Keywords

1.1 Ricœur, Concerns and Objectives

As part of a series on great thinkers and their approaches to education, this book is about the important French philosopher Paul RicœurFootnote 1 (1913–2005) and the relevance of his work for improving the state of higher education in Britain in the 2020s. I will compare and contrast Ricœur’s struggles in two different university systems—mid twentieth century France and late twentieth century USA, especially the University of Chicago—with current issues around populism on UK campuses.

Historically, binary populist arguments have often proposed that government is corrupt and that the people’s needs are suffering (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017). Currently, a different populist argument is deployed by politicians, the media and their allies: seeking to deflect attention from increasing demands to tackle historical wrongs such as slavery, they argue, through the waging of a ‘culture war’, that there is a corrupting force on campus that vilifies the white public’s cultural heritage (such as the history of empire). A culture war is a conflict between groups (often liberal versus conservative) over the nature and values of the cultural heritage to which they both lay claim. Another term that can be used is free speech wars, whereby a populist binary is created between unrestricted free speech (libertarianism) and the silencing of free speech (no platforming). To analyse these binaries, I will draw on Ricœur’s strengths (using language constructively, helping us to challenge populism and its binaries, aspiring to a rich learning and teaching environment for all) whilst also highlighting his limitations (appearing unable or unwilling to apply his ideas on mutual recognition to American students’ attempts to reduce racism and discrimination). As an older white woman, I have researched Ricœur for twenty years, and have been impressed and comforted by his balanced, irenic approach to selfhood, society and linguistic awareness. Ricœur developed a form of philosophical anthropology that attempts to balance identity and alterity and pours energy into understanding the dissymmetry that characterizes human relationships. His philosophy is characterized by humility, spirituality and an insatiable longing for unattainable wholeness.

Ricoeur is important to the question of the way potentially incendiary subjects are discussed on campus, because he was at the heart of the 1968 events in French universities, in which the response to entrenched positions, and a sense of injustice and imbalance between students and the teaching staff (and, beyond them, the government), led to riots, destruction and a painful and gradual reaching towards a truce-like resolution. Exactly these same potent conflicts are present in today’s British universities, and yet they are failing to spur protest.

So, in our current predicament, is his approach enough? One of the most fundamental socio-political issues today is the nexus of free speech, identity politics and university funding problems, which are set against the backdrop of the nasty perseverance of marginalization, systemic violence and brutal racialized othering. Faced with this, I now finally understand that there is a discrepancy between Ricœur’s capacity to unify ideas and his failure to understand human difference. Having disingenuously thought for decades that my supposedly non-racist kindness will suffice to remedy systemic discrimination, I now see that I have secretly known about my privilege all my life, which triggers the urgent need to acknowledge and act upon my bias in a much more explicit way. Perhaps I should have read George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Lipsitz 1998), which demonstrates how public policy and private need combine to protect the needs of the dominant, mostly white, groups; but maybe I would still not have seen the need to act. I can appreciate how I allowed myself to make the same mistakes Ricœur did, because of not experiencing negative, racially-rooted discrimination. In Britain and in Europe I have never feared being, nor will I ever be, subjected to ‘stop and search’ by police. I will never be racially profiled while seeking access to the House of Commons in Westminster. I will never be physically attacked because of the colour of my skin. When I arrive at the university campus, I am never mistaken for a cleaner when I am in fact a university professor. In Europe, I am white and privileged; globally, I am part of a minority who behave like a majority. I propose we can learn from Ricœur’s and my bias blind spot, which protected us both from understanding the personal role white people play in discrimination and racism.

Ricœur offers us a philosophy for higher education that is based upon his enduring belief that we can, and indeed must, honour the urgent need for us all to communicate better with each other and with ourselves. He was an anti-colonial activist in the Franco-Algerian colonial debate and later worked with government as an advisor on issues such as citizenship and migration. Ricœur protested openly with students and academics at the Sorbonne about the torture in Algeria and the urgent need for the French to liberate Algeria. We will see in the chapter on Nanterre (Chap. 5) that he fully supported the student leaders in their demands for negotiation, despite misgivings about the efficacy of such a process. Yet in the chapter on the USA (Chap. 6), I show that he felt discomfort about identity politics being used as a basis for protest. Thus, I will show that some forty years after his fight against French colonialism in Algeria, he was unable to deal with the repercussions of American subjugation of peoples of colour through slavery. When global majority studentsFootnote 2 made demands for recognition on US campuses, his understanding and responses were inadequate. This response shows a lack of awareness about the powerful praxis developed in Chicago during his time there by black students, students of Latin-American heritage and middle-class white students to mobilise groups not only on campus but across all communities in order to correct injustices. This is a model that could be followed to considerable benefit in the UK. Solidarity can only develop when white populations acknowledge the privilege they secretly know they have, and accept that the economy, the environment and society are in desperate and urgent need of solidarity across groups that will facilitate activism currently inhibited by so-called ‘culture wars’.

