Academic Freedom and the Duty of Care

The meaning of academic freedom – its substance and practices, its relationship to freedom of speech and politics, and its limitations – has become a topic of oftentimes heated debate, also at the University of Amsterdam. Following up on previous discussions among academic staff within the AISSR, philosopher and scholar on academic freedom, Prof. Shannon Dea, will deliver a lecture that considers the question of academic freedom from the perspective of care. Universities, Dea argues, have a duty of care to their students and staff to provide safe homes, classrooms and workplaces. If they fail to fulfill that task, they jeopardize the university’s scientific mission. Using several case studies from the recent campus ‘culture wars’, Dea will show that academic freedom protects the university’s mission more firmly when it is exercised in conjunction with this duty of care.

About the speakers

Shannon Dea is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Regina in Canada. She is the author of Beyond the Binary: Thinking About Sex and Gender (Broadview, 2016) and of numerous articles and book chapters on topics in feminist and social philosophy, the history of philosophy, and academic freedom. Shannon is the creator and author of the regular Dispatches on Academic Freedom column in University Affairs and regularly engages with the media on matters relating to academic freedom and freedom of speech.

Saskia Bonjour is associate professor in Political Science. She teaches mostly in the field of gender & politics and intersectionality. Her research focuses on the politics of migration and citizenship in the Netherlands and in Europe. She is especially interested in family migration, civic integration, gender and migration, and Europeanisation.

Annelies Moors is an anthropologist, professor emerita at the University of Amsterdam. She has done fieldwork in Palestine, Yemen, and the Netherlands. She was the PI of the ERC Advanced Grant on ‘Problematizing “Muslim Marriages”: Ambiguities and Contestations’. Currently she is a fellow at NIAS working on the project ‘The struggle for the future of ethnography’ that investigates the effects of shifts in academic and research management, new populations of ethnographers, and new publics on the future of ethnography.

Introduction by Brian Burgoon, Professor of International and Comparative Political Economy at the University of Amsterdam, who served as Academic Director of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research from 2014 till December 2020.

Moderated by Sarah Bracke, Professor of Sociology of Gender and Sexuality and PI of the NWO Vici research project EnGendering Europe’s ‘Muslim Question’.