Watch Tariq Modood give the 2021 Equality and Diversity Lecture

Last term the Faculty had the pleasure of welcoming Professor Tariq Modood to deliver the 2021 Equality and Diversity Lecture on the topic of Islamophobia and the Struggle for Recognition.

Tariq Modood is Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy and the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol and the co-founder of the international journal, 'Ethnicities'. He was a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute for part of 2013-15, a ‘Thinker in Residence’ at the Royal Academy of Flanders, Brussels in 2017. He served on the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, the National Equality Panel, and the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life. He was made an MBE for services to social sciences and ethnic relations in 2001, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK) in 2004 and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2017.

In his lecture Professor Modood explores the way in which, in social science and public discourse, the  concept of ‘Islamophobia’ has come to refer to anti-Muslim racism. He argues that the tendency to focus on Muslims as an ‘Other’, an ascribed identity, at the expense of Muslim inter-subjectivity and agency, fails to take note of the distinction between Islamophobia and reasonable criticism of Muslims and Islam. He then goes on to suggest the need for a multiculturalist rather than merely an anti-racist understanding of Islamophobia; one which sees discrimination within a larger frame of a struggle for recognition and institutional accommodation of difference.

Professor Modood's lecture was the fourth on the Equality and Diversity Lecture Series, following Kendall Thomas (2020), Nash Professor of Law and co-founder and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University; Haben Girma (2019), the first deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law; and The Right Hon the Baroness Hale of Richmond DBE (2018), then President of the UK Supreme Court.

Below you will find the recording of the event.