Despite Ricœur’s failure to act, his dialectical approach (identifying and moderating the antagonistic effects of the false binaries we use to shape our understanding) stands strong and is urgently needed in the 2020s to challenge the way in which British universities are being squeezed by a pincer grip formed of libertarians in government and no-platformers on campus; Ricœur’s work provides antidotes and counter arguments to both these extremisms in this culture war in which the libertarian nationalist wants to ‘protect’ British traditions from the multicultural ‘modernizing’ impulses of the no-platformer. Depending on your view, one position is positive and the other is negative. Ricœur advocated avoiding quick decision-making, preferring extensive discussion of one argument against another, and he proposed that all decisions must be provisional because circumstances and contexts change. His dialectical position challenged both Hegel, who attempted to make too little of the negative by cancelling it out (Hegel 1991), and Horkheimer and Adorno who arguably made too much of the negatives faced by modern Europe post World War 2 (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). Instead, for Ricœur, as I will show, it is the interplay of both negative and positive that is important.

What makes Ricœur’s work invaluable despite its flaws, is that it is premised on an affirmative humanism that can help us to rediscover the power of debate; and yet, the caveat must be added, it is not enough in this time of what Edward Said called the ‘reductive and vulgarizing us-versus-them’ model (Said 2004, 50). In his 2023 book Not So Black and White, Kenan Malik describes a different yet related binary: the tension between ‘a desire to push out and create a more universal perspective and a retreat into a narrow, racialized sense of identity’ (Malik 2023, 226); he also provides an analysis of ‘the reactionary roots of much contemporary radical identity politics’ (Malik 2023, 276). I propose to show in my book that such tensions are in fact core to our being but that Ricoeur represents them in ways that preclude resolution. We must accept dichotomies, but also push back against those who exaggerate these polarizations in inflammatory ways. I will show, for example, how the prevalent rhetoric of a culture war confected by state actors and media confuses us and silences our attempts to achieve some sort of balance between our personal and group needs and identities. To achieve such balance we need to understand universalism as giving more support than we might think reasonable to those who suffer the racialisation of society.

To deal with these us-versus-them pincer grips, I propose supplementing Ricœur’s dialectical method with three interrelated levels of action, each of which requires that we believe in our personal agency to use the power of language for discussing, explaining and understanding better in order to act well. My strategy to resolve this is to apply a threefold model: three interdependent ways of exercising personal agency, using Ricoeur’s faith in the power of language. Think of a Russian doll (they are called Matryoshka dolls), where one large wooden doll conceals within her a smaller doll, and that doll within her a yet smaller one, and so on. In this analogy, Communities of Inquiry (Cofl) (see Sect. 3.3) is the smallest doll at the heart of a set of three. She shows the necessity of open yet commonly agreed discussion in any situation in which we find ourselves. The larger doll she sits in is the ‘politics of pedagogy’, which is the Influencing the Corridors of Power (ICOP) project (see Sect. 7.9). When we unite in a politics of pedagogy, we take the learning and teaching outside the classroom into parliament and the wider world, a place where politics is about being a person who challenges the epistemic injustice of not being considered to have valid views and learns how to interact with politicians and groups outside the university. This is also one of the moral technologies for what I call polity praxis, the largest of the three dolls and the most encompassing pragmatist approach to a better society: this is the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) Communities of Inquiry across the Generations (see Sect. 7.10). Through polity praxis citizens without party-political positions can become part of the political debate and bring both their demands and their expertise into policymaking. At these second and third levels, I propose activist engagement with parliament and with policymakers that reduces the democratic deficit by improving political literacy amongst university students and staff. In the current politicised climate of education, this activism takes place at the intersection of education, politics, culture and nationalism. Young Ricœur engaged in such activism; older Ricœur did not.

