Keywords

7.1 Transcending Binaries and Whiteness—An Outline

Ricœur struggled with the tension between analytical and continental philosophy. Though he sought to bring the two closer together, he found that they didn’t want to be reconciled, preferring a standoff which strengthened their identity by being able to say what they were not. He thus developed a flexible version of dialectical debate to tackle this bi-horned bullishness that is also generally common in human thought (e.g. insistence upon male/female; master/slave; good/evil; black/white; Conservative/Labour); and his dialectical approach can be used to challenge the extreme versions of populism that currently complicate debate. Yet he failed to understand the horror of the black/white binary that determines destiny by skin colour and, late in life, he even distrusted attempts by African American individuals and black groups to rectify centuries of injustice by seeking recognition, respect and acceptance of difference as well as commonality. This bias blind spot in his work becomes a double blind because it is ignored by Ricœur scholars, which makes it all the more imperative that I act to challenge my own whiteness as the colour of privilege.

This shortcoming in Ricœur and in much of white society can be understood by taking another look at Ricœur’s use of dialectic: he developed a powerful, flexible model of balancing opposing forces by seeking commonalities and reducing extremities in the way we interpret our worlds. This is invaluable for moderating our thought processes and also for understanding and deconstructing the current extreme populism of the mid twenty-twenties. However, this approach is categorically incapable of recognising and seeking to resolve systemic imbalance, which is vital if we are to redress the injustices of centuries. Ricœur was suspicious of measures that increase imbalance, such as reparations, and yet we must surely create opportunities that make individuals’ success more likely than current probabilities permit.

My strategy to resolve this is to apply a three-fold model: three inter-dependent ways of exercising personal agency, using Ricoeur’s faith in the power of language. In the analogy of Russian Matryoshka dolls, Communities of Inquiry (CofI) is the smallest doll of a set of three: she works to make discussion possible in all contexts. The larger doll she sits in is the ‘politics of pedagogy’, i.e. mutual learning beyond the university and with political engagement that reaches out into the corridors of power to influence democratic processes; this is the Influencing the Corridors of Power (ICOP) project (see Sect. 7.9). The largest of the three dolls is polity praxis. This describes the point at which the citizen exerts praxis by acting politically (not necessarily in terms of party politics) as a self-aware member both of the polity and of the political environment that governs us: this is achieved through All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPG)Footnote 1; the one I have set up with parliamentarians is the APPG Communities of Inquiry across the GenerationsFootnote 2 (see Sect. 7.10). I will focus in this chapter on the second (politics of pedagogy) and third (polity praxis) forms of agency, as I have devoted Chap. 3 to Communities of Inquiry and given several examples thereof at the ends of Chaps. 3, 4 and 6.

7.2 The Fate of Activism?

In the 2020s, various environmental, governmental and societal pressures have exacerbated societal challenges. For example, through the Public Order Bill,Footnote 3 we are being instructed to comply with political decisions arising from parliamentary processes, as opposed to being active, engaged citizens both in parliament through our physical presence, via our MPs, APPGs and other forms of advocacy, as well as away from it in our own communities. The bill has amendments that would allow ‘the Government to criminalise a breathtakingly wide range of peaceful behaviour, including that with only the most tangential connection to protests’ (Breen 2022).Footnote 4 If it passes as is, protests about issues such as cataclysmic environmental crises can be categorized as extreme threats to society to be suppressed, when in fact, given elected representatives’ apparent unwillingness to act, it seems all the more imperative to be able to use one’s mind and one’s body legally to protest about the state of our planet.

Furthermore, at a grassroots level, the politicians who run this country often do not talk much to non-parliamentarians (engagement with even their own constituents can vary greatly) (Kuper 2022; Stewart n.d.). And in terms of talking to fellow parliamentarians, for many, non-cooperation with those outside their own party or even beyond their ingroup within their own party has become a principle born of the necessity to vote as instructed (Phillips 2022); this is a profoundly counterproductive practice for democracy. Another factor shaping parliamentarians’ behaviour and the stifling status quo is the pervasive dominance of social media: so, parliamentarians are very careful not to be caught unawares with the ‘wrong’ person or message; and they—like public figures in general now—are less and less likely to discuss urgent issues honestly with those who may think differently.

