By Fatemeh Shams. If people in Iran are finding a voice, what words are they choosing to say? All revolutions have slogans – the collective fight reduced to a handful of memorable, chantable, printable words. But what are the origins of these slogans? And how have they changed over time?
Interview with Asef Bayat. This interview was published in Persian on Oct. 10 by the Tehran daily Etemaad. Shortly after its publication, the Iranian authorities ordered the newspaper to take the interview down from its website. The interview had already gone viral in Iran and abroad, and several other outlets that had reposted it were likewise forced to unpublish it.
By Nassim Mehran. On 14 September 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, was detained by Iranian police forces because of an “improper hijab.” Two days later, she was pronounced dead, allegedly due to police brutality. For Iranians living under the fundamentalist state’s oppression of women during the last 43 years, this is not an exceptional incident.
By Jernej Letnar Černič. For decades, pluralism, the rule of law, and human rights have been the backbone of constitutional democracies. Those ideals have been embraced by academia, at least in constitutional democracies.
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 Rose Jaji. African “refugeeness” in the media, policy, and academia is an essentialist physical image conflating material deprivation and multiple victimhoods. Historically, African refugees were capable of political participation even to the point of building vibrant states in the new lands they fled to in precolonial Africa.
By Noémi Lévy-Aksu. Since the mid-2010s, the authoritarian turn of the Turkish regime has resulted in multiple violations of human rights and freedoms. Universities have been particularly affected by the process, with mass dismissals of academics, repeated attacks on academic freedom and autonomy, and repression of students’ initiatives and protests.
By Noémi Lévy-Aksu. Since the mid-2010s, the authoritarian turn of the Turkish regime has resulted in multiple violations of human rights and freedoms. Universities have been particularly affected by the process, with mass dismissals of academics, repeated attacks on academic freedom and autonomy, and repression of students’ initiatives and protests.
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.
By Egemen Özbek. As Vanessa Agnew highlights in the Introduction to the volume, Refugee Routes is a response to the ever-growing number of refugees and internally displaced people around the world.
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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