The protest within: How to cope with protest academically vs. academic protesting?

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel session questions whether protest or activism are a topic of our research or whether the research we do in itself is already a form of protest or activism. In addition, we aim to tackle the discourse of whether activism with the academy is currently being made redundant through e.g. tight processes of tenure or time-related regulations that make movement beyond forsaken ticking off boxes along a predetermined career impossible or non-lucrative. The academic field is also determined by neoliberal expectations of constant increases in publications or the acquisition of third-party funding. And as stated in the call, protest influences collective ideas and shapes ethical and social coexistence and is therefore always also political. How does this all fit in with the notion of open-minded and neutral academic research? This is interrelated with questions of practices of resistance, institutional frameworks, and relations with research ethics. Thus, we need to pose questions such as: How do we as academics deal with the fact that our research topics are interlinked with our concerns (for the collective good?) and are seldomly apolitical? Can the choice of how we approach and conduct research be a practice of resistance per se? And when thinking about Third Mission Projects that are developed to bridge the gap between academia and implementation in so-called real life – how to refrain from activism here?

Using the examples of research on a specific “fashionable” topic and form of protest (climate), the question of precarity in engaging in politically relevant and contested areas of research (internationally educated teachers) and the issue of how and when to engage throughout increasingly contested research biographies, this panel aims to tackle selected discourses at the nexus of protest, activism, and academia. Conducting third mission and its role in the context of delivering and remaining within anticipated barriers will be discussed against the idea of university being spaces of activism as such or limiting factors per se.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Organizers

• Michelle Proyer, University of Vienna

• Sabine Krause, Université de Fribourg

Chair

• Sabine Krause, Université de Fribourg

Individual Presentations

• Now you see me – Climate justice and protest in an academic context - Sabine Krause, Université de Fribourg

• Academic activism & precarity - Doing tenure or doing good? - Michelle Proyer, University of Vienna

• Respectful workplace policies and the silencing of protest in post-secondary education - Clea Schmidt

Discussant

• Michelle Proyer, University of Vienna