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There is a paradox at the heart of trust: we trust each other to behave predictably in a procedural sense (governments issue laws and guidance in order that citizens can follow them) and we also trust each other to behave normatively in a substantive sense (generally we trust that laws and guidance provide for the general good). Reciprocity is the key to trust and therein lies the paradox: how can we trust each other and those in power, given that reciprocity is often weakened by an imbalance of power in relationships? Moreover such imbalance can become entrenched in ‘norms’. In Britain, we see the university sector being told that it cannot be trusted if it does not follow government guidance to ‘safeguard’ its students from being ‘radicalised’ into ‘extremists’ on campus. The guidance makes it the norm to suspect Muslims. In fact we should mistrust the guidance. Yet in this context, the opposite happens: many behave as if they are diminished and vulnerable and suspend their disbelief about recent counter-terrorist laws and guidance, telling themselves that the government knows best. This ‘guidance’ is in fact an artificially generated hermeneutics of suspicion that is racist, has no evidence base and is counter-productive. The task of research, faced with such an abuse of trust, is to establish an evidence base that measures up to scientific rationality and apply that evidence to the complexities of human experience. We must ensure that this happens, rather than research being hijacked by ideologies. I will argue therefore for the central importance of co-production of research and social order: we need others to tell us when we’ve made something up.

There are three parts to my proposition: first, I examine trust, then I consider the implications of reciprocity and finally offer ways of building trust within reason. I focus upon two major causes of the breakdown of trust. My first theme is the hermeneutics of suspicion, which then provides a helpful way of framing and understanding the second cause of loss of trust—the diminished self and its Datafication. The third element is the hermeneutics of trust, the trusting self, attesting to one’s words while also using a reasonable, never excessive, degree of suspicion about the identities fashioned out of one’s own and others’ personal data. We must dismantle, modify and re-assemble the hermeneutics of suspicion, which is useful when based on reasonably accurate estimates of reality, if we want to create a hermeneutics of trust, a generalised reciprocity. I conclude by advocating research and specifically co-production as a form of research that provides a basis for trust. All research is embedded in the social environment that produces it, so values are at its core. We should therefore understand the need to challenge and, if necessary, unmask that relationship between research, values and environment when it risks distorting findings.

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), the French hermeneutical philosopher, developed the term ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ mainly in order to explain the erosion of trust in oneself by three thinkers who have taught us to be suspicious: Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. He understood them to have collectively and definitively destroyed the self-belief that Descartes gave us by asserting that we know who we are because we know that we think. Ricoeur saw how, through their analyses of secret motives regarding money, power and sex, respectively, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud taught us to disbelieve our own thoughts. We do not know who we are, after all, because we do not know what we think. Consider, for example, Freud: he discovered that our subconscious mind has a separate and secret life of which our conscious mind is usually completely unaware. Our subconscious mind influences the way we behave and think, yet we do not even notice. For Marx it was the use of capital that distorted human relations and for Nietzsche it was the use of power. Sex, money and power dominate our lives to this day.

So the first thing we learn from Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion is to mistrust our invincibility; we cannot assume that we know what we are thinking or that our predictions are right or that we understand normative trust. This is a development of the legacy of Kant, with his assertion that our sensory apparatuses will mislead us in our perception of the world and that we have to accept those limitations and keep trying to understand (1788: 5.99). Shall we believe Marx, Nietzsche and Freud in their treatment of Kant to herald postmodern thought that refuses to trust any cognitive structure? If we cannot trust ourselves to understand what we are thinking and what motivates us, then how can we trust others? The role suspicion plays in establishing normative trust can be seen in an example from legislation.

The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015

A special situation has arisen at British universities that encapsulates the hermeneutics of suspicion in such an extreme way that we will see the urgent need to dismantle, reshape and re-assemble our use of suspicion into a more reasonable form, if it is to be useful. In this endeavour, Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the ‘state of exception’ will help.

