Tag: academic freedom

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Students Against Cuts Shake Up the Walls of the University 

On the 19th of September at 8:00, a group of students marched into the main building of the University of Helsinki and announced that it was now occupied. We, “Students Against Cuts,” are behind this occupation, through which we have made noise about the rights of all students. In occupying the main building of the University of Helsinki, we wished to draw attention to the precarious past, present, and unknown future faced by students, which is being exacerbated by the government’s plans to cut housing allowance and affordable housing and to pursue racist immigration policy. 

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International Call for Solidarity: Boğaziçi University Academics Begin the 2021 Fall Term Under Assault

Note from LeftEast editors: We share the international call for solidarity with the academics of Boğaziçi University, originally published by Jadaliyya Reports. Boğaziçi University is under greater threat than ever before as the new term begins. It has been 10 months since the Turkish President appointed a rector to Boğaziçi University by a midnight decree […]

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Interview with Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan: Science shouldn’t be controlled by corporations

Alexandra Elbakyan at a talk in 2010. Photo: Apneet Jolly/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

Note from LeftEast editors: The article is an excerpt from an interview that originally appeared on The Wire Science on 22nd February 2021. Read the whole text written by Sidharth Singh here. Read also LeftEast’s interview with Alexandra Elbakyan from 2017 here. On December 24, 2020, the Delhi high court conducted its first hearing for the […]

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For Boğaziçi and Freedom: a report from Turkey’s new student opposition

This year the Turkish government’s campaign to stamp out dissent has broken new ground, but a new spirit of resistance is there to meet it, particularly at one of the country’s landmark public universities. In what follows, two participants in the oppositional student movement at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul tell us about their struggle against […]

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The Rise of Heteronomous Academia on the EU’s Borderlands

ith the very recent founding of a “streamlined” Family Research Centre, compatible with the government’s political agenda, within the Academy’s Institute of Sociology, heteronomy in academe has reached a new peak. In a context where “family research” serves as a governmental counter-discourse par excellence to bash “gender studies” (generally associated with liberalism, multiculturalism, relativism and the CEU), the foundation of a “family research centre” within the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is not only ethically questionable; it is also a clear sign of governmental policies permeating the consecrated realms of science. The Centre’s official credo propagating “value-neutral” science on its homepage is anything but neutral, given that its creation is inseparable from an evidently over-politicised context. Therefore, “value-neutrality” should be better understood as a justificatory ideology for official sociology that aims “not to realise itself as a science but to realise an official image of science”.

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Gender Studies in Hungary are now being linked to broader struggles: Interview with Anikó Gregor 

LeftEast editor Agnes Gagyi spoke to Anikó Gregor, one of the faculty in charge of the Gender Studies masters program at Budapest-based Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), shut down by the governments de-accreditation of Gender Studies programs in November. Gregor’s analysis places the ban in the context of Fidesz’s strategy of emphasizing liberal democracy’s failures, economic […]

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Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Researchers on the Campaign Against a Project on Gender Equality

Note from the LeftEast editors: days after The Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (a.k.a. The Istanbul Convention) was declared “unconstitutional” by the Bulgarian Constitutional Court, the witch-hunt against the so-called “gender ideology” took its first symbolic victim. A project on gender equality nominated in the first […]

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The Freedom to Say “No”: Interview with dismissed Turkish academic and Yeniyol editor Uraz Aydin

source: firgoa.usc.es

Note from the LeftEast editors: For the last several months in Turkish politics, the party-state’s agenda has been dominated by two interconnected operations: consolidation of power and elimination of opposition. The former will culminate in the constitutional referendum of April 16 this year, which will, if successful, transform Turkey from a parliamentary into a presidential […]

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Science, Crimea and prison bars: persecution of teachers and researchers

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article first appeared on Commons Journal. It has been reprinted on LeftEast with the permission of the authors. by Viktoriia Muliavka and Alona Liasheva Translated from the Ukrainian by Valentyna Kolesnik. The use of science and education for political purposes in Ukraine has become the norm. How has it […]