Gavan Titley – National University of Ireland, Maynooth<\/p>\n
Keywords<\/strong><\/p>\n free speech, public debate, postracial conflicts<\/p>\n Abstract<\/strong><\/p>\n This lecture engages with the conference themes of cultural complexity and the public sphere, by considering the pronounced public discourse as to a \u2018crisis of free speech\u2019 in diverse, multicultural publics. Over the last years, there has been an intensification of controversies hinging on \u2018what can be said\u2019 about particular political, cultural and social issues. The meaning of racism, in particular, has been integrated to these intense debates about the status and remit of freedom of speech, debates that are conducted in societies not only characterised by endless speech, but by a dominant if intensely disputed sense that racism is largely a problem that has been overcome. In the public imagination, free speech is celebrated as a fundamental freedom, central to modern emancipation, self-expression, and democratic vitality. In contemporary western societies, it will be argued, it has also become fundamental to an insistent, many-stranded politics that is re-shaping how racism is expressed and legitimised in public culture. This lecture proposes to examine this contradiction by examining three interconnecting dimensions: the postracial insistence on closure as to the political meaning of racism; the War on Terror era articulation of freedom of speech as a question of culture; and the vulnerability of dominant public understandings of freedom of speech to reactionary political capture. It addresses the conference theme of how academics engage in public debates by arguing against the dominant tendency to approach the question of freedom of speech in primarily legal or normative terms, without reference to the forms of politics given expression through speech conflicts in multicultural societies.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gavan Titley – National University of Ireland, Maynooth Keywords free speech, public debate, postracial conflicts Abstract This lecture engages with the conference themes of cultural complexity and the public sphere, by considering the pronounced public discourse as to a \u2018crisis of free speech\u2019 in diverse, multicultural publics. Over the last years, there has been an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3223,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-576","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.ube.fr\/aci2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.ube.fr\/aci2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.ube.fr\/aci2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ube.fr\/aci2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3223"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ube.fr\/aci2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ube.fr\/aci2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":767,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ube.fr\/aci2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/576\/revisions\/767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.ube.fr\/aci2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}