Academics in Exile

Restrictions on academic freedom, persecution and armed conflict have forced many scholars into exile. So far, the professional trajectories of these scholars and their contributions to knowledge exchange have not been studied comprehensively. The contributors to this volume address the situations and networks of scholars in exile, the challenges they face in their host countries and the opportunities they use. These issues are highly relevant to discussions about the moral economies of higher education institutions and support programs. Although the contributions largely focus on Germany as a host country, they also offer telling examples of forced mobility in the Global South, including both contemporary and historical perspectives.

Vera Axyonova is a Marie Curie REWIRE fellow at the University of Vienna and principal investigator of the project 'Expert Knowledge in Times of Crisis'. Previously, she worked in research, science management and policy consulting. She is co-founder of the ECPR Research Network on Statehood, Sovereignty and Conflict. Her research interests include expert knowledge production, international conflict management and norm transfer as well as the role of civil society actors in policy processes, focusing mainly on the post-Soviet space. Florian Kohstall is the head of the 'Global Responsibility' program at the Center for International Cooperation at Freie Universität Berlin. He is the founder and director of 'Academics in Solidarity', a transnational program for displaced academics, and coordinator of Welcome@FUBerlin for refugee students. His research interests include higher education reform, especially in the Middle East and North Africa, varieties of internationalization and the role of academic freedom in discourses and practices. Carola Richter is a professor for international communication at Freie Universität Berlin. In her research, she focuses on media systems and communication cultures in the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa), foreign news coverage, media and migration as well as on public diplomacy. She is the co-founder of AREACORE, the Arab-European Association of Media and Communication Researchers, and director of the Center for Media and Information Literacy (CeMIL) at Freie Universität Berlin.