By Raffaela Kunz. The academic publishing system is in full transformation – but not in the way many had hoped for. Since the arrival of the Internet, it was predicted that the way knowledge is accessed and disseminated would undergo a fundamental change.
By Anna L. Ahlers. After participating in the re:constitution seminar in Ljubljana, Slovenia in November 2021 and, also crucially, while working with colleagues in China, I cannot help but feel extremely lucky and privileged to be able to work under the academic circumstances that I do. They appear to be so much easier to deal with than the ones I learned about in my interactions with academics from China, Hungary, Slovenia, Turkey, and other countries.
By László Detre. re:constitution is a joint program of the Forum Transregionale Studien and Democracy Reporting International, funded by the Stiftung Mercator. Re:constitution awards fellowships, inspires and organizes topical seminars, and offers fact-based analysis on and around the rule of law and democracy in the European Union.
By Alihan Mestci. Culture is a battle that “has not yet been won” – this has been iterated on numerous occasions by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ever since late 2016, the year of the July 15th coup attempt. The state of emergency has given a legal blank check for thousands of dismissals in the civil service as well as for the criminalization and marginalization of dissenting voices from the media and civil society.
By David Armitage. Threats to academic freedom are now proliferating and accelerating in almost every part of the world. What could once be detected and resisted within specific local or national settings now increasingly appears to be part of a global movement to constrain, abridge, or abolish one of humanity’s oldest and most enduring positive freedoms.
By Sari Hanafi. By academic freedoms, I mean the freedom of thought and of creating new ideas and the freedom of expression through teaching, conferences, research, and publications.
By Sandra Richter. The history of the university and the history of academic freedom are intertwined but not identical. In certain historical situations they have even differed radically – whether it be for political, economic, or administrative reasons, or because of personal failure.
By Mitchell G. Ash. The freedom of science (Wissenschaftsfreiheit), or academic freedom, as it is called in English, has been addressed historically from multiple perspectives. In these remarks, I will focus on science and scholarship in one particularly infamous dictatorial regime.
By Pascal Engel. We observe violations of academic freedom all the time. Speakers are “deplatformed” because of their political views, professors become the victims of campaigns in the media and social networks.
An introduction to the TRAFO series “Academic Freedom” by Gisèle Sapiro, Amr Hamzawy, and Başak Tuğ. Academic freedom is under threat today in many places of the world and it is urgent to create spaces of collective reflection on a principle that is fundamental to all intellectual practice.
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research is a platform for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are interested in transregional exchange and research on current issues. TRAFO is the blog of the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) and the Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (Bonn).
ISSN: 2199-2134
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