Applications Open for Academia in Exile: Displacement, Experimentation, and Reinvention of Academic Freedom Conference
Deadline: Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Budva, Montenegro
Partners of GHEA21-led Threatened and Exiled Universities are inviting submissions for the upcoming Academia in Exile: Displacement, Experimentation, and Reinvention of Academic Freedom conference, which will take place in Budva, Montenegro, on October 15-17.Proposed contributions may address, among others, the following themes:
● Current researchers in exile and precarious academic positions: displacement, adaptation, and new forms of academic identity and belonging, including intersectional experiences of gender, race, class, and other forms of marginalization.
● Decoupled scholarly communities: fragmentation, online and virtual collaboration, and digital platforms that both connect and isolate exiled scholars.
● History of academic exile and transformation: case studies of successful adaptation, intellectual renewal, and the formation of new schools, traditions, and research communities in exile.
● Exile as a driver of scientific and intellectual innovation: the role of displaced scholars and communities in generating new research questions, methods, and theoretical perspectives, and in challenging established centers of knowledge authority and canon formation.
● Emerging post‑university and re‑founded forms: academic organizations in exile, decentralized science initiatives, community‑based research infrastructures, and experimental institutions.
● Academia in exile and the reinvention of freedoms: how displaced scholars and academic organizations in exile problematize, rework, and expand our understandings of academic and intellectual freedom in conditions of constraint and uncertainty.
● Changing academic freedom: reshaping of the concept and practices of academic freedom under a new geopolitical situation, changing local policies, new technologies, and internal rethinking of the Academia.
The conference is organized by the Center for Independent Social Research, Inc. (CISRus), with financial support from Dialog Buro and hosting support from the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (FLAS).
Location: Budva, Montenegro