7.3 Factors Militating Against Communities of Inquiry

The cultural imaginations of academics and their students are shaped considerably by the current parodies of the university sector as depicted in the media and some state departments. The sector is accused of being too left-wing, too free thinking, possibly even extremist; yet it is also reputedly prone to oppressive ‘cancel culture’ which seeks to protect overly sensitive students, who are dubbed ‘snowflakes’ since they would supposedly melt in the heat of challenge to their ideas and identities; they thus ‘no-platform’ those who would challenge them. In reality, ‘no-platforming’ (the institutional version of cancel culture) has not been used frequently: 2019 figures from Office for Students state that outside speakers were refused the chance to speak on campus on fewer than 10% of attempted bookings (Scott-Baumann and Perfect 2021, 44–45). The thought and behaviour of university staff and students is actually affected by counterterrorism policies such as Prevent that sow suspicion on campus and chill speech (Scott-Baumann et al. 2020), and the government-cultivated culture war, which denies the existence of institutional racism and the need to decolonize the curriculum (Duffy et al. 2021; Morreira et al. 2021). Compounding these are the two years lost to Covid-19, increased mental health issues, administrative overload, financial precarities, and, as Livia Scott notes, fractured, often barely existent staff-student interactions and relationships, exacerbated by Covid-19 (Scott 2022). Moreover, and overall, our society is weaker than it has been for decades, economically, socially and politically (Piketty 2022). All this makes it imperative that students and staff act together in a politics of pedagogy, overcoming their tendency to avoid talking to strangers, and using activism, knowledge and solidarity to step out beyond the campus limits to hold their political leaders to account, and provide them with ethical researched information.

7.4 Ricœurian Justice and Current UK Politics

In response to parliamentarians’ unwillingness to engage with, for example, environmental and human rights matters, there has been a recent rise in demonstrations (such as those associated with Just Stop Oil, Greenpeace UK, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter and Free Palestine). This is in a directly inverse relation to the failure by governments to address these issues, matched by the British government’s attempts to inhibit such protests through new legislation, such as the Public Order Bill (see Sect. 7.2). This state of affairs seems to place under excessive strain Ricœur’s description in The Just that the social contract expects our leaders to act morally and deontologically, so that the morality of the act is more important than the outcome, as opposed to adopting an ends-driven consequential approach (Ricœur 2000). Indeed, in Reflections on the Just (2001) he admitted that this is not the case since Hobbes's vertical axis of governance and Weber’s axis of domination centralize power and incline towards arbitrary exercise of power; the horizontal axis is Hume’s axis of affection, which animates us as citizens and communities to try and live together (Ricœur 2007, 22; Ricœur et al. 1998, 39). These axes present a paradox: whilst politics necessitates attempts by citizens to live together companionably, it also makes it imperative that they accept leadership which centralizes power and which can be arbitrarily deployed against them. Ricœur did not believe that either of these axes could be dismantled, but that they must be accepted in an agonistic way, a way that assumes adversarial tension but avoids outright hostility between the two. However, Ricœur knew this prescription was unrealistic due to his experiences on the Nanterre campus: he described how he suffered ‘unresolved conflicts within me between my willingness to listen and my quasi-Hegelian sense of the institution’; by this he meant that he wanted to support students’ iconoclastic impulses while also believing, as did Hegel, in the need for institutions like the university. This conflict led Ricœur to ‘the impossible dream of the hierarchical and the convivial; such is, for me, the labyrinth of politics’ (Ricœur et al. 1998, 40). By contrast Jane Addams, with her standpoint epistemology, made extensive use of the idea of lateral progress along the horizontal axis, by leadership that involves seeking and meeting the goals of those without power and often with no clear goal in sight until it happens: ‘Progress has been slower perpendicularly, but incomparably greater because lateral’ (Addams 1895; Elshtain 2001).

7.5 Pragmatist Probabilities

To develop a philosophical understanding of the problems of race and articulate it to others, I first consider philosophical and then rhetorical pragmatism: philosophical pragmatism can be exemplified in the human mind as imagined by British pragmatist Frank Ramsey. His fascinating approach seems shaped by logic, yet surprisingly provides access to the human decision-making process. Thereafter, I will look at the mind and body as engaged with by Americans Jane Addams and Danielle Allen, both based in Chicago respectively before and after Ricœur: they both use a version of what Danisch calls rhetorical pragmatism (Danisch 2019).

