Dr Rizwaan Sabir & Dr Fahid Qurashi | Academics & ivory towers | BB #14

In this special episode of the Blood Brothers podcast, Dilly Hussain picks the brains of Dr Rizwaan Sabir, lecturer in criminology, and Dr Fahid Qurashi, who is a lecturer in sociology. #BloodBrothersPodcast​ #DrRizwaanSabir​ #DrFahidQurashi​

Dilly questions both scholars on whether academics live in their own bubbles, and have created ivory towers which disengages the masses from benefitting from their knowledge. Both doctors explain the importance of academic research while Dilly scrutinises how beneficial peer-reviewed work actually is to wider society.

Dr Sabir briefly describes his ordeal when he was detained under anti-terrorism for seven days for downloading an Al-Qaeda manual for his doctoral research.

Dr Qurashi passionately defends the importance of people referring back to academic experts and their works before publicly discussing complex issues like colonialism, racism and Islamophobia.

Topics of discussion also include the UK government’s controversial Prevent strategy, decolonising western academic syllabuses, and Muslim traditionalists’ contentions with Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a framework to understand and express institutional racism and Islamophobia.