In 2015, as part of a long line of counter-terror legislation, the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act was passed. To help people interpret an Act, it is common practice to issue guidance, which is for clarification and is not legally binding. In the case of this counter-terror legislation, the guidance is extensive and I show how Agamben’s theory helps us to understand the guidance. The 2015 Act places certain duties on higher education authorities and the Guidance is something to which the authorities must ‘have due regard’ when performing those duties. There is a significant difference between the 2015 Act, which is mandatory, and its Guidance, which is designed to provide direction. But, more importantly, in both cases, the duty is simply to ‘have regard to’ various matters: there is no requirement that anything be done in any particular way. This difference between law and guidance should be discussed in legal journals, and university legal teams should be clarifying this, but generally that is not happening and the silence around the subject suggests that the process of infantilisation is working extremely well; universities feel unable to refuse to comply with bureaucratic constraints because of dependence upon government and the risk of reputational damage. By this means, different normative expectations can be applied to minority groups than to the majority population. (In normative terms, we are invited to trust the inference that it is normal for a Muslim to have terrorist goals.) The topic therefore needs to be discussed in the context of the diminished self: the Muslim may feel diminished and so is the person who becomes suspicious without evidence.

This is the legal situation: Section 26(1) of the 2015 Act sets out the duty thus, ‘A specified authority must, in the exercise of its functions, have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.’

However, there is much public and media discussion that believes this places a statutory duty on universities to monitor or to record information on, mainly, Muslims, of whom we are told to be suspicious. The guidance itself is written in intimidating language about the obligation, the legal duty to use surveillance (Higher Education Funding Council for England [HEFCE]). It is a duty to ‘have due regard’ to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism. Think about it. Take it into account: no more, no less. The precise content of this duty always depends on all the circumstances of the situation.

Guidance accompanies the Act and provides the application of the norms set out in the Act. In his book, State of Exception (2005: 1–31), Agamben shows how laws can be subverted by pleading for an exception that will allow guidance on existing laws. In such a situation, these laws remain in place and appear to ensure that no illegality is committed. Yet Agamben locates ‘an empty space’, ‘the empty centre’ at the core of all laws, because of a natural gap between laws and guidance about their implementation (Agamben 2005: 86). What I call elsewhere the ‘vacuum’ between law (norm) and guidance (application) is part of the juridical system and can be exploited and turned into a state of exception (Scott-Baumann 2017). We see this with the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, which instructs us to ‘have due regard to’ the Prevent Guidance but has no power to control the Guidance. The Prevent Duty Guidance is based upon a fear of terrorist activity everywhere—in the context of my work, this relates to university campuses—and this creates the conditions for establishing a state of exception.

I believe that the relationship between the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 and its Prevent Guidance exemplifies Agamben’s state of exception. Under the protection of the Act, the Guidance can throw its weight around and demand more than the law mandates. How can such a state of exception be created? It requires complicity from the silent majority. In 2016, the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) carried out a survey of university students on free speech and on surveillance issues. As shown by this HEPI survey, 55% of the students in the survey believe that it is necessary for universities to work closely with the police to identify risk of terrorism and 58% believe that it is good to train staff to deal with the identification of such risk (HEPI Report 85 2016: 57). According to the way these students understand the situation, 55% of the same sample also want ‘safe spaces’ policies, establishing zones where unpleasant views cannot be expressed: by this policy it would also be more difficult to discuss any issues underlying the Prevent strategy. These forms of compliance authorise the state to fill the ‘vacuum’ that Agamben identifies at the heart of the juridical system, with exclusionary gestures that become norms because of the imbalance of power that weakens generalised reciprocity.

It can perhaps be inferred from these figures that over half the student body sees itself as vulnerable and in need of protection. The student population is also represented implicitly in this Guidance as being in great need of safeguarding. Ideas, ideologies and opinions are represented as incredibly dangerous and this situation can of course be interpreted purely politically: by suppressing the voices of those British Muslim students and others who do not agree with government policies, opinions at variance with issues such as British foreign policy will also be suppressed. This represents a profound lack of trust in young adults to be autonomous and capable of decision-making. Moreover, shaky narratives are created to ensure compliance, of which ‘fundamental British values’ are one. ‘Fundamental British values’ are described in terms of not being extremist: ‘We define “extremism” as vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs’ (Channel Guidance 2015: 3).