Focusing on the first of these three dolls, Communities of Inquiry has a fourfold typology of positions for pragmatist discussions: liberal, guarded liberal, libertarian and no-platforming. The liberal and guarded liberal approaches to discussion (with occasional use of libertarian approaches) have been the discourse styles that universities have traditionally prided themselves on: liberalism (i.e. free discussion within legal limits on the assumption—possibly unfounded—of general agreement in a group) can be replaced by guarded liberalism to take account of possible cultural, gendered, religious or ethnic differences of opinion. No-platforming is the extreme version of the guarded liberal approach, which can now be found in class and around campus, reflecting the increasing tendency to avoid using language that could cause upset or offence rather than exploring differences to resolve them; the assumption is that the discussion itself may harm minority groups, and they ought to be afforded particular protection. For example, in class and around campus it has recently become difficult to discuss gender identity, and especially transgender identity—a difficulty which perpetuates confusion and negativity. Libertarians, on the other hand, assert in an equally damaging way that we all have the right to speak as freely as we wish, even if we upset others, or precisely because we can. Recourse to this fourfold typology (liberal, guarded liberal, libertarian and no-platforming) ensures that the parameters for dealing with offence are clear, and it is a helpful mechanism to explore the topics raised in this book, which include free speech, racism, Islamophobia and the state of the university sector.

1.2 Economic Inequality and the Modern University: 1968 and Today

To explore these topics, the 2020s English university system will provide the context; yet it is worth noting that 1968 was a tumultuous year in many universities across the world as they provided a heady atmosphere for children born after World War 2 who wanted to right the social and cultural wrongs that faced them in the societies they were born into (Reader and Wadia 1993).

In 1968 Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, Vietnam war protests reached a peak and the Tet offensive in Vietnam demonstrated America’s weakness. There is an important economic background too. In 1966, financial markets worldwide had suffered the first (largely unknown and unnoticed) post-war crash: it emanated from America and set the pattern for future instability in money markets worldwide with a toxic combination of fast financial technology, slow regulation and cunning banks (Stepek 2017). This created a lending boom followed by a shortage of money.

Students took recourse to protest and affiliation with progressive politics to demand correctives for racism, human rights violations, foreign wars, economic difficulties and the hegemony of empire, with protests bubbling up on campuses in North and South America, Europe and Japan. Some of these 1968 protests were effective in ways that seem unimaginable in 2023: together, French students and trade unions nearly brought the country to a standstill as President de Gaulle briefly fled France. By contrast, today, increased levels of surveillance, censorship and restrictions on protest severely limit the opportunities and prospects for students to demand change, especially in China, India and Russia where protest is brutally suppressed, but also in the countries I focus on herein: France, the UK and the US.

France resolved its 1968 crisis; yet the economic difficulties were just beginning and they have since become much worse. In his Brief History of Equality, French economist Thomas Piketty shows us that we, in capitalist nation states, are held hostage by our own inability (and our governments’ unwillingness) to redistribute wealth in ways that are equitable, fair and universally productive (Piketty 2022). Although for thirty years after the Second World War, an equitable redistribution of wealth in capitalist nation states seemed attainable, by the 1970s the combination of wars and unequal taxation systems favoured the very rich; this led to ever-growing increases in inequalities that have not been reversed since. In addition, it is now clear that much of the huge, accumulated wealth and privilege of that minority of economically powerful people—the middle classes and the very rich 1%—can be traced back to the wealth accumulated from empires we thought were dead (Savage 2021). Moreover, as Savage explains in The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past, this wealth is perpetuated by patterns of exploitation that resemble imperial ideologies, as seen for example in the way cities dominate their surroundings and are under heavy surveillance, and which host gated communities to protect the rich, but which are serviced by the poor, including students, many of whom are in long term debt (Savage 2021).

The modern British university is much changed from 50 years ago and is in crisis: it is constrained in the money it can spend, the language it can use and the subjects it can teach, and it has been marketized to provide a serviced product. The mood in wider society is volatile, as is manifested in populist accusation and counter-accusation, social media addiction, insult and propagandist shouting, as well as a cost-of-living crisis that shows how weakened civil society has become. We define ourselves currently more by the degree of offence we cause each other than by the degree of affection we feel for each other. The modern university now serves a larger, more representative student population than it previously has done; yet, remarkably, the university sector is unwilling, unable or unready to respond to the heated debates around democracy, free speech and race. Structural racism is real: in 2020, 38.2% of white graduates were awarded a first-class degree, compared with 19.1% of black graduates. This does, however, mark a discernible improvement since in the last six years the percentage gap between white and black graduates being awarded a first class or a 2.1 degree went down from 26.3 to 20.0% (UCAS 2022; Higher Education Statistics Agency 2022). Progress, nevertheless, is slow and the government denies structural racism despite clear evidence to the contrary (Campbell 2022). The university sector is also losing its funding for arts and humanities subjects, where counternarratives to such denials could traditionally find expression. All the while, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s nineteenth century dream of an Enlightenment campus where cool true wisdom is nurtured through teaching underpinned by research is still secretly aspired to by many academics.

