What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030516970
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Research Contexts

Eylem: It’s interesting because I was listening to the interviews that Lee Jarvis had done with our participant researchers, including your own interview Qudra. One theme that recurred in all the interviews was that Muslim individuals were finding it challenging to reach out to other Muslims to be part of this research project.

Lee J: I think the socio-political context—including the increased securitisation of Islam and Muslims—is vitally important, and I think there’s a risk that this had a selective function at a couple of levels. On the one hand, it potentially meant we ended up working with individuals who felt sufficiently empowered as to be unaffected by programmes such as Prevent, and the security brought on by such a detachment likely has diverse class-based, gender-based and other dynamics to it. Alternatively, it’s also possible that we ended up working with individuals who were essentially supportive of the Prevent agenda and the community cohesion discourse and so forth: individuals who were therefore willing to take part in the project. Certainly, in some of the films from Luton and Bedford in particular, there was a strong performative aspect to them, where people were speaking quite openly about a love of Britain and a love of British values.

Lee M: When Lee J and I visited a mosque in Bedford and we were knocking on the door, trying to get in—you can’t get into any of these Islamic centres, because, understandably, they are all locked up and security conscious—within a minute or so of arriving somebody came across the road straightaway. The Mosque there is part of a Faith Watch scheme,5 whereby religious centres across Bedford, people watch out for them. For visitors, or things out of the ordinary, in order to protect such places.

So, it did sort of strike home that clearly the community in Bedford feels threatened, but also supported in the environment. The guy who came across the road to us, an estate agent, a Christian from an Asian background was the broker for our research. But it did sort of strike me at that time, and also in other conversations that we’ve had, that the project is about trying to break away from the stereotypical David Cameron type of approach to British values. That people, more or less, had to make a judgement themselves about whether they wanted to get involved in the project, knowing that it’s so controversial within their own communities.

Qudra: I was just reflecting on some of the ethical challenges of the research and I think in some ways the discussions around these different issues, such as the intersections of identity and how that affected the films that were made, make for an interesting aspect to the project, which provides rich contextual data which can then be threaded through the analysis?

Lee J: I’d like to add something to that, because—to reflect back on what Lee M was saying—something else occurs to me. I had several long telephone conversations with potential participants in the project who wanted very, very clear commitments in terms of our statutory duty around Prevent and so forth.

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