Moral authority and the academy under attack: the case of #Boğaziçidireniyor at Boğaziçi University

Buckner, Elizabeth

doi:10.1080/14767724.2023.2173150

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 30 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The concept of 'moral authority' is well rehearsed in the sociology of intellectuals, and while it may sometimes represent political narratives of the state, it often gravitates towards, or formulates, critical sites of resistance to political power. In the context of Turkey, both the conservative populist intellectuals of the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) and the critical intellectuals of the Academics for Peace (AFP) movement have drawn on and performed some form of 'moral' authority to address diverse publics and audiences (Buckner, 2022;Gürpınar, 2020). Similar dynamics are present in the Syrian context where Baathist journalists and academics make claims to a perceived moral authority and do so no less than dissident intellectuals to speak against corruption and dictatorship, often on behalf of the subjugated masses.…”

Section: On Moral Authority and The Task Of Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

Authorial Power, Authoritarianism, and Exiled Intellectuals: Syria and Turkey

Azmeh

Dillabough

2023

Int J Polit Cult Soc

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How does a crisis of the state and its ‘emergency politics’ lead to a crisis of the intellectual, or what does it mean to be an intellectual in our contemporary conjuncture beyond Western clichés and the universalistic bias of their declinist arguments? In responding to these questions, we draw upon data collected from Turkish and Syrian academics living in exile to argue that the critical commitments exiled intellectuals presume are under threat as rising authoritarianisms take hold globally and advanced neo-liberal practices tighten their grip on universities. The promise of Said’s figuration of the ‘intellectual in exile’ and its political potential is also under threat as displaced scholars navigate democratic backsliding and structural precarity in the contemporary university and in the nation-states to which they have found themselves tied, eroding even further the conceptual idea of the critical intellectual and the potential power of the ‘post-colonial intellectual’. In our research, this crisis of the intellectual is recounted by exilics paradoxically in both the autocratic and the ‘nominally democratic’ higher education (HE) context where in some cases the very idea of the intellectual can represent, at least in part, a banal political figuration epitomised in what Nancy Fraser refers to as progressive neo-liberalism. This is largely so because both authoritarian and nominally democratic states, whilst different in political charge, are simultaneously invoking ‘states of emergency’ and culture wars that are eroding their own intellectual constituencies’ ability to disturb existing institutional norms and the taken for granted problems that emerge in everyday HE practices.

show abstract

Section: On Moral Authority and The Task Of Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%