Rob Faure Walker

Rob Faure Walker has been a school teacher in London since 2005. He is also a PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of Education where he is investigating the impact of counter-extremism discourses in educational settings and on the democratic process. He became interested in this area when he saw the impact that new counter-extremism policy had on his students in the secondary school in East London where he was teaching. Since then, his work has used corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to demonstrate that the usage of ‘extremism’ and ‘radicalisation’ has changed over the last decade, the words becoming conventionally synonymous with violence. He theorises that this results in the application of counter-extremism strategies in schools promoting rather than preventing violence and this work has contributed to reports into the human rights implications of counter-extremism in education for Rights Watch (UK), Open Society, the Tower Hamlets Overview and Scrutiny Committee into Prevent and other ongoing research projects. His research has been presented at The Law Society, The Annual Conference of the International Sociological Association, The King’s Think Tank, The Critical Studies on Terrorism Conference 2017 and will be published next year as a chapter in a forthcoming book about processes of violent radicalisation in the 21st century by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. He also compiles a monthly digest of media and commentary on Prevent, ‘extremism’ and ‘radicalisation’ (www.preventdigest.co.uk) which is circulated to journalists, academics and policymakers.