Roundtable Discussion | The (In)Dependence of Knowledge? Academic Freedom Today
Join colleagues from Regensburg and Kansas to discuss the state of academic freedom today across Europe and the Americas. This event takes places as part of our 2026 Annual Conference In/ter/dependence.
17 June | conference begins 16:30 - roundtable starts at 18:30 | H24, Vielberth Building, UR
Join Marie Beyrich (Regensburg), Ulf Brunnbauer (Regensburg), Marike Janzen (Kansas), Livia de Souza Lima (Regensburg) and Marta Vicente (Kansas) for a discussion on academic freedom chaired by Ben Chappell (Kansas). The event is part of the 2026 annual conference organized with REAF and supported by the Vielberth Foundation.
Taking up the broader conference theme of in/ter/dependence, the roundtable is intended to explore the conditions, limits, and contested meanings of academic freedom today. The speakers will approach the topic drawing on their research, institutional experience, regional expertise, and broader reflections on public debates on political interference in academia and knowledge circulation, war, censorship (and self-censorship), as well as university structures, academic hierarchies, precarity, and organizational cultures.
The speakers will address how these and other factors affect the production and circulation of knowledge, where academic independence is under threat, and where dependence and independence become more complexly entangled, with the reflections covering the US and Germany, as well as Europe and the Americas more broadly.