However unclear and reactive this is, it is certainly being simultaneously both promoted and transgressed by the government, through targeting students of certain beliefs, ethnicities or appearance. This creates an imbalanced relationship that threatens trust because it creates an imbalance of reciprocity. Yet before Prevent, the university sector delivered a perfectly adequate duty of care to staff and students. We can look at this compliant sector response to Prevent as another manifestation of the diminishment of the self.

The postulated danger that terrorism arises from thinking dangerous thoughts at university has been accepted by many British universities as real, even though there is no evidence and precautionary measures entail racial and ethnic stereotyping. So following the Guidance is clearly seen as the lesser of two evils—the perceived vulnerability of the student body and of the reputation of the university are more important than possible racist slurs on a minority. The diminished self can be seen here again: the student (whether Muslim or not) is perceived as incapable of protecting him/herself against evil, conveniently packaged in the perceived evils of Islam. The non-Muslim student is rendered passive, sensitised to ‘data’ about others: a beard, a headscarf, a view about the Middle East and a devout religious belief. When such ‘data’ is collated it becomes data as capital and it can be used for any purpose, which may involve matters beyond the intention of the original owner of the beard or headscarf. In this case it is collected, collated and used to sow and marketise fear. We see a clear example of fear being marketised, being made a commodity, with the British cultural imagination internalising the fear of clothing as data (the hijab being the most obvious) and pressing home the perceived danger of Islam in British civil life. Sectors of the media are guilty here. Arthur Snell, former Head of the Prevent programme, comments on the provocative assertions of Anjem Choudary. His assertions and pictures of him were well publicised in Britain for some years and his ‘main platform was given to him by the mainstream media’ not by Muslim communities, who tended to dismiss him.Footnote 1

In such a situation, Foucault asks us to consider whether we can identify where the power resides. Currently we are told that it resides in radical Islam, yet as Debord demonstrates, stories about terrorism are written by the state, in whom the power resides. Terrorism is presented as worse than everything else and individual liberties must be given up voluntarily in order to combat terror. It would be unwise to exercise one’s democratic right to seek evidence because fear is stronger: ‘Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results’ (Debord 1988: 24). University students are thus placed under pressure to accept contradictory messages. Students placed in this situation experience difficulty in finding a platform to express themselves, and this chronic state of enforced inarticulacy must have implications for their future identity as citizens (Scott-Baumann 2017).

The Diminished Self

In Britain, we see a politicised version of the diminished self, whereby the university sector is made to appear guilty of not safeguarding its students from being ‘radicalised’ into terrorists on campus. The propagandist privileging of terrorism over all other forms of danger diminishes Muslims because they are thereby given a restricted identity as British citizens who are radicalised or ripe for radicalisation, and this also diminishes the rest of us, who become complicit. We are made to feel and therefore can easily become infantilised and victimised. Here, I focus on one small aspect of this big picture: how data mining in the perceived interests of national security can contribute to diminishing the person.

Personal data is being taken constantly and fashioned into identities unintended by the owner. Data is being used to suppress the personal complexities of individuals by the harvesting of huge amounts of private information that is used for other purposes than those intended by the original owner, whose identity is taken and turned into data for others to graze upon and enjoy. We see how the Western press and Daesh mutually nourish each other. This mutual nourishing works to boost social media profiles and sales for newspapers: in Britain, in November 2015, The Sun published a bold and exciting headline ‘1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis’. This was based on a Survation poll, which did not mention ‘jihadis’ or ‘ISIS’ or ‘ISIS fighters’, and the poll asked whether British Muslims felt ‘sympathy with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria’. What happened next was a rare and gratifying concerted response with a positive outcome. The headline led to the largest number of complaints that the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO)Footnote 2 had ever received. IPSO was set up in 2014 to be an independent regulator of the British press. IPSO chose the NGO MEND (Muslim Engagement and Development) as the lead complainant to challenge The Sun. It was argued that the operative words in the questionnaire were sympathy ‘with’ and not sympathy ‘for’. Some months later, IPSO concluded that The Sun, the biggest selling newspaper in the United Kingdom, had been responsible for coverage that was ‘significantly misleading’. In March 2016, The Sun newspaper was obliged to publish a correction to this headline. Yet the remnant of anti-Muslim thought is lodged in the reader’s mind and is much more nourishing to many than the truth.