In a manner that I believe is illuminating for understanding those who are routinely discriminated against, Ramsey redefined probability in a way that was acceptable in Cambridge to the dominant analytical (language) philosophers while using an approach that focused upon subjective perceptions more inclined to a phenomenological or even hermeneutical approach (although those terms were not common in the 1930s). In order to show how we gauge the likely probability of a situation occurring, he first analysed the classical model of probability as an objective and fact-based phenomenon based upon an example like tossing a coin repeatedly to establish the frequency of heads and tails. Given its distance from human thought, he consigned that model to the sciences (e.g. physics). Moving more towards continental type thinking, he then developed ideas in economics, mathematics and philosophy that are rationalist yet bear a close affiliation with pragmatist ideas, such as that our beliefs cause us to act in certain ways and the success of our actions can be seen to relate to the respective accuracy of our beliefs once we act and witness the outcome. He demonstrated how subjective our decisions about others and about the situations in which we find ourselves are.

To explain human decision-making, he defined probability as a numerical representation of an individual’s subjective degree of belief; a prediction of likely outcomes based upon perceived possibilities and risks. He preferred subjective notions based upon induction, i.e. the gradual construction of an empirical argument based upon accumulated phenomena that are similar to each other and/or relate to previous experience. He argued that this model of subjective thinking is reasonably predictive of some sort of credible truth when it is based upon beliefs that seem to be often (although not always) confirmable by events: I will be in time to catch that train (and I did); I will be happy to see this friend (and I was); I have heard this restaurant serves good food (but it wasn’t to my taste). His approach is characteristic of pragmatism in taking human thought and action seriously.

When belief, facts and successful actions coincide, it constitutes a happy coincidence that may allow one to see the motivating beliefs as ‘true’. This can therefore explain a core aspect of pragmatism, i.e. action is taken both as an outcome of beliefs and also as a testbed for, as yet, unproven beliefs. Ramsey and the American pragmatists also accepted that a belief may be accurate but not lead to success, due to factors that intervene to frustrate our intentions; or that a particular (accurate) belief may not be appropriate for the chosen setting. Ramsey’s marvellous work was left unfinished due to his tragically early death, aged 26.

There is also an important aspect regarding the amount of personal control that we have in collecting data to gauge future outcomes probabilistically—Ramsey did not stress this but I will adopt it to show why so many of us deny that we discriminate against people according to skin colour. I will show this by contrasting the probabilistic thinking of a privileged member of society, with that of a less respected member of society. Generally speaking, in Britain white people are more privileged, black people less so.

For many white people in the UK, the probability of success seems (relatively speaking) objectively safe, controllable and predictably in their favour. Class and gender intersect to compound privilege or lack of it: as many know without being conscious of it, white people are much less likely to be challenged, to be insulted, or to be blocked in their progress in life. By contrast, I imagine the person of colour may, thus predict being insulted, being ignored, passed over, not considered to be clever or well educated, or being physically harmed. Since they are more likely to be impeded in their life journey because of the colour of their skin, they may estimate personal success as based upon probabilities that are unsafe, out of their control and predictably and probabilistically weighted against them. Thus, the black person lacks the independence of the agent, the doer, who is white and makes probability judgements that seem objectively true (although they may not be) because the white person is more free to develop a range of testable hypotheses, relatively unchallenged by others. I imagine the person of colour may feel strong and determined, and may decide to ignore, to be assertive and to respond strongly to any impediments, but these are all demanding and tiring actions. Nor will the average white person notice that they have discriminated by acting ‘unconsciously’ in the pleasantly ‘invisible’ realm of unconscious bias and stereotype prediction. His own bias blind spot thus undermines Ricœur’s ‘imputability’, i.e. the belief that I should be capable of judging the morality or ethical nature of an act and decide how to behave in the light of my judgment (Ricœur 2005, 104 ff).

7.6 Rhetorical Pragmatism

In his edited text Recovering Overlooked Pragmatists in Communication, Danisch argues for what he calls rhetorical pragmatism, based upon the understanding that people learn best through first-hand experience and through listening well (Danisch 2019). Listening to others with ‘affectionate interpretation’ of different standpoints is a creative act that involves conscious effort: pragmatism aims to explain the world accessibly from different standpoints and make it a better place, using action and language. With none of the concerns of Socrates, Plato or Ricœur, Danisch argues that we need to practice deliberative interaction using the clearest, most persuasive rhetorical language we can command in order to (as Allen would put it) form political friendships with strangers, i.e. pragmatic relationships with those who have different priorities from us and yet who can experience our needs by direct contact with us and help us to advance our specific goals. This experiential learning and such personalized practices need to take precedence over the pursuit of universalisable knowledge—such as that towards which Kant strove (Danisch 2019, 15).