1.3 Understanding the Other

Ricœur developed powerful arguments about our constant need, as he saw it, to understand ourselves by how we understand the other and how we see ourselves reflected in the other. In this book I apply his ideas to two groups that are frequently ‘othered’ on British university campuses: Muslim students and staff and black students and staff (I will also use the term people of colour). Black and white are racialized terms bound up with the history of torment or privilege endowed by societies upon skin colour. Muslim groups are thought to be dangerous and are subjected to the state’s relentless application of an anti-extremist lens which has a chilling effect on freedom of expression. Students and staff of colour are thought to be somehow inferior and are increasingly exposed to the effects of libertarian populist attacks upon those features of HE that attempt to reduce systemic racism (decolonisation, diversity training and antiracism initiatives). With both groups we witness how the freedom of expression of some will curtail the freedom of expression, if not the silencing, of others.

To address these issues, we need to challenge Ricoeur’s approach. As a universalist, he avoided dealing with the realities of individuals’ experiences of racism. Instead, he preferred to set these in a broader, more abstract context—the ‘human condition’, and the tendencies discernible in people’s actions, irrespective of their colour. However, owing to distortions of history, we experience others and are experienced differently by them depending on skin colour, facial features, religion and gender—and the politics of the culture wars and populism exacerbate this. We thus need to consider how the less heard voice can express itself—in the ways it would authentically choose—in linguistic and social contexts controlled by another with a history of domination. This may include women students wanting to speak in seminars, Muslims on campus seeking not to be labelled as terrorists, black students hoping not to be academically underestimated by their skin colour, and Jewish students who do not wish to be measured solely by their views on Zionism. Ricœur’s universalist conciliatory ideas about our moral use of language are not enough: they require the practical scaffolding of the pragmatist tradition, which insists upon taking the individual human perspective seriously and exploring the ways in which our personal beliefs and habits influence our behaviour and vice versa. I juxtapose his work at the University of Chicago with that of early pragmatist, Jane Addams (1860–1935), whose community-based practices in her work with migrants in Chicago created a template for the ‘community of inquiry’ (Addams 1910). Addams was a forerunner to feminist standpoint epistemology in implementing her belief that knowledge is in many ways contextual and gendered and that the wider context is the community. I will also use the work of university professor Danielle Allen who recommends political friendship, personal sacrifice and the bold use of rhetoric in anti-discriminatory endeavours in her book Talking to strangers (Allen 2004), which she wrote when based at the University of Chicago.

By complementing Ricœur’s work with the pragmatist approaches of Addams and Allen, the Communities of Inquiry model I propose is more of an organising principle than a method and is based upon two beliefs that deserve reinvigoration after having been weakened and sidelined by the dominance of political ideologies based upon accusatory antagonisms. The first tenet of a Community of Inquiry is that it is both necessary and worthwhile to discuss intractable problems with a view to finding some sort of resolution; and second, that procedural ethics (clear, morally grounded, mutually agreed guidelines for conversational conduct) are paramount both for enabling productive discussion and also for understanding these intractable problems.

1.4 Populism’s Binaries and Ricœur

In order to conceal state-imposed hardships, authoritarian populism’s brutal binaries demand adversarial non-cooperation and create a militant ‘law and order’ rhetoric in opposition to a rights agenda. Stuart Hall explains how ‘to raise the question of rights and civil liberties is tantamount to declaring oneself a “subversive”’ (Hall 2021: 79–80). Creating and adopting false binaries and aggressively negating the opposing position creates adversarial stalemates. Such wrangling destroys the two classical pillars of rational or even sensible thought: first, if we want to understand ourselves and others, we need propositions that are non-contradictory; and second, these propositions should cohere as part of a recognisable argument with which every party can engage.