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion Enshrined in Data

Consciousness is a task, a work, a labour, not a given. We labour at our ‘self’, our identity and, according to many modern thinkers such as the teachers of suspicion—Marx, Freud and Nietzsche—at self-deception. Even if we shouldn’t trust our own self-constructs, developing and maintaining a personal identity is a form of labour, it is our personal project. My personal identity becomes valuable capital in the form of data. The way in which this is done partially resembles Marx’s analysis of labour and capital, whereby capital creates markets and these markets are alien to the worker whose labour made the markets possible. Datafication can trigger a similar process of alienation. Labour becomes separated from the worker and turned into capital, and in a similar way personal data is taken from its owner and made immensely valuable and marketable. In classical Marxist terms, my labour becomes capital that is greater than the sum of its parts (its parts being my efforts), and the capital that emerges from my labour will therefore profit those in power more than it advantages me. In fact in the twenty-first century, data counts as capital much more than labour does.Footnote 3 Data is capital, as we see from Facebook and other giant collectors of personal information. Personal data is taken from us and they can be used to market products and emotions, such as desire and fear.

Reducing a person to data can reduce the individual’s trust in their own judgement and can even infantilise them. We see an example of this after the March 2017 Westminster Bridge tragedy, when a social media feeding frenzy erupted over the photograph of a young woman in a hijab walking past an injured person. Attention was focused upon the combination of her assumed indifference and her hijab, although at least two other people can be seen walking past in the photograph. Opprobrium was manifested in such an intense manner that she felt she had to respond to the mass defamation to reclaim her identity.Footnote 4 She became data—the hijab—and was objectified as a subject of fear. In this way, attempts were made to estrange her from her personal identity.

One way of understanding how data can dominate public narratives is to consider a very different narrative to see if it can, at least, clarify a situation by offering contrast. Philosophy can help. With the Prevent duty agenda, it is possible that people may find it harder to use their own powers of judgement and observation to draw conclusions, relying instead upon government and media commentaries on suspect communities objectified as data. The self becomes data about the self, data that is worth more than the self.

Through technological rationality, data is manipulated to become interconnected in seductive ways that the diminished, one-dimensional self cannot easily resist. Elsewhere I have applied the linguistic analysis that Saussure developed to help us to understand how we come to certain conclusions: Saussure developed his analysis of language through the use of the signifier, the signified and the referent. We can see how, in this way, for example, the hijab has been adopted by the Western press and media as a symbol for a lack of integration. The signifier is the term used and recognised (hijab), the signified is the preferred meaning of the term (agent of oppression) and the referent is the actual object (material used by people to cover their head) (Scott-Baumann 2011). It is dangerous to let the signifier and the signified become so interlocked that they have no need of a referent, that is, the hijabbed student on campus becomes something to add to a databank of visible features of Islam that, in turn, becomes a databank of fear. The commodity is then valuable in the lucrative Islamophobia industry. The individual whose identity data has been harvested in this way can become alienated from his or her own identity and cannot recover and reinterpret that data. They are no longer considered trustworthy to undertake such tasks as managing their own identity. As with Marx’s original model in which a person’s labour is taken, turned into capital and exploited by others, similarly, those from whom data is harvested lose control of the self as they’ve developed it.

Of course this isn’t wholly true; despite huge pressure upon young British Muslims on campus to ‘fulfil trust’ in both a predictive and a normative expectation by becoming terrorists, they resist and insist upon developing their own path as British citizens. Yet it is partially true that they lose control over interpretation of the data stolen from them. Moreover, the lazy, unsubstantiated belief that hijabi women are dangerous, held by many, weakens the fabric of society by reducing trust in others, reducing trust in one’s own judgement and pathologising diversity. This attitude is carefully orchestrated to divide society, to weaken trust on campus through surveillance under Prevent and to control student unions (now overseen by the Prevent-friendly Charity Commission).

