Seven Questions with... Jonathan James

This week we meet Jonathan James, a part-time PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of Education. In the world before COVID, Jonathan split his time between Paris - where he has lived since 2009 - and London, the city he grew up in and still calls home. What are you studying, why are you interested in this subject and what do you plan to do in the future?. My PhD looks at the impact of Islamist terrorism on education policy and practice in England and France. Ever since I studied French as an undergraduate, I have been fascinated by the differences in the way that issues around cultural diversity, immigration, and national identity play out in public debates in Britain and France. It was only after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in 2015 that I began to connect these ideas to the context of terrorism. I took a sabbatical from my teaching job to do the MA Comparative Education at the UCL Institute of Education, and this became my dissertation topic.