scholarly journals Free Speech and Academic Freedom in the Era of the Alt-Right

2020 ◽  
Vol 118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Hackett ◽  
Javier Rivera

This essay is written in two parts: "The Weaponization of Free Speech," describes a series of events on a university campus. The narrative clarifies the nature of current right wing attacks on personnel and programs in women, gender, and sexuality studies, and in race and ethnic studies. "An Annotated Bibliography on Academic Freedom" collects and describes materials that can assist campus communities in building cultures of resistance and resilience in the face of these attacks.

2001 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 268-272
Author(s):  
Mary Bucholtz

Debating diversity, a pragmatic analysis of official liberal discourse concerning migration in Flemish Belgium, is a thorough, topical, and relevant treatment of the widespread yet near-invisible forms of racism that pervade public discourse on cultural difference. Electing not to focus on the far more widely recognized phenomenon of right-wing racism, the authors instead offer a careful critique that makes clear that the left is by no means immune to racism in its policies and practices. Following in the wake of research by a number of other politically oriented discourse analysts, this volume addresses how racism manifests itself in discourse. It therefore serves as an important reminder that ideologies are constructed, and hence contingent and changeable. Because of the broad scope of its inquiry and the relatively accessible methods it employs, it will be of interest to scholars in many fields, including anthropology, communication, political science, race and ethnic studies, and sociology, as well as linguistics. Despite its sometimes overwhelming wealth of detail, it may also appeal to a nonacademic readership, as did the Dutch version of the book when it was first published in Belgium.


2020 ◽  
pp. 147892992094206
Author(s):  
Colin Wight

Academic freedom is one of the most important principles of the modern university. Yet, defenders of academic freedom, and the associated concept of free speech, are now often projected as being either aligned with or enabling, right-wing views. This is a puzzling development. Academic freedom is typically understood to be a set of principles that protect academics from external – primarily state – interference. In this article, I examine this puzzling development and argue that academic freedom is a higher order value than free speech and that as such, it requires greater protections. Second, the biggest dangers to academic freedom today, at least in democratic societies, are coming from within the academy. Underlying these self-inflicted attacks on academic freedom is a deeper set of disagreements about the concept of truth and the production of knowledge.


Author(s):  
Alicia Mireles Christoff

This book engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, the book reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too. In the book, novels are charged relational fields. Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, the book shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality—including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. The book describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject.


Author(s):  
Jennifer Lackey

This chapter provides an introduction to the volume and to each of the individual chapters, and it is divided into three sections. In the first section, the rationale for academic freedom is discussed, focusing particularly on truth-based and justice-based arguments, as well as on the connection between academic freedom and free speech. The parameters of academic freedom are taken up in the second section, where three issues are addressed: the scope of outside threats to academic freedom, whether academic freedom protects extramural speech, and the extent to which academic freedom permits a change to research areas. In the last section, academic freedom is discussed in connection with specific issues, including silencing, microaggressions, content warnings, campus protests, civil disobedience, and no platforming.


Author(s):  
Richard Traunmüller ◽  
Matthias Revers

ZusammenfassungIn unserer Antwort gehen wir auf einige Kritikpunkte an unserer Studie „Is Free Speech in Danger on University Campus?“ ein, die uns wiederholt und in ähnlicher Form in Diskussionen begegnen. Diese betreffen unsere Fallauswahl, unser Verständnis und unsere Operationalisierung von Toleranz und Meinungsfreiheit sowie nicht zuletzt unsere „Positionalität“. Wie wir darlegen, beruht diese Kritik vornehmlich auf einer verzerrten Rezeption unserer Befunde und auf uns zugeschriebenen Argumentationen, die wir nicht getätigt haben. Wir bekräftigen noch einmal die Relevanz, sich sozialwissenschaftlich mit der Frage nach der Meinungsfreiheit an der Universität auseinanderzusetzen.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan-Willem van Prooijen ◽  
André P. M. Krouwel

Dogmatic intolerance—defined as a tendency to reject, and consider as inferior, any ideological belief that differs from one’s own—is often assumed to be more prominent at the political right than at the political left. In the present study, we make two novel contributions to this perspective. First, we show that dogmatic intolerance is stronger among left- and right-wing extremists than moderates in both the European Union (Study 1) as well as the United States (Study 2). Second, in Study 3, participants were randomly assigned to describe a strong or a weak political belief that they hold. Results revealed that compared to weak beliefs, strong beliefs elicited stronger dogmatic intolerance, which in turn was associated with willingness to protest, denial of free speech, and support for antisocial behavior. We conclude that independent of content, extreme political beliefs predict dogmatic intolerance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-327
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Pierce ◽  
María Amelia Viteri ◽  
Diego Falconí Trávez ◽  
Salvador Vidal-Ortiz ◽  
Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal

Abstract This special issue questions translation and its politics of (in)visibilizing certain bodies and geographies, and sheds light on queer and cuir histories that have confronted the imperial gaze, or that remain untranslatable. Part of a larger scholarly and activist project of the Feminist and Cuir/Queer Américas Working Group, the special issue situates the relationships across linguistic and cultural differences as central to a hemispheric queer/cuir dialogue. We have assembled contributions with activists, scholars, and artists working through queer and cuir studies, gender and sexuality studies, intersectional feminisms, decolonial approaches, migration studies, and hemispheric American studies. Published across three journals, GLQ in the United States, Periódicus in Brazil, and El lugar sin límites in Argentina, this special issue homes in on the production, circulation, and transformation of knowledge, and on how knowledge production relates to cultural, disciplinary, or market-based logics.


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