Diminishing Trust

British public discourse and the language of the Prevent duty can evoke a self-fulfilling prophecy. Case Study 17 from the Open Society Justice Initiative Eroding Trust report shows how, by this means, Prevent can have a counter-productive effect. ‘Nazia’, a nurse, had no intention of going to Syria but when questioned by Prevent officers she felt: ‘The way they went about it, it could have made me do exactly what they told me not to do’ (Eroding Trust 2016: 105). This is not what the majority of British Muslims want, yet they are being trusted to behave as expected: that is, to want to go to Syria. Here is the rupture of reciprocal trust. In the generalised reciprocity of citizenship, we trust each other to behave predictably in procedural ways (governments issue laws and guidance about Muslims and citizens follow them) and we also trust each other to behave normatively in a substantive sense (in this case, we trust that laws and guidance will provide for the general good by demonstrating the ‘evil’ of the minority). Both procedurally and normatively, some of her colleagues saw her as a threat. ‘Nazia’ was able to work out how unsound the data was that was collected on her and that led to her being questioned. This diminished identity is in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is often presented by government and media as if it is the ultimate Islamic self-realisation and made punishable by prosecution and imprisonment.

How can I find out if personal data is being collected on me without my permission? My legal advisors tell me that if I want to know, I must send a specially worded request and a £10.00 cheque to the Home Office and, if I wish, a copy of the same letter with another £10.00 cheque to the Henry Jackson Society, a charity. Why is this? The Extremism Analysis Unit (EAU) is a government group that collects material on individuals considered to be ‘extremist’ ‘partly using work produced by researchers employed by the Henry Jackson Society’ (Chahal CO/6361/2015: 12). The Henry Jackson Society has evoked strong reactions from commentators: in 2013, James Bloodworth expressed concern about their illiberal perspectives (Guardian 2013) and David Miller’s Spinwatch has devoted considerable effort to analysing their actions. Until 2014, The Henry Jackson Society provided the secretariat for two All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs), one for Homeland Security and one for Transatlantic and International Security. The November 2010 Homeland Security launch was also the launch for the Centre for Social Cohesion’s report, Islamic Terrorism: The British Connections, which asserted that radicalisation at universities is a major problem. This report influenced the revised Prevent strategy and in 2011, the Henry Jackson Society and the Centre for Social Cohesion merged.

Two years earlier, in 2009, Henry Jackson Society set up Student Rights, which acts upon this stated concern with and interest in the need for campus security. Taking all this into account, I would perhaps not want to draw attention to myself by asking the Henry Jackson Society if they were keeping a file on me. Their clear partisan interest in security issues indicates that data collection by such a group could easily be understood to see society (and university campuses) as defined by security problems and to see human beings as categorised by the level of risk that they pose. On the part of government, this seems to contribute to Agamben’s state of exception, when government agencies invite a group with such strong views to collect data on a heavily securitised question. Such data collection, harvested without public knowledge, also presumably contravenes data protection principles and serves to diminish trust.

Attestation of the Self and a Hermeneutics of Trust

This spiralling down into self-doubt and lack of trust in others could be seen as the origin and destination of the diminished self. This is not necessarily the case, because a certain amount of self-doubt is useful and indeed necessary. Nor am I advocating at all that we follow the anti-cogito of the teachers of suspicion. On the contrary, if we accept our personal fallibility, we will be much closer to a better understanding of the conscious and unconscious complexities of our identity: this in turn should help us to be more trusting of our abilities to judge, because we will be more honest, more accurate and possibly more able to grasp the complexities in the personalities of others. Indeed in his book, Oneself as Another, Ricoeur argued that we can only learn about ourselves if we try to understand others, and this process includes accepting the negative, the emotions, desires and beliefs which we ourselves hold, while finding them embarrassing, shameful, thought provoking or unacceptable within ourselves—rather than projecting them onto others. I exist, here I stand and I am responsible for my actions. This is the approach of attestation, setting overbearing suspicion aside, believing and trusting, despite personal fallibility, that we can be useful (Ricoeur 1992: 300–2).

