The construction of “criminal outsiders”: security services and whitening-securitization in higher education

This article examines students’ experiences of security services on university campuses. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and a national survey of UK students, we demonstrate that students’ perceptions of safety often rely on excluding non-student “outsiders” and “criminals” from campus. We argue that neither the figure of “the outsider” nor “the criminal” is race-neutral. Thus, the exclusionary impulses held by students and institutions legitimize securitization practices that disproportionately impact racially minoritised students. On the one hand, these practices (re)produce the deep-rooted association between Blackness and criminality. On the other, they (re)produce the whiteness of the university. We conceptualise whitening-securitization to underscore the previously overlooked role of security services in maintaining whiteness and perpetuating institutional racism. In so doing, we argue for a more comprehensive conceptualization of institutional racism in higher education than that found in existing literature, one that considers the peripheral, more informal spaces where racism is sustained.