Webinar on Academic Freedom 

Tuesday 30 September 14:00 CET

The recent years have been marked by wars and authoritarian repression that have greatly affected the academic community. There have been various responses from academic institutions aimed at supporting scholars at risk, supporting academic freedom, and discussing the role educational institutions should have in responding to conflict and pressure. Wars, persecution, and insecurities have pushed scholars into exile, forcing them to adapt to new academic environments.  

ECREA already started the discussion with a focus on Ukraine and Gaza, which opened many questions about the academic role in responding to mass atrocities and authoritarian threats to academic freedom. For this reason, the EDI subcommittee proposed ECREA to hold a series of webinars to discuss academic freedom, scholars at risk, and strategies for assisting scholars. 

The first webinar will address the issue of scholars in exile and strategies for supporting them. The discussion will focus on the experiences of scholars who were forced to leave their country and adapt to a new academic environment. The webinar will provide an opportunity to reflect on the structures or circumstances that forced scholars into exile, as well as the pressures, expectations, and roles scholars experience while in exile.

In what ways can ECREA protect and support its members, whose physical safety can be at risk if they are in zones of war or violence, or whose academic and civic freedoms might be under attack from repressive governments or institutions, including academic institutions? We hope the webinar series will help ECREA develop a response to these issues, such as recommendations or other practices designed to support academics.

Confirmed Speakers:

Dr. Bermal Aydın, formerly a lecturer at Mersin University in Turkey, was dismissed, banned from public employment, and had her passport cancelled for signing the Peace Petition, “We will not be a party to this crime.” Supported by CARA (Council for At-Risk Academics), she became a postdoctoral fellow and later a guest teacher at the London School of Economics (LSE), researching authoritarian neoliberalism and the politically motivated precarisation of academics and journalists in Turkey. She taught and supervised master’s dissertations at LSE, published in journals such as Globalizations and Turkish Studies, co-edited books, contributed chapters, and continues her work independently.

Dr. Zeina Al Azmeh is political sociologist at the University of Cambridge. Her work examines the cultural sociologies of knowledge production in exile and their impact on diasporic political subjectivities. Her book Syrian Intellectuals in Exile: The Dilemmas of Revolution and the Cost of Leaving will be published this December with Cambridge University Press. She has published in journals such as Theory and Society, Cultural Sociology, Qualitative Inquiry, and IJPCS and chairs the Syrian Academics and Researchers’ Network in the UK.

Dr. Olena Zinenko is a media scholar and senior lecturer at Institute of Sociology and Media Communication, Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine, a feminist peace activist, and currently a PSI Visiting Fellow at the IFHV, Ruhr University, Bochum. Her research focuses on media discourse analysis, investigating the role of media in peace processes and public communication in Ukraine. 

The webinar will be accessible to ECREA members only. We will distribute information about registration to the webinar in time.