So what does a hermeneutics of trust look like? Hollis analyses the way in which generalised reciprocity leads us to make donations of blood or pick up student hitchhikers: we know we cannot guarantee that others will give blood for us or give lifts to our student children, but by doing so ourselves we make that more likely. Trusting or mistrusting others has the same effect. In the Eroding Trust Report 2016, Dr Clare Gerada points out that she can no longer assume that her General Practitioner (GP) relationship is based on trust with her Muslim patients; this is because her patients know that she has been instructed to report them if they speak in any way that suggests they are becoming radicalised (Justice Initiative Eroding Trust Report 2016: 49). Her point is valid: this is how the reciprocity that facilitates trust is eroded. However, that situation can also assume that a professional in that situation does in fact no longer trust Muslims—if the Muslim patient criticises the government, they are supposedly being more dangerous than other patients who do the same. I hope I can assume that she and others in the same position will indeed trust their own judgement and differentiate between terrorism and normal human criticism such as ‘the political situation for fellow Muslims, or Syria, or despair about drone attacks, or how Palestinians are being treated’ (Eroding Trust 2016: 50). This would be an example of trusting oneself to make sensible judgements: there is no evidence of more than the usual risks of criminal actions in doctors’ surgeries, in communities and on university campuses. The hermeneutics of trust requires self-belief, belief in human beings and rational risk assessment. In the current climate of suspicion, we are using a distorted sense of generalised reciprocity to assert that we need to report ‘terrorists’ in order to be trustworthy. Two sets of norms exist, a set for the majority and another for the minority.

Taking a very different view, Ricoeur, in Oneself as Another, presents the other person as the part of our existential experience that we cannot eliminate and, moreover, that other as the aspect of our own lives from whom we can learn most about ourselves. The ‘other’ may be the mind or the body, each of which can appear frightening in its demands; or the opposite sex, as understood by Plato to be impenetrable; or the antinomies that Kant identified, which (such as love and justice) are each necessary yet when combined become antithetical; or the Muslim who ‘looks different’ from the majority in Britain. Ricoeur adapts and warms up Kant’s antinomies: we cannot find stable happiness, yet we can find some provisional personal comfort when we have faced these ‘others’ and seen them to be integral components of our lives, not as indicators of evil which we can negate and against whom we can legislate. In order to achieve this, we need to trust our own ability to make judgements about others and this is what the diminished self also lacks—even or especially when seeking research funding.

Academic Research on Campus: The Case for Co-production

A vigorous renewal of research intent is required, that demonstrates clearly to academic researchers that they themselves risk being manipulated by ideologies, unless they seek guidance from their own moral framework, information sources and academic disciplines that stand outside propaganda.

The hermeneutics of suspicion arises with regard to current ethical research concerns. Islam on campus is a difficult topic to research dispassionately: Muslims are being analysed in a politicised arena, where research agendas are influenced by fear and by both national and foreign interests. Those who impose securitisation procedures are also those who decide what the danger is. In such a situation, where exceptional action is deemed necessary for public order as if we are in a state of war and such action is therefore unimpeachable, errors can be made such as the inductive fallacy. This is a belief such as: ‘some Muslims are terrorists, therefore all Muslims can become terrorists’. In this highly politicised research environment, undertaking balanced, dispassionate research becomes an assertion of generalised reciprocity. We need to recover the ‘norm’ of research based upon empirical research, not upon ideologies of suspicion.

Empirical research cannot begin from an inductive fallacy because there is no evidence to substantiate such a position. Yet, there is research funding available that invites such a premise, and this dilemma illuminates the importance of the General Will which was so important for Rousseau when he showed how the individual becomes a citizen. Rousseau’s General Will binds us as individuals into a bigger understanding of how we can function together in harmony, using generalised reciprocity to get on with each other. This reciprocity relies upon mutual trust: for such trust, a communal bond is required and a bond that we often appeal to in Western democracies is liberalism. A liberal vision is one that believes each individual can pursue their own interests while also subsuming them when necessary to the general good in the interests of generalised reciprocity: a naturist will usually put clothes on to pop out and buy a pint of milk. This naïve yet valuable desire for an important balance between the individual and the group means that when democracy goes wrong and racism bubbles nearer to the surface of human thought and behaviours than usual—as now—then we demand that liberal values are imposed on society: which is an anti-liberal position to adopt. Yet good research can and must adopt this contradictory position by collecting data that is neither partisan to a particular view of humans nor biased in the questions it asks.

