Academic Resistance in Turkey and Hungary: Online Public Spaces, Authoritarian Political Imaginaries and Novel 21st Century ‘Culture Wars’
Zahra Jafarova
11 October 2023
16:30 – 18:00
Cambridge
This study explores the re-emergence of universities as spaces for the contestation of government policies in an era of illiberalism, democratic decline, and rising nationalism and populism. I focus on recent high-profile contestations occurring at two public universities in Turkey and Hungary: Boğaziçi University and the University of Theatre and Film Arts, respectively. At both universities, attacks on democratic governance and liberal-democratic values have resulted in various forms of academic resistance that have played out on both physical campuses and in on-line spaces. I conceptualize virtual space as a digital site of contestation, authority and resistance that function in part to energise new modalities of power and political transformations. This conceptualisation has emerged through an analysis of social media data designed to identify the following: dominant discourses of governments and their supporters on the one hand; and anti-regime resistance supporters (students and scholar activists on the other. The analysis reveals that whilst right-wing imaginaries and pro-government actors frame the liberal and pro-freedom inclinations of universities as a “threat” to nation, culture and identity, students and faculty portray the government (and in some cases university actors, e.g., university rectors, conservative intellectuals) as the real threat to their ability to ‘think without bannisters’ (Arendt, 1954) and engage in robust forms of knowledge production within the realm of the university. In this way, an emergent view of students as the last legitimate protectors of university spaces and academic freedom is dominant in a virtual political reality, where culture wars and battles over the ‘true guardian’ of HE looms large. Such an analysis shows how HE and universities have become increasingly represented flashpoints and modern institutional spaces in and upon which broader political contestations over national culture and identity play out.
Zahra Jafarova is a doctoral candidate in Higher Education program at the Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.