Caring for Knowledge During Authoritarianism
A gathering of 40 self-organizations of scholars at risk, self-governing and para-academic universities
21-22 November 2026
Majal Collective
Sonnenallee 127, 12059 Berlin
For quite some time we have been experiencing a breakdown of knowledge infrastructures across countries and disciplines. Academia is under threat; it’s not a matter of individual countries, and it is taking place in what have been and still are considered strong democracies with strong institutions and rule of law.
Built in response to different crises, the institutions we represent provide answers to this breakdown by organising the distribution of knowledge and supporting marginalised knowledge outside of the university, while maintaining close connections to it. The gathering starts from the assumption that new forms of academic life are already being created in dispersed and often fragile ways. It aims to bring together self-governing universities of displaced and persecuted scholars and para-academic initiatives in order to strengthen these emerging practices of knowledge-making and sharing.
We are grateful for the financial support by Zeit Stiftung Bucerius and Eastern Academic Alliance which allows us to come together.
The gathering is conceived as a working space for exchange and development of shared perspectives and actions.
Together we will tackle three topics and their key questions:
Knowledge at Risk
Losing its authority over the production of truth, the university as an institution is in a deep crisis. Worldwide authoritarianism fiercely fights evidence-based knowledge and knowledge workers, targeting especially the social sciences and the humanities by either labelling whole disciplines and departments as dangerous/radical/un-national/woke or as without value and unnecessary. As research and knowledge creation on climate change, gender, colonialism, migration, peace and conflict are suppressed further and as even some parts of medical research become marginalized, scholars working in these areas are at risk, persecuted and displaced. In their new, often temporary, academic homes, they are frequently not perceived as full members of the academic community. Often scholars at risk are seen as providing field access to regions that are otherwise no longer open to academia but not taken seriously as real knowledge workers in their own right.
We aim to tackle the following questions and others:.
- How to catalyse the vast knowledge of scholars at risk better and not as a replacement of a ‘field’ only
- How to create support infrastructures for scholars at risk that are not conceived as a sprint to catch up with “normal” scholars in formats like non-renewable 12-month fellowships, but rather as peer-led support
- How to establish new networks of solidarity with EU scholars
- How to bring lived experience into academia as it’s crucial for resistance
- What and how do we teach, what do our students need and where do they take it
- How do we raise public awareness about the crisis of/within academia and the plight of scholars at risk
- How do we get people who are supportive of democracy to understand that they should put their money into it the fight
- How to share resources better, like e.g. www.academicresilience.eu
Autonomy and Collaboration in Higher Education
The crisis of the university may partly be connected to the way higher education aimed to overcome its retreat into the “ivory tower”: its wish to leave this proverbial tower and remain relevant to society has led to an opening of the university towards business only. Business started to shape the curriculum so that the university produces useful employees; and universities looking to business to fill increasing holes in university budgets has led to a bending of teaching and research to the needs and demands of corporate donors and contributors. It has also resulted in new semi-academic job profiles like science manager and science communicator to communicate research at the university to ’the public’. Science Communication is largely focused on communicating with the general public at large and as individuals. This has not yet led to structured ways in which the university can connect to the public on a communal basis, that is to civil society.
Over the past years, scholars at risk have built a myriad of intellectual infrastructures and peer support networks. Alongside other challenges like structural underfunding and the lack of sufficient exchange and mutual support among them, cooperation between existing higher education institutions (universities and state-funded research institutes) and civil society remains haphazard.
Roughly two models have developed:
Whichever of these two models we focus on:
- How can cooperation between these organisations of scholars of risk be more structured, long-term, less dependent on individuals and more cognizant of the intellectual contribution of scholars at risk?
- How do we operate effectively as organisations that are academic and at the same time civil society organisations? How can we learn from others to become more self-sustaining?
- How do we collaborate (better and more) with civil society organisations, resisting the shrinking of civic space as part of authoritarianism’s attack on democracy?
- In collaborating with universities, we find ourselves in the role of the „non-academic“ partner: what are other ways of working within academia, what are models?
- How can we engage with universities as a whole and the student body not as customers but as political actors?
Publishing Infrastructures
Over the past three decades, academic publishing has become increasingly centralized, corporatized, commercialized and metrics-driven, resulting in escalating costs, restricted access, precarious labour conditions, and epistemic homogenization. Rather than addressing the challenges higher education faces, such as the threat of international authoritarianism to academic freedom, this approach has only served to exacerbate existing issues, including accessibility, accountability, and credibility of academic knowledge commons.
One aspect of the structural shortcomings of academic publishing is that it creates major barriers for independent scholars, scholars in the Global South and especially scholars at risk, who lost their academic affiliation because of authoritarian regimes or war. Without an affiliation to a university in the Global North, they lack access to journals, libraries, and peer review infrastructures. Even existing open-access models largely follow the same profit-driven logic and often require authors to pay for publication.
In a collaborative design workshop we will prototype possible governance models for scholar-led or cooperative publishing networks. Discussions will address financial sustainability, institutional collaboration, and technical infrastructure components such as peer review systems, archiving, and interoperability.
Participants will articulate preliminary principles for a shared knowledge commons in academic publishing and identify potential institutional partners for future experimentation.
Participating Organizations
Self-organizations of scholars at risk who strive to increase solidarity with our peers;
we are not support organisations for scholars at risk
Self-governing
we use on democratic decision-making mechanisms and we are independent of universities and states,
Para-academic
we search for alternative ways of knowing and aim to create and share knowledge differently from the established university system
Event Programme and Organising Committee
DAY 1
November 20 – Friday
16:00
Welcome, Meet and Greet for representatives of self-organisations.
18:00
Fair of Organisations:
Caring for Knowledge during Authoritarianism
DAY 2
November 21 – Saturday
10:00 – 13:00
Plenary:
Intro of the three topics, split into working groups
Parallel sessions during the day
Lunch
Play-back
17:00
Dinner and cultural get-together
DAY 3
November 22 – Sunday
10:00
Agreement and further steps
13:00
Wrap-up and Goodbye
Organising Committee
Alexandr Rusanov
Off University, Historian, Svobodny University (Free University)
Anastasia Ushakova
Based at Lancaster University, lecturer, part of CARA and Svobodny University (Free University), left Russia 16 years ago
Andrea Pető
CEU Vienna, gender studies, published a pocket guide for academics under attack
Boris Melnichenko
PhD in Sociology at EHEES, Paris, Research Engineer at CIS/CNRS), Volunteer at Exil Solidaire, Réseau de soutien CSSCR, Free School of Arts and Design and Svobodny University (Free University)
Bülent Somay
Psychosocial Studies and English Literature scholar, academic for peace, Off University among the hosts, author of the book “The End of Truth”
Çağla Diner
Off University trustee, economist and sociologist, academic coordinator at Essen University
Dina Gusejnova
LSE, Project 2022, UNE
Fırat Erdoğmuş
Media Studies scholar, software & knowledge infrastructures developer, Off University Volunteer
Julia Strutz
Executive Director at Off University
Luqman Guldive
Rojava University
Mohamad Moustafa Alabsi
Off University trustee, independent scholar , Syrian conflict studies, Syrian Library Project
Ruth Mulandi
Fundraiser at Off University
Sevil Çakır
Part of Barış İçin Akademisyenler/Peace Academics Germany, KriSol, sociologist and independent researcher on Kurdish women’s movement in diaspora, Off University volunteer
