Free as a Bird

In view of the entanglement of entrenched quasi-feudal hierarchies and neoliberal reforms in the so-called leading scientific countries, the ‘Free as a Bird: Academic Precariat and the State of Academic Freedom in the Global North’ workshop on May 18, 2021 aims at expanding the discussion on academic freedom to the underexamined relationship between labor devaluation and critical knowledge production. For this purpose, the event brings together a number of distinguished scholars and activists working on issues related to labor precarity, political freedoms, discrimination, and intersectional inequalities in academia.

This event is organized by BCB faculty members Aslı Vatansever and Aysuda Kölemen and funded by the Philipp-Schwartz-Initiative. 

Program

Panel I: 10:00 – 12:00 am

10:15-10:40 am
Mariya Ivancheva (University of Liverpool): The double bind of academic freedom: state and/or market capture in UK and Venezuela

10:45 -11:10
Sanaz Raji: Understanding the Nexus between Marketsized Higher Education, Surveillance and the Hostile Environment in the UK

11:15 – 11:40
Daniel Mekonnen (Geneva, Leiden): Neither in nor out:  A forced migrant’s view on demographic diversity of the Swiss sector of higher education and its knowledge production processes

Panel II: 1:00 to 3:00 pm

1:00 – 1:25 pm
Dan Hirslund (University of Bergen): Disappearing freedoms. On intersections of career and labor in Nordic countries

1:25 – 1:50 pm
Ana Ferreira (CICS.NOVA, Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences, Lisbon): Embodying scientific precariousness through the narrative of “passion for science”: neither academic freedom nor autonomy

1:50 – 2:15 pm 
Lisa Cerami (University of Rochester, NY): What is tenure?

2:15- 2:40 pm
Colin Cameron (Northumbria University): It’s Not Much of a Surprise That So Little Changes

Panel III: 4:00 – 6:00 pm

4:00 – 4:25 pm
Britta Ohm (Berlin, Heidelberg) : Political freedom and structural unfreedom: dependencies, disenfranchisement and low-cost academic labor in Germany

4:25 – 4:50 pm
Max Kramer (Free University of Berlin) & Sarbani Sharma (University of Tübingen): Reflexivity and Temporality of Conceptual Labor in Anthropology

4:50 pm – 5:15 pm
Giuseppe Acconcia (University of Padova):  Academic Freedoms of Fixed-Term Researchers in Italy: Politicizing Occupational Precarity

Contact information:  events@berlin.bard.edu