Zoom Registration: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_D_dc3UQkQ7WHKYYXVeW0Xw

Lecture Description: Recent years have seen a rapid spread of autocratic practices and systematic attacks on the institutions, rights, and freedoms that underpin liberal democracies. As the number of repressive regimes rises, antidemocratic strategies refined in one de-democratizing state are being transferred and adapted to other locations. Academia is among the primary targets of such efforts, as scholars play a central role in enabling and sustaining dissent through knowledge production and public engagement. University campuses further serve as physical spaces for assembly and protest against democratic backsliding. In this lecture, Prof. Aysuda Kölemen will examine these transnational patterns of repression targeting academics and academic institutions with a focus on Hungary, Turkey, Russia and the United States. Prof. 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 Right (under contract with Amsterdam University Press/Central European University Press)--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.