Given the paucity of evidence that the university campus is a dangerous place that radicalises Muslims, empirical researchers must seek to collect evidence of activities that actually take place on campus and ask a wide range of participants to describe what they experience. Researchers must also cultivate a reasonable degree of suspicion about the identities fashioned out of one’s own and others’ personal data. There is plenty of long-standing evidence to confirm that a person’s character is not reflected in their skin colour any more than in their eye colour and we should assert that in the face of counter-terror measures. This approach requires great sensitivity to the double hermeneutic, which is characteristic of social sciences. With the double hermeneutic, social scientists have to understand both that those on campus will have certain understandings of their environment that shape their perceptions of their place in it and that social scientists themselves can influence the ways in which staff and students think. Liberal ideas are currently viewed by many as dangerous, but even in such a hostile environment there are ethical protocols that should help us to develop trust within reason, such as the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki that emphasised autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and distributive justice. Trust can be achieved by mutual respect and generalised reciprocity, grounded in an approach that is both predictive (most people follow rules) and normative (the rules contribute to the general good). Yet this can only be achieved in the current climate if researchers become aware of rules that privilege some over others, as with the counter-terror initiatives.

Another way of challenging counter-terror initiatives is to understand them as an aspect of the debate about ‘multiculturalism’. This term was used for decades to suggest acceptance of differences brought about by immigration, until 2006, when the then Communities and Local Government Secretary Ruth Kelly gave a speech that seemed to signal the end of multiculturalism as government policy (Kelly 2006). In 2011, David Cameron, the then Prime Minister, underscored the end of multiculturalism and argued that Britain needed a stronger national identity in order to deter people from becoming radicalised extremists, although there is no proven connection between these elements (Kuenssberg 2011). The 2016 Casey Report picks this up and ridicules multiculturalism. After a year-long study of community cohesion in Britain, Dame Louise Casey, a senior civil servant in the government, described ministerial efforts to integrate ethnic minorities as amounting to little more than ‘saris, samosas and steel drums for the already well-intentioned’ (Casey 2016a, b). There may be some truth in this, but she offered nothing positively useful in its place. The only way for academic researchers to be able to develop a clearer, more positive picture with a real chance to improve the quality of such discussion and its attendant policies is to do research with, not on communities and individuals. This is only possible if researchers can free themselves from the prevalent rhetoric about extremism, terrorism and fundamental British values.

In this context, here are 3 of the 11 research guidelines that were formulated as a result of conducting 4 important and interrelated research projects regarding Islam and Muslims in Britain from 2008 to 2013 (Scott-Baumann and Cheruvallil-Contractor 2015: 167–9). These three sample guidelines are not based upon the risk aversion that increasingly characterises research ethics protocols, they are positive assertions:

  • The researcher must interrogate their own value system and their own ethical literacy in research ethics in order to be able to undertake research.

  • Any highly politicised research field is likely to suffer from adverse and destructive media coverage, and a high degree of care and pragmatism is necessary to ensure that the reputations of others are not damaged.

  • The use of collaborative research methodologies (including feminist methodologies) will allow the researcher and the researched to work together and give voice to all the diverse stakeholders. These include university students and staff, government, civil society, commercial interests such as social media, lawyers and activist groups of different ideological persuasions.

Conclusions

Our labour, in the Marxist interpretation, has become special and external to each of us and so has our view of ourselves: in the digital era of data harvesting, data about the self is priceless. Personal data is being harvested in the same way that labour used to be collected and sold on: personal information is being collected and aggregated to create and feed securitisation market places that create capital for others. Datasets are capital, they are worth money and also, like money they can be passed around as if they are currency and are in fact of more value than currency.