At the same time, contradictory binaries are a key feature of human thought. We often seek to understand something by contrasting it with something else, creating dualism that can guide a form of discussion, a dialectic. The binary can become a form of dualism, such that each pole is defined by its difference from the other; for example, secularism is often defined by its relation to religion. This can create distortion as each often becomes an exaggerated version of itself to ensure that it seems different enough.

Binaries are also instrumental to Ricœur’s technique for creating understanding, but he was always sensitive to the need to choose binaries that have something in common, without which no resolution would be possible. By deploying dialectic in Ricœur’s way, which is to develop two views in tension with each other, we can better understand how populism works. We can seek to understand and critique authoritarian populism, and then attenuate it, turning it into a positive, less authoritarian version than that identified by Stuart Hall (Hall 2021).

Another advantage of Ricoeur’s dialectical approach is that it seeks to also understand the other (i.e. the interlocutor), as can be explored through his dialectic of event and meaning. Ricœur posits that the event of a verbal utterance is inadequate to the task of communicating fully to another person the meaning of being you; yet, somehow, some understanding of individual identity can be transmitted linguistically so that the other can derive some understanding of the incommunicable meaning of what it means to be another person (Ricœur 1976, 14–17).

Ricœur’s dialectical approach constitutes another thread throughout this book, and in Sect. 4.6 I specifically consider how it helps us challenge populist binaries and see the relevance of dialectical debate for productive conversations.

1.5 Free Speech and ‘Populism’s Pincer Grip’

In England, populist influence has created a wider tendency for freedom of speech to be understood in binary terms, as the right to express a personal opinion with no consequences whatsoever (libertarianism), or, conversely and perversely, no right to express an opinion at all (no-platforming). University campuses have become a key site for this free speech crisis, with Conservative politicians complaining about the cultural influence of universities, asserting that they are full of left wing no-platforming extremists who deny a platform to those with different views from their own (Fazackerley 2020); having asserted their concerns, these politicians then curb universities’ freedoms and influence through legislation. This, and societal discrimination result in corresponding reactions from those committed to the protection of minorities and/ or to the voicing of histories unheard, and this can lead to expressions of extreme sensitivity being articulated poorly. The HE sector seems to be mesmerized and trapped by this pincer grip in which the right wing feels it imperative to deny that racism and discrimination exist, while the left wing insists that racism and discrimination exist everywhere; I call this phenomenon ‘Populism’s Pincer Grip’.

At the time of writing, the UK Conservative government’s campaign to create a narrative in competition with the universities’ perceived leftism can be found in the 2023 Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) ActFootnote 3 that insists completely free speech for all, thereby removing the commitment to eliminate discrimination provided by the Equality Act (Renton and Scott-Baumann 2021). At the crux of this libertarian absolutism are the following four assertions: institutional racism does not exist; diversity training is not only unnecessary but actually counterproductive; the rights of minorities will, accordingly, not need to be protected; free speech is at risk if any or all of the aforementioned are challenged. Indeed, planned changes to the data protection law and rights legislation 2022 will go far beyond the university sector and affect the UK, by ‘placing freedom of speech above the right to privacy in a way which unbalances the relationship between competing rights, potentially undermining people’s ability to enforce their privacy rights (see Clause 4 of the Bill of Rights Bill)’ Footnote 4 (Duhs 2022). Yet, in Ricœur’s words,

the independent exercise of justice and the independent formation of opinion are the two lungs of a politically sound state. Without these, there is asphyxiation. (Ricœur 1965, 268)

In that spirit, I will show how universities can hold the government to account by working actively to explore, monitor and comment upon planned legislation.

As well as using Ricœur’s philosophy, I will draw upon statistical evidence of social trends in Britain and the USA regarding the key issues that I address. We all have access to large samples that reflect our cultural imagination and often show how wrong we are in our ideas about each other. Typically unresponsive to more accurate counter evidence, these misshapen ideas are often systemic, society-wide beliefs as we see, for example, with common societal convictions about immigration being a major problem (Duffy 2019, 106–16). Both such statistically analysed ‘facts’ and philosophical ideas are subjective in their own ways; I hope they will complement each other in some sort of dialectical balance, which is one of my methodological recommendations.

