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Good morning. I'd like to welcome you to this first panel session of today.

My name is Andreas Nering. I'm from the University of Erlangen

and I have the pleasure and honour to introduce our speaker for this panel today.

His name is Liam Gerron and you can see him here already.

Some of you might know him.

And he's going to speak on the politicisation and secularisation of religion in education.

Securitisation.

Securitisation, sorry.

Let me just introduce our speaker as far as I could find out so far.

He is an associate professor in the Department of Education

and he is a senior research fellow at the Harris Manchester College University of Oxford.

And interestingly, Liam has a doctorate in English literature

and nevertheless his interests are always or have always been multidisciplinary

and also interdisciplinary because he is doing research on religion, politics, education and also literature.

He has been the guest editor of the British Journal for Educational Studies

where they have published a special issue on education, security and intelligence studies.

Nevertheless, his PhD was on literature and it was published in 2002 under the title

Landscapes of Encounter, the Portrayal of Catholicism in the Novels of Brian Moore.

I have to admit I don't know Brian Moore but maybe this gives me a chance to read some of his novels later.

Throughout his career, Liam Garon has maintained his interdisciplinary research interests

and he has done research on political theologies and also especially on the questions of freedom of expression

and how theological and political approaches or perspectives work together.

So his fields of interest are religious education and the role of citizenship,

the interface of religion, politics and education and also philosophy of education and its relation to literature.

Welcome with me, Liam Garon, and we are looking forward to your lecture.

Good morning, everybody, and thank you for being here.

As Andrea said, this is the title of my paper,

it's the Privatisation and Securitisation of Religion in Education, a Response to a Rejoinder.

I'll say a bit more about the subtitle shortly.

The difference between securitisation and secularisation, of course, is significant,

and maybe in questions we can draw out why then, why and how the two are related,

but it is an important correction to make.

This is about the politicisation and the securitisation rather than specifically on the secularisation,

which I have written fairly extensively on, secularisation of religion in the context of education.

Can you go a bit closer to the microphone?

The microphone, OK, the microphone does... OK, I will, yes, yes.

This is the broad outline of my paper.

First of all, some words of introduction,

and I want to present some wider context of my work very, very briefly

in some recent books I've written in religious education.

And I want to move on to some significant and somewhat trenchant criticisms of my work

on security and intelligence studies on the politicisation and securitisation of religion in education.

An old friend and colleague of mine, Bob Jackson,

and the criticisms are fairly extensive and trenchant,

and I will respond to those as my first public opportunity to do so.

And I want then to make in point four my considered response

and then draw things to a close and a conclusion.

I want to say firstly about some words of introduction then.

Bob Jackson has written two major papers challenging aspects of my work.