Academic Freedom and Precarity in the Global North

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.

Asli 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 im Osmanischen Reich. Eine weltsystemanalytische Perspektive (Sources of Islamism in the Ottoman Empire. A World Systems Analysis Perspective, 2010), Ne Ders Olsa Veririz. Akademisyenin Vasifsiz Isçiye Dönüsümü (Ready to Teach Anything. The Transformation of the Academic into Unskilled Worker, 2015 - co-authored with Meral Gezici-Yalcin) 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 Coskun, 2020), and Reflections on Exile and Academic Precarity: Discussing at the Margins of Academia (with Asli Vatansever, 2020) focus on freedom, resistance, and precarity in academia.-

Introduction PART 1: The Neoliberal Restructuration of University 1 The Chair: A Short History of Structural Unfreedom, Anti-Democracy, and Disenfranchisement in German Academia 2 What Is Tenure? 3 Disability Studies as a Subaltern Discipline PART 2: The Academic Precariat between Coping and Resistance 4 Living on the Edge: Continuous Precarity Undermines Academic Freedom but Not Researchers' Identity in Neoliberal Academia 5 Academic Freedoms of Fixed-Term Researchers in Italy: Aggravating Occupational Precarity 6 Disappearing Freedoms: On Intersections of Career and Labor in Nordic Countries PART 3: When Political and Economic Precarities Intersect: New Forms of Border Control and the State of Migrant/Exiled Academic Workers in Europe 7 "Our University Is Exploiting Us": Migrant Students in the UK, the Global Pandemic, and the Nexus between Marketized Higher Education and Border Controls 8 Academics Stuck in Movement Amidst Precarity, Hypermobility, and Vulnerability Index