Designated ‘dangerous’: student and academic dissent against the Prevent duty in the United Kingdom and the Professor Watchlist in the United States

This chapter explores student and academic dissent against and the chilling effect of the Prevent Duty in the United Kingdom and the Professor Watchlist in the United States. Focusing on a critical discourse analysis of selected editorial articles, activist campaign documents and media, and tweets using the hashtags #StudentsNotSuspects, #TrollProfWatchlist and #TrollProfessorWatchlist, this chapter highlights the ways certain student populations are targeted and made suspect through the Prevent Duty in the United Kingdom and the ways particular academics are designated as ‘dangerous’ by the creation of the Professor Watchlist in the United States. Exploring the possible chilling effects that both the Prevent Duty and the Professor Watchlist have on the speech, participation, and engagement of students and academics, this chapter offers insight into the process of Othering both the Prevent Duty and the Professor Watchlist perpetuates. Theoretically drawing upon Bauman and Lyon’s (2013) Liquid Surveillance and Butler’s (2006) Precarious Life, this chapter critically examines the ways in which some powerful discourses control and limit which identities and voices can be recognised as legitimate or dismissed as dangerous within and beyond the academy.