A hundred years earlier, Jane Addams’ centre for migrant women, Hull House, provided the location for such interaction, debate and research (i.e. Communities of Inquiry), and thus an opportunity for the politics of pedagogy in that she and her team worked beyond Hull House to act in the world outside. This led to the third and largest ‘doll’, polity praxis, i.e. finding agency in dealing with political situations and politicians to negotiate a better future in the public sphere. Her aim was ‘to provide a center for higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago (Shields 2017). In Addams’ words, this resembled a university:

it [Hull House] returned to the people’s lives and their lived experiences, instead of imposing abstract knowledge, and that emphasis on lived experiences made Hull House on par with the universities and colleges. (cited in Nam 2022)

The polity praxis at and beyond Hull House would have also embodied Danielle Allen’s ideas of political friendship which she elaborates on in Talking to strangers (Allen 2004). Allen emphasises that equity is the driver for trust, and that trust can only be achieved when we know how to support group action and agree to communal decisions that may not always go in our favour, but that will benefit the wider citizenry—and also the smaller group with which we identify as individuals. By such means we may be able to develop what she calls political friendships, thereby understanding friendship to be a practice rather than an emotion. Equity, trust and friendship, however, are all bound up with a prerequisite: sacrifice. And this sacrifice may even have to be one-sided until it bears fruit.

Allen gives the example of sacrifice shown in the abominable treatment of the African American teenager Elizabeth Eckford in Sept 1957, when she tried to attend what had previously been a whites-only school and was driven back with weapons by soldiers. This sacrifice of safety and dignity drove Elizabeth’s and other young African Americans’ attempts to enact the desegregation laws; yet it required immense personal sacrifice since desegregation was vehemently opposed by many white people in their communities. Whites only accepted the policy once it became clear that desegregation was inevitable (Allen 2004, Chaps. 1–3). This example will be high up on a sliding scale of sacrifice; further down it, in their private lives each member of my team has been subjected to abuse and violence and felt the fear of being treated as less equal becaue of their skin colour or clothing. None of this sacrifice is acknowledged by the current political analysis of this country’s situation or accepted as necessitating policies to protect ‘minorities.’ Instead, such sacrifice is mocked as part of the confected yet potent culture wars.

Danielle Allen’s pragmatic approach of individual sacrifice, positive group response to such sacrifice, and practising human friendship could also significantly help to resolve Ricœur’s fear of ‘bad infinity’, i.e. global majority groups’ (often called minorities in race-rooted nation states) ever increasing frustration at the status quo and not being heard despite their ever intensifying requests for recognition (Ricœur 212–225) (see Sect. 6.5).

7.7 Religion on Campus: The Politics of Pedagogy

University, it has been asserted, is a secular space, and thus purportedly neutral; in a post-secular society, however, religion persists, and faith is often a vibrant feature of campus life. Habermas suggests that this creates a friction which places an onerous (but necessary) cognitive burden upon both the religious and the secular. He believes that people are able to recognise ‘the limits of secular reason’, and also that by virtue of that appreciation they should be able to refuse the ‘exclusion of religious doctrines from the genealogy of reason’, and thereby overcome the ‘narrow secularist consciousness’ (Habermas 2006, 15–16). Similarly, the religious consciousness, which does already respect ‘the precedence of secular reasons and the institutional translation requirement’ needs to continue adapting ‘to the challenges of an ever more secularized environment’ (Habermas 2006, 15). The ethics of democratic citizenship requires ‘complementary learning processes’ by both religious and secular citizens so that their respective mentalities imbibe the corresponding cognitive preconditions to engage in the ‘public use of reason’ (Habermas 2006, 16–18). However, Habermas accepts the impossibility of success for such processes. He decides, in a rather Ricœurian manner, that a precondition of success for a secular state involves the acceptance that these complementary learning processes are both vitally important and impossible to achieve: we will never fully understand and accept each other.

