On the Uses of Academic Freedom in the Interdisciplines

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

In the spirit of questioning what academic formations like American Studies “[are] and can be in this moment of ongoing catastrophe and accelerating devolution,” this roundtable asks: what is academic freedom and what can it be for the studies of power, race, gender, class, and sexuality that form the core of American Studies and the identity-based interdisciplines?
Born of protest and epistemic ruptures with the academy, these field formations have a fraught relationship with principles such as institutional autonomy, shared governance, and academic freedom. These principles of academic life can and have been used both to foster oppositional knowledge production (authorizing them to establish scholarly standards) as well as to suppress radical knowledge practices (by constraining or policing the proper subjects of these fields).
In 2025, right-wing attacks on higher education in general and identity-based interdisciplines in particular have financial, economic, and anti-democratic dimensions that extend beyond mere "culture wars" to form the preconditions of democracy and transformative social change. And while academic freedom alone is insufficient to achieve broader political goals such as sovereignty, self-determination, and abolition, its absence might foreclose these outcomes.

With this in mind, this roundtable asks:
The AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure is fundamental to modern understandings of the concept. How/has the deployment of the term evolved in the last century?
What might be gained by moving away from conceptualizations of academic freedom as an individual right?
Is it useful to, instead, approach academic freedom as the conditions of possibility for critical thought and insurgent knowledge production?
Who can leverage academic freedom to advance justice?
What other terms/concepts/values/ideals do the interdisciplines turn to prior to or instead of turning to academic freedom?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Laura Goldblatt, University of Virginia

Panelists

• Vineeta Singh, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Eli L Meyerhoff, Duke University

• Liz Montegary, Stony Brook University

Comments

• Jairo Isaac Fúnez-Flores, Texas Tech University

• Nick Mitchell, University of California-Santa Cruz

Biographical Information

Eli Meyerhoff is a visiting scholar and program coordinator in the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. His research and organizing focus on abolitionist, decolonial approaches to education institutions and alternative modes of studying. He wrote a book, Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). He co-wrote “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation,” and has published in peer-reviewed journals including Social Text, Cultural Politics, Polygraph, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, and the Journal of Environmental Education.

Liz Montegary is an associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Familiar Perversions: The Racial, Sexual, and Economic Politics of LGBT Families (Rutgers, 2018) and coeditor of the collection Mobile Desires: The Politics and Erotics of Mobility Justice (Palgrave, 2015). Most recently, she has published essays on the institutionalization of gender and sexuality studies on her campus and recent right-wing “anti-gender” attacks on the field across the United States in the Scholar and Feminist Online, the Abusable Past, and Feminist Formations.

Nancy MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and a past president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association. A historian of the modern US, she is the author of several award-winning books, most recently Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. MacLean’s scholarship has received more than a dozen major prizes and awards and has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowships Foundation.

Vineeta Singh teaches in the interdisciplinary studies program at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she is part of the sixty-two percent of instructional employees who are non-tenure-track faculty hired on yearly contracts. Her teaching and research are grounded in critical and abolitionist university studies, historicizing contemporary conversations around diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education by placing today’s controversies and confrontations in the context of four hundred years of US racial democracy.