Crackdowns on Academic Freedom: The Transnational Dimension

In this lecture, Professor Aysuda Kölemen will examine transnational patterns of repression targeting academics and academic institutions with a focus on Hungary, Turkey, Russia and the United States. Professor Kerry Bystrom will introduce the lecture and moderate a discussion linking transnational strategies of crackdown with transnational strategies of resistance. The lecture draws on material from Bystrom and Kolemen’s forthcoming edited collection Threatened Scholarship, Dynamics of Repression and Forms of Resistance: Towards Academic Freedom as a Transnational Human Rights, a volume which brings insights from scholars at risk forced to leave their countries of origin together with scholars currently fighting for open society at home.

Kerry Bystrom is Associate Professor of English and Human Rights at Bard College Berlin. She publishes on African and Latin American literature and cultural studies and on the role of storytelling and the arts in processes of democratic transitions and transitional justice, human rights movements, and humanitarian campaigns. She teaches in world literature, critical human rights and postcolonial studies including regularly offering a Scholars at Risk advocacy seminar. She also works practically in the field of Higher Education in Emergencies.

Aysuda Kölemen is a comparative political scientist. She manages TSI-OSUN, an international fellowship program for at-risk scholars, works as an activist against threats to academic freedom, and teaches politics at Bard College Berlin. Her current research focuses on the combined threat that autocratization and precarious academic employment poses to academic freedom in critical disciplines both in the Global South and the Global North.

Register and join via Zoom

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Time: 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Location: Online Event