Islamic thought accepts rational means, but with recourse to fiṭra and Shari’aFootnote 5 as the overarching framework and guides; when considering the Platonic and Aristotelian legacy of ancient Greece, Hamza Yusuf elaborates as follows: ‘the Sunni response was to recognize the great good in Greek learning but to place restraints on its sovereignty through a rigorous methodology that preserved the authority of revelation in its own domain over reason, while asserting the authority of reason in its proper place’ (Yusuf 2019, 4).Footnote 6 I suggest that modern multifaith universities cannot expect their students to make arguments only through secular language, and that in order to avoid an excessive burden of self-justification upon religious students, there must be some accommodation in the classroom for religious thinking. Islam is understood to be the largest and most visible minority religion in the UK and thus it is remarkable that there is still very little accommodation made in the curriculum.

7.8 Polity Praxis: German Case Study on Religious Thinking

The British and American university systems maintain an attitude of guarded suspicion towards confessional Islam, whilst French secularism excludes it from education altogether. I find these approaches not conducive for democratic polities, nor for general understanding, and in a 2010 government commissioned report, colleagues and I proposed that active partnerships between universities, Islamic colleges and government should be fostered (Mukadam et al. 2010); regrettably, these ideas were not implemented.

By contrast, since 2010, the German state has adopted a policy of enlisting Islamic scholars and university support to address and tackle its concerns around de-radicalisation, social cohesion, immigration and religiosity. Tailored courses prepare Islamic religious studies teachers for school work and to better support mosque activities, train Muslim social workers, and academically develop Muslim university intellectuals (Agai and Engelhardt 2023). This project, however, can be seen as a form of colonial governance (Hafez 2023), which is a valid critique that exemplifies a vulnerable necessity of the politics of pedagogy: whilst the project requires reciprocal learning and exploration of each other’s cultural understandings and physical ‘spaces’, such as universities, mosques and community centres, nation states may seek to discipline and regulate the practice and beliefs of their Muslim minorities, thereby undermining their religious freedom and religiosity. This control over religious life complicates the negotiation central to the politics of pedagogy.

Ten German universities have become involved either with dedicated state-funded centres or with professorial appointments; in total about forty professors and eighty postdoctoral students comprise the current intellectual workforce developing the academisation of Islamic discourses at German universities. An emerging canon includes Qur’anic studies, Islamic law, Arabic, Kalām and Sufism, and there are also urgent requests for coverage of social issues involving Islam in Europe, such as gender equality and sexual diversity. The chosen German universities have to balance confessional issues with academic authenticity and develop suites of practical skills for the applied disciplines (school teaching, social work and mosque engagement), while also responding to alternatives, such as Shia Islam (Engelhardt 2021). This is, despite many difficulties, an excellent exercise in updating, interpreting and contextualising Muslim life within modern Europe to complement and/or challenge the efforts of Muslim scholars in society contextualizing their living tradition and its theology.

7.9 The Politics of Pedagogy: Influencing the Corridors of Power

UK universities should—but currently often do not—apply the politics of pedagogy, i.e. mutual learning within and beyond the university and with political engagement that reaches out into the corridors of power to influence democratic processes in what Jane Addams described as ‘reaching our own ends through voluntary action with fair play to all the interests involved’ (cited in Nam 2022). To help address this lack, in January 2020, I launched an initiative that I optimistically named Influencing the Corridors of Power (ICOP)Footnote 7 at SOAS, University of London. To achieve ICOP’s collaborative goals in Westminster (see Sect. 7.10) our research team uses the politics of pedagogy: we started with little understanding of how Westminster works, but after much trial and error we now understand the various democratic processes that are available to us as citizens. In this politics of pedagogy we are using our twin understanding of models of learning and teaching and of democratic processes to build links between academics and politicians, thereby forging pathways between parliament and the university. And whilst academics and politicians are often quite hostile towards each other, yet individuals on both sides recognise the value of co-operation, and our work is an example of what Addams called pluralistic civic inquiry.

The strategy is for ICOP researchers to support academic engagement in politics in the following ways: track legislation, follow debates (e.g. via Hansard) and MPs (e.g. via Twitter), and keep pace with research from universities, think tanks and NGOs. The team decides in which live or upcoming issues MPs and peers would benefit from an expert angle: they plan one-page briefings, they commission them using in-house academic expertise, or co-author them with SOAS and non-SOAS academics, or commission an academic or field expert to write it. The team then disseminate them directly to 900 + MPs and peers via Mailchimp, along with Soundcloud recordings and they make both publicly accessible via the ICOP blogsite.

