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LETTER FROM OSMAN KAVALA

January 18, 2018 by Kenan Malik

Osman Kavala, one of the most important intellectual and cultural figures in Turkey, was arrested in November. He remains in detention, in solitary confinement. He recently put out a statement through his lawyers. This is an English translation, first published by the Free Osman Kavala campaign. The situation, not just for Osman, but for hundreds of academics and others who have been detained in recent months, remains dangerous. Earlier this month Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s claimed in a speech that […]

Categories: Academia, International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: academic freedom, censorship, erdogan, free speech, osman kavala, turkey

ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND ACADEMIC COWARDICE

July 22, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is in response to the decision of the University of Cape Town to ‘disinvite’ Flemming Rose, former cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten responsible for publishing the Danish cartoons, from giving this year’s TB Davie Lecture on Academic Freedom. Last year, I was honoured to be invited to the University of Cape Town to give the 2015 TB Davie lecture. It was a privilege to have been able to become part of the history that is the TB Davie lecture, a history of resistance […]

Categories: Academia, Free Speech, International • Tags: academic freedom, danish cartoons, flemming rose, free speech, islamophobia

FREE SPEECH IN AN AGE OF IDENTITY POLITICS

August 13, 2015 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of my TB Davie Memorial lecture that I gave at the University of Cape Town on Thursday 13 August. It is truly an honour and pleasure to be able to deliver this lecture, and to be able to follow the speakers who have gone before me, speakers such as Walter Sisulu, Wole Soyinke, Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. It is an honour, too, to be the fiftieth speaker in this great series. But being the fiftieth speaker raises […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: academic freedom, black identity, censorship, free speech, identity politics, left, moral autonomy, offence, pluralism, racism, therapeutic society, trigger warnings, universalism, universities

INTELLECTUAL CHARLATANS & ACADEMIC WITCH-HUNTERS

September 3, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Judith Butler is a queen, perhaps the queen, of poststructuralist philosophy. A pioneer of queer theory and one of the world’s leading feminist philosophers, she made her name with her 1990 book, Gender Trouble, which dismisses the idea of sex and gender as fixed categories, viewing them instead as forms of social artifice. Butler introduced in the book the concept of gender as ‘performativity’: by behaving as if there were male and female ‘natures’ we create the social fiction that these natures […]

Categories: Academia, Free Speech • Tags: academic freedom, adorno prize, anti-semitism, cultural boycott, free speech, israel, judith butler, martha nussbaum, michel foucault, palestine, post-structuralism, postmodernism