The free speech wars

This book is a timely intervention into the apparently growing culture wars around free speech as a political and social issue. These debates take form on university campuses, social media, mainstream press and elsewhere. The book will focus on the weaponisation of the concept in these areas, as well as providing a strong historical and comparative context.

Who gets to exercise free speech, and what happens when powerful voices think they have been silenced? Assembling a diverse group of commentators, activists and academics, this book explores the contemporary free speech wars to try to understand how this issue has become increasingly charged. It asks how the spaces and structures of 'speech' – mass media, the lecture theatre, the public event, the political rally and the internet – shape this debate. The contributors examine how acts such as censorship, boycotts, and protests around free speech developed historically and how these histories inform the present. The book explores the opposing sides in this debate: beginning with a defence of speech freedoms and examining how speech has been curbed and controlled, before countering this with an exploration of the way that free speech has been weaponised and deployed as a bad faith argument by people wishing to commit harm. Considering two key battlefields in the free speech wars – the university campus and the internet – this book encourages the reader to be suspicious of the way that this topic is framed in the media today.The free speech wars offers context, provocation, stimulation and – hopefully – a route through this conflict.

Introduction – Charlotte Lydia RileyProtecting freedom of speech1 Protecting the freedom of speech - Jodie Ginsberg2 Open air free speech: the past, present, and future of Speakers' Corner - Edward Packard3 The problem of neutrality and intellectual freedom: the case of libraries - Sam Popowich4 In a diverse society, is freedom of speech realisable? - Emma Harvey, co-written and edited by Edson Burton5 Training readers as censors in Nazi Germany - Victoria Stiles6 Is boycotting for or against free speech? - Andrew PhemisterFree speech as a weapon7 Why (and how) anti-racists should defend free speech (and why they shouldn’t describe their opponents as free speech defenders) - Omar Khan8 Drinking the hemlock: Socrates and free speech - Neville Morley9 Secularism, Islamophobia and free speech in France - Imen Neffati10 The logic of nonsense - Nina Lyon11 Weaponised Swissness - Janna Kraus12 Free speech and the British press - Aaron AckerleyFree speech on campus13 Free speech and preventing radicalisation in higher education - Shaun McDaid and Catherine McGlynn14 Anatomy of a 'trigger warning' scandal - Gabriel Moshenska15 Grad school as conversion therapy: "free speech" and the rights of trans and non binary people on university campuses - Grace Lavery16 Teaching 'Freedom of Speech' freely - Paul Whickman17 The politicisation of campus free speech in Portugal - Adam Standring, Daniel Cardoso and António Dias18 Free speech on campus – Marta SantivanezThe internet: The Wild West of free speech19 A post-modern neo-Marxist's guide to free speech - Ben Whitham20 Free speech and online masculinity movements - Henry S. Price21 Choose your fighter: loyalty and fandom in the free speech culture wars - Penny Andrews22 Free speech in the online 'marketplace of ideas' - Helen Pallett