Free speech is never free. It always comes at a cost, and someone always has to pay. In our late neoliberal era, that someone is usually us. In Free Speech and Neoliberalism: Art, Culture, Education, Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad argues that because of 'the shrinking of the horizon of the sayable within neoliberal culture', there is a pressing need to reconceptualize our notion of freedom of speech. He is right. Against the censorial imagination, for Grønstad there is hope in art and culture, and especially hope in reviving and nurturing the practice of parrhesia (the license to offend as a courageous speaking truth to power) but even more so and necessarily in the principle of isegoria (the equal right to speak). To this end, Grønstad mobilizes Alphaville, Fahrenheit 45I, the performance art of Jingyi Wang, the TV series Severance, and the films of Yorgos Lanthimos as articulations of isegoria. For him, they offer profound ethical, epistemological, and political potentialities. More than this, isegoria offers an antidote to our waning faith of higher education's commitment to critical thinking, judiciousness, and education; and perhaps even to the demise of democracy itself! We can only hope…

Marquard Smith, Academic Director, AHRC's London Arts & Humanities Doctoral Training Partnership, UCL, London