In this seminar, Zeina Al Azmeh and Jo Dillabough draw upon data collected from Turkish and Syrian academics living in exile to pose the following overarching question: how does a crisis of the state and its ‘emergency politics’ (Honig, 2009) lead to a crisis of the intellectual or what does it mean to be an intellectual in our contemporary conjuncture beyond Western clichés and the universalistic bias of their declinist arguments. They argue that the critical commitments exiled postcolonial intellectuals presume are becoming more and more untenable as authoritarianism takes hold globally and the Global Right increasingly tightens its grip on universities. These untenable commitments, often resting alongside nomadic precarity, are creating inner tensions within the postcolonial critical intellectual that are often unresolvable or at least unresolved. More importantly, they are creating a crisis of critique that renders the figure of the postcolonial intellectual as a ‘problem space’ in need of new questions and new frames of understanding.

Zeina Al Azmeh is a political sociologist at the University of Cambridge. She currently serves as Research and Teaching Associate in Political Sociology at the Department of Sociology. She is also a Fellow of Selwyn College. Her research centres on the cultural sociology of exile and the political sociology of knowledge production related to revolutions and counterrevolutions. Her expertise lies in cultural sociology and the sociologies of intellectuals, memorialisation, and migration, particularly within contexts of forced displacement. Her recent publications include ‘Trauma work as hindrance to political praxis during democratisation movements’ in Theory and Society, ‘Authorial Power, Authoritarianism, and Exiled Intellectuals: Syria and Turkey’ in the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, and ‘The Right to Meaning: A Syrian Case Study’ in Cultural Sociology. Her book titled Syrian Intellectuals in Exile: The Dilemmas of Revolution and the Cost of Leaving is under contract with Cambridge University Press. 

Jo-Anne Dillabough is Professor in the Sociology of Youth and Global Cultures (Education, Sociology of Education), University of Cambridge. She has been a visiting scholar at universities in Australia, Argentina, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden and was the former David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education, UBC.