The data harvesting that atomises our identities, and particularly then steals parts of the identities of suspect communities, is a major source of suspicion that we must be aware of in seeking to establish trust. We inhabit a highly politicised atmosphere. This harvesting makes us feed upon ourselves and others by atomising us and giving or selling us back to ourselves like a contagion, a version of bovine TB. When a violent crime takes place, increasingly we are told that it is not terrorist related, even though the thought may not have occurred to most people in the first place. The unevidenced assumption is that terrorism is the greatest existential threat that faces us. The effective theft of the hijab from Muslim female identity, and its transformation into a sign of alienness and threat, is a particularly favoured instance of this distortion, partly because of the high visibility of the headscarf. If we can recognise harvesting the lives of others thus, we can lay the groundwork for accepting personal fallibility, because we will never be able to stop ourselves going online to look, but we can reduce our infantile gorging and become aware of how we are manipulated into suspicion of others, as with the Westminster Bridge photograph.

We can look at the diminished self in this context, and such a broken anti-cogito also needs to be considered in terms of a bigger heuristic structure of possible empowerment, using research to challenge and then unify the fragmented yet repetitive patterns of modern life. The tragic paradox is that while we are apparently being encouraged to seek our rights to dignity and self-fulfilment by exercising choice, we are systematically being deprived of them through forced choice: we are told that we need to research radicalisation in order to secure protection from evil and become whole again, and so we will thereby remain diminished. Of course the diminished self never truly recognises itself as diminished, because that could lead to it seeking to free itself. Yet instead of ground-up online offal, academic research can collect and analyse empirical data without prejudice.

In conclusion then, there is a state of mind to which we all aspire. This state is one in which we know enough about ourselves to make reasoned decisions about how to develop our potential. We dream of how to exercise agency that enables us and others to live a better life, with and for each other and within just institutions, as Ricoeur explains it. This is a rich, deep and much desired state that may resemble Rousseau’s General Will. I believe that we cannot attain a wonderful state of trust but that we can aspire to being better than we are, by using various approaches through generalised reciprocity. One approach that Ricoeur recommends is through religious faith, although he recognised that this was not a universal aspiration. Another approach is through attestation: being prepared to take full responsibility for one’s own actions and believing that one can act ethically and usefully. He also advocated an approach that takes something from Kant’s antinomies and accepts the contradictions that populate human existence: we have animal desires yet we wear clothes, walk on two legs and use language to create our realities and our moral positions. I recommend that the academic community reviews the research landscape critically to ensure that we cannot be bought for the purposes of researching with the securitisation bias. For this we need to review our levels of ethical research literacy and challenge the creeping influence of securitisation into research ethics protocols. We can carry out trustworthy research by starting with a challenge: large British-funded research schemes such as Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research (PaCCS) and Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST) provide research funding based on the assumption that there exists a problem with Islam more than with any other belief system, so we need to ensure that they also fund research which challenges the hegemonic discourse about Islam as a violent, evil religion, for example.

Academic research is not merely collection and analysis of data; it is a practical commitment to a way of thinking that should enhance one’s life and the lives of those with whom one researches. New generations of young people should conceive of themselves as able to be part of a project that can alter events: ideologies can transform lives, they don’t need to ruin lives. Good research will challenge whether there is evidence of radicalisation on campus, define what it means to be radical and seek to explore the issues that many staff and students now feel they cannot discuss. In order to trump the hermeneutics of suspicion that creates suspect communities, we need to use moderate and healthy suspicion to challenge these processes, doubt these securitisation narratives, challenge the Datafication of minorities and work in trust with voices that are usually talked about but not asked directly for their views. This is co-production of research and is only possible when we are critical of racist policies on campus. Dealing with what we may perceive as the negative aspects of others and of ourselves is one crucial aspect of reversing the diminishment of the self as currently experienced by university students and staff through campus securitisation. At the heart of trust lies an acceptance of the contradictory nature of our constant existential struggles with the notional other: the other as part of us.