The politics of knowledge-making and knowledge-makers in times of political turmoil: lessons from Turkey, Syria, Hungary and The United Kingdom

Abstract

Higher Education (HE) and its persistent links to precarity, political ‘crises’, conflicts over the meaning of freedom and the rise of populist political HE imaginaries represents a space demanding comparative understandings of contemporary universities, their attendant culture wars and corresponding knowledge-making conflicts, including a debate about the effectiveness of 21st century critique in HE (Dillabough, 2022, Al-Azmeh & Dillabough, under review, Michelle & Robertson, 2023). At the same time, this need for novel understandings of HE and crises are also particularly relevant to wider questions raised across different HE constituencies about the impact of the legacies of imperialism on HE– what Arendt referred to as the ‘imperial blueprint’, alongside the rise of authoritarian orientations increasingly framing HE governing rationales. One method for comprehending these crises in HE is to consider more fully the role of the post-colonial intellectual and ‘scholaractivist’ in navigating the often contradictory challenges of such varied legacies and empires, alongside contemporary nation-building projects in transnational HE contexts. These are contexts blighted by heightened geopolitical conflict, growing emnity across ethno-national, gender, racial and class lines and the growth of powerful pressure groups. These rest alongside intensifying languages of protectionism, militarisation and geopolitical interventions through overt (violence) and covert means (cyber and culture wars). An increasing trend is to view these conflicts through new modalities of HE cronyism and ‘corporatism’ and political languages such as statecraft, capture and competitive advantage. In this task, however, we are still left with questions about the contextually driven motivations of nation-states and HE actors to shift the terms and conditions of their missions and mandates in relation to the past and in contexts of heightened authoritarianism and conflict. Arguably these conflicts are also impinging on the ability of intellectuals to engage in the task of robust critique and respond effectively to the complexity of the challenges that HE faces in the 21st century. In this panel we seek to explore these questions through the study of HE and crises in four different contexts experiencing varying degrees of populist and activist political intervention simultaneously. Drawing upon a large-scale ESRC funded research project on HE and Crises, we present four case studies (Turkey, Hungary, UK, Syria) that examine the dual conflict of HE’s imperial legacy and the contemporary rise of populism and populist pressures. First, we expose the ways in which populist imaginaries shape the experiences of scholar and student activists in HE and the associated knowledge-power dynamics within modern HE institutions in each context. Second, we demonstrate the role of contingent national and regional politics, alongside wider geopolitics and historical legacies of imperial conflict, in influencing how HE actors come to embody the influence of populism in HE, in its tacit and more extreme forms. Third, we assess the ways in which diverse forms of authorial power in HE are drawn upon to justify or resist populist HE governing practices, shift the terms upon which critique takes place in HE, and helps us to expose a potential crises of the ‘post-colonial intellectual’.

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