Abstract The role of social workers, and specifically racialised social workers, within the PREVENT policy is unexplored both within empirical and theoretical studies. Understanding the personal and professional impact upon Muslim social workers, who exist at the intersection between their religious and racial identities and the 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security duty to prevent terrorism, offers insights into the racial ordering that underpins the policy. Using the theoretical combination of bordering and biopolitics, through Agamben’s (1998) “inclusive exclusion” and Foucault’s (1982) “subjectification”, it is possible to explore this racialised governance. I argue that racial hierarchies and meanings are produced through everyday interactions, microaggressions and experiences of Islamophobia, which construct the Muslim/social work subject. Furthermore, Muslim social workers internalise these experiences, creating themselves as subjects in their choices to engage in an inclusion and representation approach or to take a more critical stance. Yet this collaboration is not just internal, and is weaponised by the state to extend the structural Islamophobia embedded in PREVENT. In working to reduce and exclude expressions of Muslimness, Muslim communities are paradoxically included within the political space and are fundamental to the continued governance of the general population. This is particularly important within a social work context, as a profession that purports to be anti-racist and yet assists PREVENT in promoting a nationalistic white Britain.
Sophie Shall (Wed,) studied this question.