Free to Think speaks with three university students who express the profound impact of joining the SAR student advocacy community. “Being involved in the amplification of the voice of somebody who's marginalized doesn't just affect the person who's marginalized,” says Samkele Shange, a SAR Student Advocacy Seminar participant at the University of South Eastern Norway. “It also affects you, the person who lifts your voice.”

Samkele Shange describes how she and her peers advocated on behalf of GN Saibaba – an activist and formerly wrongfully imprisoned scholar of English literature at Delhi University. Laia Simó Garriga and Truc Hanh Vu share how interviewing scholars from Ethiopia through their SAR Legal Clinic, and compiling a UPR report for the United Nations Human Rights Council, shaped their understanding of academic freedom – and the power of their voices.

This episode is guest hosted by Clare Robinson, Advocacy Director at Scholars at Risk.

Free to Think speaks with academic, policy analyst and human rights activist Mubashar Hasan. He describes how in Bangladesh certain research topics are off-limits, particularly those that threaten the power of the ruling class, and speaks from first-hand experience — Hasan survived 44 days of “enforced disappearance” in Bangladesh in 2017.

Now based in Sydney, Australia, Hasan describes the ‘mental prison’ Bangladeshi colleagues navigate when trying to balance doing their work with the risks they face daily: “I had to negotiate with myself, ‘Should I be silent? Or should I express myself?’

Hasan is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at Oslo University, Norway and an adjunct research fellow at the Humanitarian and Development Initiative at Western Sydney University, Australia. Learn more about Hasan’s work at: mubasharhasan.com

Free to Think speaks with Katrin Kinzelbach and Lars Lott, researchers behind the Academic Freedom Index (AFI) which assesses levels of academic freedom in 179 countries and territories from 1900 to the present.

Recent headlines suggest academic freedom is in retreat everywhere, but is it true? Katrin Kinzelbach and Lars Lott discuss the latest data from the AFI and how academic freedom may fit into wider trends of increasing political polarization worldwide. They describe how they collect data for and structure the report, and how researchers can get involved. The AFI is a collaboration between FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and the V-Dem Institute. Now in its fifth edition, the AFI is a valuable tool for academics and policymakers. With it, Kinzelbach says, “we can have an independent measure, updated on an annual basis, to hold states to account.”