1.6 Structure of This Book

Here, in this chapter, I begin several threads that flow throughout the book, engaging directly with some of those who are ‘othered’ and with writers who represent them. Consideration of Islam on campus, of racism on campus and (to an extent) of identity issues on campus, will show tragically unresolved tensions. In order to attempt resolution of such matters, it will be necessary to go beyond Ricœur, and I turn to the pragmatism of Jane Addams (intensely practical, face-to-face engagement and action research) and of Frank Ramsey (intensely cerebral yet practical engagement with human reasoning), as well as the approach of Danielle Allen, which is based upon personal sacrifice and use of Aristotelian rhetoric. I propose my own version of academic activism.

In Chap. 2, I consider some of the key issues that beset universities in the twenty-first century and contrast them with Ricœur’s interventions in the 1960s; as a comparator, 1968 seems as if it was a very innocent time for higher education.

In Chap. 3, I provide a definition of ‘free speech’ as a negotiated process, and consider how, using the Communities of Inquiry (CofI) approach, young people can relearn the art of discussion as they progress through university. A politics of pedagogy entails each teacher and each student becoming a facilitator: the individuals develop a group narrative and learn from each other in ways that create group identity based on sharing the risk of offending each different other. The politics of pedagogy is also the ability to have debate both inside and outside the university and talk, as a group as well as individually, to activists and thinktanks, to politicians, policymakers and civil servants and to convene Communities of Inquiry.

The next three chapters (4, 5 and 6) explore Ricœur’s intellectual development with specific focus upon his views on higher education. These chapters use historical evidence to extrapolate conceptual changes in him and in society. They will show increasingly how he was not able to address, or was not interested in, the pragmatism that necessitates the presence of the body as integral to the solutions sought, not least because of bodily characteristics such as skin colour.

Chapter 4 explores how, from 1947, with increasing anger, he worked with students to oppose colonial France in Algeria, culminating in his house arrest in 1961. As a junior academic, Ricœur held utopian ideas about the university as a site for self-development and rich educational opportunities for all, as well as a locus for political activism. As a relatively junior academic, his approach, based on polemical discussion and activism with students as well as postwar idealism, was successful over the issue of Algeria.

Chapter 5 explores his later attempts during the 1968–71 student rebellions to engage with students through discussion. In the mid-1960s he sought an alternative higher education model to break the higher education hegemony of the Sorbonne as a place of huge lectures and distant tutors. He was sympathetic to the students’ rebelliousness; yet their impassioned rhetoric took them onto the streets and Ricœur’s bookish approach was rendered mute. Ricœur’s dream of equality of class, gender and subject discipline on campus was not realized, and his interventions metamorphosed into abject failures.

In Chapter 6, I consider how, despite his admiration for the collegial American campus, Ricœur became wary of attempts by minority groups on campus to supplant discrimination with respect and recognition for their difference. Drawing upon his experiences in the USA, we see that he understood the twentieth-century campus to be a site of racism, and that the university sector (like himself) had failed to challenge and resolve it. Contrasts are drawn with the University of Chicago student movements which offer a powerful model of united activism on campus and beyond. They often failed but the idea of solidarity across class, colour and creed must be the only way forward. Influenced perhaps to an extent by French assimilationism, he believed that demands from those discriminated against and their escalation in intensity were correspondingly less likely to lead to mutual recognition.

In Chapter 7, my incorporation of Ricœur’s and Addams’ conciliatory work into Communities of Inquiry offers a clear way to transform the modern university into a locus of active political engagement with the outside world, as I will evidence through my work on democratic literacy, namely the Influencing the Corridors of Power (ICOP) project based at SOAS, University of London, and the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) called Communities of Inquiry across the Generations based in WestminsterFootnote 5; whilst ICOP enlarges the scope of the CofI approach with the politics of pedagogy, the APPG aspires to polity praxis, the widest scope of citizens speaking evidence-based truths in the corridors of power.

Each chapter shows historical and conceptual connections between Ricœur’s work and university-related social events on and off campus. We can learn a great deal both from his powerful analysis of how to understand the other and, conversely, over the decades, his progressively more remarkable inability to see the necessity of resolving racialized tensions. In order to implement Ricœur’s focus upon the other, I draw upon my research with Muslim groups and the research and literature on racism: of course, class, gender and other areas also desperately need resolving, but Muslims and people of colour have been nominated by current right-wing movements as the ‘other’, to be vilified and tormented, while at the same time denying any such thing, and these are thus my focus in this short book. To help us replace the simplistic binaries of right-wing populist rhetoric and protective left-wing rights moves that shut down conversation, we need to talk.