Apolitical University? – Democracy, Militarization and Autonomy in International Contexts

This event explores some of the critical questions: What distinguishes intellectual autonomy from institutional autonomy? Can the production of objective knowledge coexist with the need for critical perspectives on society? What is the way for universities to tackle the dark sides of modern democracies, including colonialism, imperialism or racism? How can universities uphold democratic governance in the face of increasing militarization and political polarization? Does the current state of academic institutions favor one type of political activity over others? Can academics and their institutions remain apolitical while fostering autonomous spaces for democratic debates?

Maya Wind is a President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Riverside. Her research on the reproduction and international export of Israeli security expertise has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Killam Laureates Trust. Her first book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, investigates the complicity of Israeli universities in Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters the reputation of Israeli universities as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy and documents how they are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights.

Christina Kullberg is professor of French, specialized in Francophone postcolonial literatures. Her research deals with the historical dimensions of colonialism and racisms as well as its contemporary configurations. Publications include Points of Entanglement in French Caribbean Travel Writing (1620–1722) (2023), Lire Histoire générale des Antilles de J.-B. Du Tertre (2020), and The Poetics of Ethnography in Martinican Narratives (2013). In her current research project, funded by Riksbankens jubileumsfond, she investigates poetic response to natural catastrophes from a decolonial perspective. She is one of the project leaders of the research program “Democracy and Higher Education” at Uppsala University, created by the Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences in response to increasing threats to democratic processes within the global community, with the aim to raise awareness of both the relationship between higher education and democracy, and how this needs to develop and change, arguing that the University has an obligation to critically assess its contribution to the vitality of democracy.

The event is organized by the Retracing Connections RJ research programme and the Faculty of Languages of Uppsala University.

Registration required: register here
(no later than September 5)