A Program by CEU-Democracy Institute’s „Democracy in History” workgroup supported by OSUN Global Visiting Fellowship
The concluding conference of Academics Facing Autocracy in April showed the need for new modalities to teach higher education under illiberal rule. As the continuation of the workgroup’s Academics Facing Autocracy program, current deliberations focus on teaching and research in an authocratizing Central Eastern Europe. Where the conference brought together academics from scholarly communities threatened by authoritarian governments from numerous countries on several continents (Belarus, Brazil, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Paraguay, Russia, Nicaragua, Turkey), the current research groups are composed of researchers with in depth knowledge on the developments in the region and thus predisposed to find suiting answers to the challenges they operate in.
One central finding of the discussions in April was that support programs that aim to get critical educators out of illiberal contexts results double challenge: For the one side they are barely able to integrate into foreign academia in a sustainable manner and for the other, they leave the higher education sector of their origin weakened. thus, the current round aims at assessing European support programs set up scholars-at-risk and at working out course curricula which sensitize students with regard to threats against their and their universities’ academic freedom. For the sake of the former aim, one team of the Academics Facing Autocracy 2. group conducts a survey among scholars who participate(d) or applied to European scholars-at-risk programs and the managers and administrators of such programs in order to come up with suggestions how such programs could be further improved and rendered sustainable. For the sake of the second aim, the three other teams within our group develop curricula organized around the crucial topics of decolonization, memory politics and democratic resilience.
The concluding conference of Academics Facing Autocracy in April showed the need for new modalities to teach higher education under illiberal rule. As the continuation of the workgroup’s Academics Facing Autocracy program, current deliberations focus on teaching and research in an authocratizing Central Eastern Europe. Where the conference brought together academics from scholarly communities threatened by authoritarian governments from numerous countries on several continents (Belarus, Brazil, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Paraguay, Russia, Nicaragua, Turkey), the current research groups are composed of researchers with in depth knowledge on the developments in the region and thus predisposed to find suiting answers to the challenges they operate in.
Participants
TRACK 1
ASSESSING SCHOLARS AT RISK PROGRAMS
Agnes Kelemen (CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest) and Michael Kozakowski (CEU Yehuda Elkana Center for Teaching, Learning, and Higher Education Research, Vienna) team leaders
Rafael Labanino (University of Konstanz)
Eren Paydas (Off University, Berlin)
Maksym Snihyr (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy)
TOWARDS A PEDAGOGICAL ALTERNATIVE
A, DECOLONIZATION TEAM
Daniel Palm (University for Continuing Education Krems/Ceu Democracy Institute, Budapest) team leader
Elzbieta Kwiecinska (University of Warsaw)
Karolina Koziura (European University Institute)
Adrian Matus (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)
Lina Omran
B, MEMORY POLITICS TEAM
Vladimir Petrovic (Boston University) team leader
Noemi Levy-Aksu (Hafiza Merkezi,, Turkey)
Julia Szekely (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)
Ketevan Epadze (Tbilisi State University)
Bohdan Shumylovych (Center for Urban History, Lviv)
C, DEMOCRATIC RESILIENCE TEAM
Ruzha Smilova (Sofia University) team leader
Saniia Toktogazieva (American University of Central Asia, Bishkek)
Aleksandar Pavlovic (Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade)
Activities
Academics Facing Autocracy 2. started on August 1, 2023 with a kick off hosted by the then double leadership of the AFA program, Renáta Uitz and Balzs Trecnenyi. Since then, each team has bi-weekly zoom meetings and there is a plenary meeting once a month. Members of each team join other teams’ meetings to keep the coherence of our work across all panels. The first meetings in August aimed at familiarizing each other with the different local contexts we come from and at identifying how we can work together so that our research and curricula output can be relevant on a larger scale, how to work out pedagogical alternatives that are resilient enough to be tailorcut to local needs. On September 1, the whole group met and discussed what the outcomes should be by the end of the program (December 31, 2023).
Track 1 worked out two survey questionnaires, one for scholars at risk and another one for managers and administrators of European scholars-at-risk programs in addition to two different sets of interview questions to each group to be disseminated during the autumn. During the preperations, essential questions on research ethics in the field were discussed and are documented to guide further research on the topic. The questionnaires are anonymous online surveys and respondents who indicate their willingness to share their personal experiences in more detail will be contacted for a half-hour interview. The generated data will allow us to assess existing programs and address questions for future improvement.
Within Track 2, the Decolonization team mapped literature in the theoretical space in between the rightful criticism of Western, liberal , U.S. centered academia colonializing Central-Eastern Europe and the overly nativizing and essentializing responses of some academics that are supported by autocratic movements. Currently, they develop a didactical concept to teach about changing uses of decelonialization concepts under autocracy in the Central Eastern Region. Tightly cooperating with the Memory Politics team, they came up with the suggestion that all the three teams within Track 2 should aim at the following learning outcome in their curricula: “Students participating in the activities can distinguish critical from biased use of concepts from the literature on the topos of decolonialization. They also can identify actors and literature that allow them to react to overly essentializing reformulations of history and identity from the side of autocratic governments.”
The Memory politics team traced the patterns of authoritarian interventions in politics of memory and scrutinized this mnemonic landscape in national as well as regional context, according to distinguishable subjects (memory laws and calenders, education and textbooks,. monuments and urban space). They also discuss the possibility of counteracting this attempt at controlling the past by hosting memory labs aimed at mnemonic resocialization. Memory lab is a module in their proposed course curriculum, a means to enable students to experiment with original mnemonic techniques (such as for instance memory walks or digital forms of commemoration). The course participants will work together towards the production of an original output contributing to documentation and/or civic engagement in the memory field.
The Democratic resilience team mapped existing university courses’ curricula in East Central Europe, the Balkans and the Caucasus region, primarily but not only of Political Science departments of universities in these regions which claim to teach about democracy and subjects where democratic resilience is presumably discussed. They looked at courses of universities that already teach on democratization. The analysis of exiting curriculaincluded also of institutions supported by famously non-democratic governments such as Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Budapest.
Another plenary meeting is expected for late October or early November and we will meet for a (hybrid) workshop in Budapest on December 14-15 to discuss each teams’ outcome and prepare the project outputs, possibly working papers in the Review of Democracy and trial classes based on the course curricula developed within the project.
