Anti-Intellectualism, Attacks on Academic Freedom and Illiberal Neoliberalism

Prof. Éric Fassin (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis)

06/06/2024 10:00 am –12:00 pm

U Bremen GRA2 0030

This interdisciplinary workshop will address the rise of neoliberal illiberal politics and their connection to anti-intellectualism and discourses around academic freedom. Based on the guest lecture, we will discuss a variety of cases, ranging from the US-American moral panic around ‘Critical Race Theory’, Bolsonaro’s intentional attacks on University funding, discourses around ‘islamo-leftism’ and ‘wokism’ in France to the ban of Gender Studies in Hungary. What do those cases and the growing hostility against researchers tell us about the global state of democracy? How and why are academics and their modes of knowledge production targeted not only by far-right actors but increasingly also by the state?

The workshop is open for students, PhD candidates and Post-Doc researchers from all disciplines.

In preparation of the workshop, participants are asked to read the following chapters from Eric Fassin’s (2024) book State Anti-Intellectualism & the Politics of Gender and Race (available via SUUB):

Introduction: Anti-Intellectualism and the Politics of Truth (pp. 1-23)

Conclusion: Democracy and the Intersectional Politics of Mourning (pp. 149-160)

Epilogue: In the First Person (pp. 161-172)

Registration for the workshop via mail is possible until May 30.

Register
Back to overview
diversity and plurality

“Join us to create more diversity and plurality in knowledge production.”

Gisela Febel
Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart
Is contradiction eurocentric?

“Is contradiction a eurocentric concept, operational phenomenon, and instrument of power?”

Kerstin Knopf
sustained engagement

“The history of Western philosophy can be understood as a sustained engagement with contradiction.”

Norman Sieroka
relational

“At first I thought contradiction was always a relational thing; but the more I ponder it, the more I think contradiction creates relation.”

Ingo H. Warnke