Transnational Solidarity? Academia and the Politics of Knowledge, Translation, and (Im)Mobility

Abstract:Globally escalating attacks on critical scholars and their scholarship demand a response that matches their urgency, intensity, and scale. But the struggle to mobilize academia as a transnational solidarity network is troubled by the complicated political affects attending the labors of solidarity, the uneven burdens of translating local struggles for diverse audiences, and the unequal access to mobility experienced by academics differently situated within hierarchies of citizenship, race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Local and international solidarity efforts with over two thousand Academics for Peace, who in 2016 petitioned the Turkish state for a Turkish-Kurdish peace process and were summarily criminalized en masse, offers an opportunity to reflect on academia as just such a transnational solidarity network. This article offers a feminist analysis of solidarity efforts by and for Academics for Peace and maps the coalescing forces of neoimperialist war, nationalist/racist border xenophobia, heteromasculinist militarism, and academic neoliberalism that together shape the terrain on which flows of solidarity and exiled academics, migrants, and refugees are both facilitated and thwarted. The article concludes with attention to the alternative spaces of knowledge production created by these solidarity efforts and the potential these locales hold for revisioning academia itself.