Safeguarding Academic Freedom Against Transnational Repression: Exploring Researchers' and Educators’ Experiences, and Identifying How Institutions and Professional Networks Could Support Scholars and Students at Risk.

In contemporary higher education, transnational repression (TNR) – where authoritarian regimes extend repression beyond their borders to targeted communities abroad – increasingly shapes dynamics in the classroom and beyond. Students and staff at higher education and research institutions may refrain from fully exercising their fundamental rights in research, education, and civic engagement, even when residing in functioning democracies, due to efforts by foreign actors and their proxies to silence, intimidate, and threaten diasporic communities.

In academic contexts, TNR could range from surveillance, censorship, to digital and physical harassments. More perniciously, it could lead to self-censorship that manifests not only in silenced speech, but also in reduced participation in university and civic life by students and staff, as well as communities that we wish to engage with as researchers.

These dynamics have rarely been adequately voiced in safe contexts within academic governance that allows sensitive explorations of how oppression operates relationally and structurally in academic settings, and how they could be properly addressed and managed to defend academic freedom.

In this session, we will share some practical and existential struggles we have experienced as educators and as researchers, to start off a collaborative dialogue on how we can address this collectively as a global scholarly community. We would like to move this conversation out of niche discussions within marginalised communities, and mainstream this as part of our broader fight for Academic Freedom generally, by building a community of inquiry involving HEIs and RIs as well as independent researchers and community partners.