Through this mechanism, since ICOP’s inception in January 2020, we have drawn upon the expertise of academics, lawyers, medical experts and activists and published over 65 briefings on a wide range of legislation and issues including: responses to Covid-19, free speech, freedom of information, think tanks, democratic processes, elections, parliamentary oversight, the climate crisis, counter-terrorism, covert human intelligence, health and care, education, Windrush, Afghanistan-Hazara, Israel-Palestine, China-Uyghurs, Tigray and others.Footnote 8

Our briefings have contributed to parliamentary debate and resulted in SOAS developing its voice, being named and being trusted for collaborations. For example, in the House of Lords debate, Baroness Fox of Buckley cited approvingly from one of our briefings Sentencing Democratic Protest to Death (Renton and Pandor 2021) to argue against Amendment 115 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.Footnote 9 The briefing Policing in a Time of Coronavirus (Faure Walker 2020) contributed to Abena Oppong-Asare MP’s work and her report Leaving Nobody Behind in Erith and Thamesmead (Oppong-Asare and Beattie 2020). The briefing Freedom of Information Needs Urgent Freeing (Geoghegan et al. 2021) led to ICOP’s first online ‘open briefing’ with parliamentarians, academics and journalists (openDemocracy 2021), which contributed to successful pressure for the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee to investigate Freedom Of Information failings in Government and across public bodies (UK Parliament 2022a).Footnote 10 MPs tell us they use our briefings as a basis for speech making.

To overcome the inertia and the knowledge gap about democratic processes in universities amongst staff and students, ICOP publishes guides, creates video explainers, and shares resourcesFootnote 11; the ICOP team has also delivered several training workshops at SOAS in collaboration with experts. Through our efforts to engage in democracy, we have also learnt about and exercised various processes, such as the option of working with an MP to ask a question of a minister, which must be answered within a week; and we know that a well-timed briefing can help to trigger an early day motion, i.e. force a discussion of an urgent topic in the House of Commons chamber. Notably, we also trained The Ebony Initiative affiliates, members of a SOAS group which seeks to nurture the success of black scholars, and from whose talent pool ICOP also recruited a research assistant. Along similar lines, but at a more grassroots level, ICOP collaborated with Bollo Brook Youth Centre whereby young black students excluded from London schools produced a trio of audio briefings in autumn–winter 2020 on ‘The Broken Social Contract’ with extraordinarily penetrating insights into education, policing, and housing that were well received by the Education Select Committee and others.

7.10 Polity Praxis: An All-Party Parliamentary Group

A year and a half after ICOP’s inception, in July 2022, black teenagers from the Bollo Brook Youth CentreFootnote 12 were part of the 90+ strong audience in Committee Room 9 at the Palace of Westminster attending ICOP’s launch of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) Communities of Inquiry across the GenerationsFootnote 13—a landmark moment in our bid to reach, engage and shape political conversation and decision making, and persuade aloof MPs governed by party whips to talk to us, to academics and students, to young and old, to communities and society. The topic discussed by the six-strong APPG launch panelFootnote 14 on Monday 11 July was the Public Order Bill—legislation that requires the strongest possible challenge to halt the shrinking of our democratic right to protest and freedom of expression (Renton 2022). However, as Shami, Baroness Chakrabarti CBE stressed that evening, this constitutes just one piece of a raft of ‘terrible’ bills that have been passed over the past two years, and that continue to be proposed and deliberated; whilst ICOP’s briefings have directly challenged the problematic aspects of many of them, far greater academic and citizen engagement is required.

As the secretariat for the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), we (ICOP) are authorised, with support from MPs and peers, to enter Westminster physically and hold events. We can literally open the doors to those who would not otherwise consider entering; indeed, great excitement was expressed by the cross section of citizens who attended our launch, many of whom had never before entered this space, and who felt empowered and inspired to be more actively involved in democracy as a result of having walked the corridors of power. As we plan strategically ahead, the APPG will facilitate ever stronger connections with peers and MPs, and between them and the speakers and the public who we will urge to be active in the home of political decision-making, and outside of it.

Our utopia would be for all universities to have their own equivalent ICOP and APPG projects, and certainly some universities do already offer activities that embrace transformative research, fully engaged standpoint-based methodologies and international transformation of transnational issues, for example around migration, displacement and refugee status (Hammond 2017; Lambert et al. 2020).