustice (Cork University Press 2020). He is currently leading a Leverhulme Trust funded study titled 'Free Expression at School? The Making of Youth Engagements with Race and Faith', collaborating with Prof Reza Gholami, Dr Aslı Kandemir and Dr Md. Shajedur Rahman.