Academic Freedom and Precarity in the Global North: Free as a Bird

With contributions from six leading scientific countries of the Global North and from the general European Higher Education Area, this book questions the predominant view on academic freedom and pleads for a holistic approach.

While academic freedom has been a top agenda point for the global scientific community in recent years, the public and academic discourse has often been marked by a negative interpretation of the term understood merely as exemption from state intervention and censorship. The contributions in this edited volume demonstrate, however, that this is not where the story ends: the ability to exercise academic freedom not only involves the freedom of expression in its abstract sense but should involve the capability to determine research agendas and curricula independently from market pressures or threats of career sabotage, and to resist workplace misconduct without fear of losing future career chances.

Providing a differentiated picture of contemporary structural limits to academic freedom in advanced democracies, this volume will be of great interest for not only scholars of higher education, but for the entire academic community.

Aslı Vatansever is a sociologist of work with a focus on precarious academic labor. Currently she is a Research Fellow at Bard College Berlin. Her books include Ursprünge des Islamismus imOsmanischen Reich. Eine weltsystemanalytische Perspektive (Sources of Islamism in the OttomanEmpire. A World Systems Analysis Perspective, 2010), Ne Ders OlsaVeririz. Akademisyenin Vasıfsız İşçiye Dönüşümü (Ready to Teach Anything. The Transformationof the Academic into Unskilled Worker, 2015 - co-authored with Meral Gezici-Yalcın) and At the Margins of Academia. Exile, Precariousness, and Subjectivity (2020).

Aysuda Kölemen (PhD University of Georgia, Athens, USA, 2010) is a comparative political scientist and a journalist. After she was dismissed from her position as an assistant professor in Turkey in 2017 for her political stance, her activist and research interests turned to the economic as well as the political dimensions of academic freedom. Her recent publications such as Illiberal Democracy or Electoral Autocracy: The Case of Turkey (with Gülçin Coşkun, 2020), and Reflections on Exile and Academic Precarity: Discussing at the Margins of Academia (with Aslı Vatansever, 2020) focus on freedom, resistance, and precarity in academia.□