Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SFS (Situating Free Speech: European parrhesias in comparative perspective)

Teaser

\"Summary of the context and overall objectives of the projectA range of events in recent years – from the shootings at the office of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, through impassioned arguments over no platforming in universities, to emerging debates surrounding the #metoo campaign...

Summary

\"Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

A range of events in recent years – from the shootings at the office of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, through impassioned arguments over no platforming in universities, to emerging debates surrounding the #metoo campaign – have once again brought centre stage enduring questions surrounding ‘freedom of speech’ in contemporary Europe and America: when and how can speech be ‘free’? With what consequences? And why and how does this come to matter differently to people in particular social and historical contexts? From Demosthenes to John Stuart Mill, free speech has long been a topic that has attracted extensive and sustained theoretical attention, definition and critical discussion in the fields of legal studies, philosophy and political science. Yet our understanding of how people relate to free speech in their everyday lives in concrete historical and geographic contexts remains paradoxically scant.
This project asks how, in various locations, the everyday life of ‘free speech’ becomes entwined with actors’ intimate understandings of responsibility, courage, truthfulness, measure and excess. What effects do the practicalities and exigencies of different legal and institutional frameworks, new and old modes of communication and political action, have on lived commitments to free speech – be they exhibited loudly, becoming clear foci of attention and dispute, or on the contrary lived and embodied quietly, in the nitty gritty of everyday practice?
To this crucial set of questions, anthropology, with its fine-grained ethnographic method and comparative heritage, is poised to make a substantive contribution, but its potential contributions in this field have yet to be seriously realised. Building on these starting points, this project asks what free speech means in Europe through sustained ethnographic accounts of how these values are actually lived on the ground by practitioners, professionals and laypersons in times of crisis and political transformation across Europe: from clashing ways of inhabiting the ‘traditional’ values of republican speech and action in France after Charlie Hebdo, to newsmaking in troubled times in Ukraine; from disputes surrounding the memorialisation of fascism in Italy, to free speech as therapy in a UK mental health care setting. Beyond Europe, the project has assembled a team of comparative experts to test and probe the initial conclusions of the core European studies by putting them into dialogue with contexts in which radically different issues cluster around notions of free speech.
To forge a comparative framework, the project builds on Michel Foucault’s discussions of parrhesia – the virtue and techniques of free-spokenness regardless of the cost. Foucault’s discussion forms an ideal starting-point for a comparative exercise that combines concerns about epistemology, the government of the self and others, and the exercise of freedom. This research project thus has two core objectives:
Objective 1: To lay the conceptual bases for an anthropology of free speech as a lived value, by developing the first systematic elaboration of Parrhesia as a comparative analytical framework
Objective 2: To experiment with an innovative comparative research design to enquire into the distinctiveness (if any) of Europe as a space in which free speech is lived, imagined and contested.
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Work performed

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first year of the project (2016-2017) was devoted to recruiting the project team, and undertaking bibliographic and preparatory research. The project has held regular team meetings, intense bibliographic research, and exploratory trips to research sites. We have also organised a string of seminars and masterclasses by invited experts in a range of disciplines, to ground the team’s knowledge of questions relating to freedom of speech, and to begin to build the profile of the project institutionally and internationally. The second year of the project (2017-2018) was mainly dedicated, as planned, to fieldwork in the four main research locations. Additionally, we have found that the initial methodological and theoretical discussions of the first year, as the team members thought about the modalities of research collaboration, themselves started leading to initially unexpected outputs: The PI and one of the post-docs co-organised a workshop focusing on the role and limits of explanation in anthropology , and we are currently seeking a publisher for the resulting contributions. The PI also wrote a book manuscript focusing on the practice and theory of comparison, drawing on the preparatory conceptual, methodological and bibliographic work for this grant. This book was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.

At the time of writing, the core team researchers have all completed their substantive period of fieldwork. As is usual with fieldwork-based projects, initial pre-field investigations have led to some shifts in emphasis or location (within the same national setting) for some of these field-projects, in order to provide the most productive angle on the general empirical and conceptual problems which the project sets out to investigate. Research associates submitted their periodic fieldwork reports to the PI by email, rather than use the website as initially planned, as this was more straightforward to organise

We have entered the writing-up phase of the project and a number of further publications are in preparation.

Final results

Progress beyond the state of the art, expected results until the end of the project and potential impacts (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project will result in a range of academic and public outputs. Peer-reviewed academic outputs will include 4 monographs, 2 edited volumes and a range of academic articles/book chapters. These outputs will be actively disseminated to potentially interested parties, including NGOs and IGOs, through an international conference in year 5 of the grant, and through a bespoke website.

Theoretically, this project will clear new ground on the intersection of political subjectivity, ethical practice and the study of knowledge production; methodologically, the project will transfigure anthropological ethnography through a carefully crafted comparative design; and pragmatically, it will give us new tools for reinvigorating public and intellectual debate over free speech in Europe and beyond.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.riskingspeech.socanth.cam.ac.uk/.