Free to Think Podcast

Free to Think speaks with Achiro P. Olwoch, an award-winning writer, playwright, and filmmaker from Northern Uganda, and current scholar-at-risk and Weiss International Fellow at Barnard College in New York City. Achiro describes her recent play ‘The Survival,’ the impact of anti-LGBTQ+ laws in Uganda, and how living in New York has made her a “bolder artist.” She also offers advice to fellow artists-in-exile: “It takes time. Allow yourself to learn, allow yourself to make mistakes, allow yourself to mourn, allow yourself to grow.”

This episode is guest hosted by Leona Binz, a Program Officer on Scholars at Risk’s Protection team, who has worked closely with Achiro since 2022 through SAR’s Practitioners at-Risk program.

Watch Achiro’s play ‘The Survival’ at the Criminal Queerness Festival at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York this June 2024.

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.”

Emma Hartley and Jonathan Gelfond, undergraduates at UC Santa Barbara in California, weren’t sure if elected officials in Washington DC would agree to speak with them. They were advocating on behalf of Patrick Zaki – a University of Bologna graduate student formerly detained for two years, in apparent retaliation for his human rights research in Egypt. Though released in 2021, authorities continue to postpone Zaki’s trial, and he faces up to five years in prison if convicted.

To Hartley and Gelfond’s surprise, they got four meetings on Capitol Hill. “We were focusing on issues that might not be these representatives or senators' first priority,” Gelfond says. “It was really empowering.” They join Free to Think along with their SAR Student Advocacy Seminar professor, Claudio Fogu, to describe campaigning on behalf of Zaki, using art as a tool for advocacy on campus, and the impact of engaging in human rights work. “No matter how daunting it may seem at first,” Hartley says, “our voices are important and they do make a difference.”

Learn about setting up a Student Advocacy Seminar on campus here: scholarsatrisk.org/actions/student-advocacy-seminars/

What is ‘academic activism?’ What responsibility, if any, do scholars have for engaging outside of academia, with the public and with marginalized communities in particular?

Free to Think speaks with Joel Mark Barredo, the Executive Director of SHAPE-SEA, the “Strengthening Human rights and Peace Research and Education in ASEAN/Southeast Asia” program. SHAPE-SEA is a regional programme for and by human rights and peace scholars and institutions engaged in dialogue, research, and advocacy about threats to academic freedom and human rights in Southeast Asia.

In 1997, Henry Reese and his wife, Diane Samuels, were at a public talk by writer Salman Rushdie, and inspired by his call for communities around the world to offer sanctuary to exiled writers. They "kicked each other under the chair" and thought, why not? Six years later, they founded the City of Asylum, Pittsburgh, a multi-unit residency program that has welcomed exiled writers and artists from China, Syria, Bangladesh and beyond.

Twenty-five years later, Reese was invited to interview Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institute Amphitheater. Just as the interview was about to begin, Rushdie was violently attacked. Reese has described the audience’s rushing to the writer’s aid, attributing it to what Reese calls the “reader effect” – a real time demonstration of how reading literature and sharing stories builds empathy and meaningful community.