Köppert, Katrin: “Für eine radikale Imagination von Wissenschaft” [For a radical imagination of scholarship], Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 17 (2025), Nr. 2, pp. 140-144, http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/24183.
Peters, Kathrin: “Kritik der Wissenschaftsfreiheit” [Critique of academic freedom], Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 17 (2025), Nr. 2, pp. 135-139, http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/24182.
What does it mean when there is so much talk about academic freedom at the moment? Who uses the term and for what purposes? To whom does this freedom apply? Who is not being considered, what is not being thought about? In the Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (Journal of Media Studies), Katrin Köppert and Kathrin Peters have published contributions to the debate that take the reactions of universities to the genocidal war in Gaza as a starting point for problematizing the discourse on academic freedom.
Katrin Köppert argues that responding to the curtailment of academic spaces by defending academic freedom is futile. Against the backdrop of Black Radical Thought, the call for freedom must first acknowledge the problem of a real existing lack of freedom. Rinaldo Walcott has described Black emancipation as something that has not yet happened. Following Walcott’s thinking, the plea for academic freedom should be replaced by the demand for a radical imagination of scholarship.
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Kathrin Peters also takes issue with focusing solely on academic freedom. She sees the relationship between scholarship and politics as intertwined since the dawn of science. The call for academic neutrality is therefore political in itself, as it ignores the fact that even the perception of a problem as a problem can never be neutral. Against this backdrop, the debate on academic freedom that has erupted in response to protests in solidarity with Palestine at universities is proving to be a deflection. As justified as doubts about whether academic freedom has always been protected by the state may be in individual cases, these debates also serve to divert analytical attention away from pressing questions—questions about where racism and anti-Semitism begin and end, or about the so-called German culture of remembrance. Above all, however, the debates obscure the situation in Gaza, which is what the protesters want to draw attention to in the first place.
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