Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologists of the Month for May 2026, Taylor A Hughson (now at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand) and Simina Dragos (Queens’ College and the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, UK). Their article for Current Sociology The United Kingdom’s ‘free speech crisis’: From the fringes to a mainstream political project 2010–2023 is Open Access.

Taylor A Hughson

Simina Dragos

Could you please tell us about yourselves? How did you come to your field of study?

T.A. Hughson & S. Dragos: We met and started collaborating as doctoral students at the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. Now that our studies are over, we are in different parts of the world but continue thinking together.

Taylor is a lecturer in Education at Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand. Before entering academia he was a secondary school English teacher, and this experience motivated him to research the policy and politics in education.

Simina is still based at Cambridge, where she is a Junior Research Fellow at Queens’ College and an Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Sociology. Simina is fascinated by the social and political life of the past and therefore learns from memory studies and historical sociology.

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “The United Kingdom’s ‘free speech crisis’: From the fringes to a mainstream political project 2010–2023”?

T.A. Hughson & S. Dragos: The research was undertaken as part of an UK ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) project looking at populism, authoritarianism and contemporary universities. Our specific interest in free speech came about as a result of our experience as doctoral students, where ‘free speech’ as a concept was increasingly at the centre of debates about universities and their future, to the extent that the then-Conservative government was advancing the Free Speech Bill (now Act). We wanted to understand why this term had risen in prominence so much, and, in particular, how it had come to have a particular degree of prevalence in the right-wing media ecosystem.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

T.A. Hughson & S. Dragos: The article traces the shifting use of ‘free speech’ over the period 2010-2023. It shows how, over this period, the concept moves from something at the fringes of political discourse to being ‘mainstreamed’. We argue that this happens because the discourse of ‘free speech’ offers a powerful way for right-wing actors to silence critiques of their positions. ‘Free speech’ is presented as an absolute ideal that reflects ‘western’ civilisation and is a marker of rationality. In this way, the invocation of ‘free speech’ moves the focus of debate away from the merit of particular positions espoused by these actors, and towards the highly sacralised notion of ‘free speech’ itself; in other words, the debate is no longer whether an argument may be valid, but whether an actor is entitled to make the argument in public, irrespective of its form and validity, because of ‘free speech’. This in turn means that critiques are positioned as ‘anti-free speech’ and appear less valid, or are neutered in some way, because they are positioned as ‘uncivilised’ or ‘unwestern’.

We used a historicized analysis to trace the mainstreaming of ‘free speech’, identifying four phases of the mainstreaming process. Initially, in the 2010s, ‘free speech’ is constructed in opposition to an imagined ‘uncivilised’, ‘external’ Muslim other. After 2015, the enemy of ‘free speech’ starts to be located within the west, described as censorious ‘snowflakes’, later the ‘woke’. Discourses of decline of the west and internal and external threats to free speech get then taken up in the age of Brexit by multiple actors within the media but also in think tanks and the state. This stage (2016-2020) sees a proliferation of commentary on the lack of ‘free speech’ on university campuses, and the idea of ‘free speech crisis’ becomes mainstreamed, so much so that the state eventually enforces ‘free speech’ in higher education via the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. We described this last phase of mainstreaming as populist policy-making.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

T.A. Hughson & S. Dragos: Discussions on ‘free speech’ continue to feature heavily in debates about universities, media and public discourse more broadly. Our research hopefully offers a way to continue to think about this issue. One area of particular prominence at present is debate over pro-Palestine speech. One might expect that advocates of ‘free speech’ would be vociferously in favour of pro-Palestine speech, as they appear to be for other forms of maligned speech. However, prominent free speech groups have often been critical of pro-Palestine speech, asserting that it impinges on the free speech rights of others and even threatens those who disagree. Other free speech advocates have remained relatively muted on the issue, even when pro-Palestine speech has been curtailed with the full force of the law. Our research offers a theorisation that helps to potentially unpack this apparent contradiction, by showing how ‘free speech’ is often presently evoked only by right-leaning actors to defend right-leaning political positions, rather than it being about concern about a ‘freedom to speak’ for all members of a society.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

T.A. Hughson & S. Dragos: We also wrote a companion piece to this article, which uses the concept of ‘racial liberalism’ to further develop what we see as the way the narrative of the ‘free speech crisis’ can also be understood as an expression of white anxiety.

In writing this article, we were particularly inspired by the work of Darcy Leigh in this space (see here and here). We have also valued engaging with the work of Jana Bacevic on the related concept of ‘academic freedom’ (see here, for example).