Free to Think talks with Asli Vatansever, a labor sociologist and author of “At the Margins of Academia: Exile, Precariousness, and Subjectivity,” which examines misconceptions and structural inequities in academic labor markets around the world, through the lens of scholars displaced from their home countries. 

Vatansever was among the thousands of scholars in Turkey and abroad who signed a January 2019 public petition (the “Peace Petition”) demanding an end to fighting and renewed negotiations between Turkish forces and members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Vatansever, along with hundreds of other signatories, was dismissed from her post, banned from working and forced to seek academic employment abroad.

At the Margins of Academia situates the path of academic exile —familiar from earlier generations of scholars--within the wider dynamics of contemporary academic labor markets. It asks whether displaced academics are “at-risk” or “in reserve,” and whether these are two sides of the same coin?