Scholē IRL

This week, we are joined with Tuba İnal Çekiç, Cagla Diner, and Mohamad Moustafa Alabsi (Safi), from Off University, a self-organisation of scholars at risk who seek new strategies to sustain academic life threatened by anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes. Off University was established by scholars in Turkey, yet addresses itself to a public all over the world: Academics who have been purged from their institutions, forced to resign, who are legally and politically persecuted and even imprisoned because of their opinion and research by anti-democratic regimes, and those who seek to speak up against these practices in solidarity. Tuba İnal Çekiç came to Germany in 2016 after working in academic institutions in Turkey. She holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from Yıldız Technical University and works at the intersection of urban sociology, spatial theory, and planning. Her research and publications focus on urban conflicts, migration, spatial justice, authoritarian urbanism, and democratic transformation. Currently based in Berlin, she is particularly interested in how power, inequality, and resistance shape urban space, and in linking academic research with urban practice and everyday experiences. She is a Co-Founder of Off-University, where she contributes to developing collaborative formats of research, learning, and knowledge production. Cagla Diner came to Germany in 2018 as an “Academy in Exile” Fellow, after working as a faculty member at Kadir Has University in Istanbul for eleven years. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Boğaziçi University. Her research and publications focus on the relationship between economics, knowledge, and politics; women’s organizations in Turkey; and policymaking on women’s poverty. She currently lives in Germany and is concerned with the production and dissemination of knowledge in migration studies, as well as with independent and community-based forms of knowledge creation, engaging with Off University to foster more independent and collective approaches to knowledge production. Mohamad Moustafa Alabsi (Safi) holds a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Grenoble-Alpes/France. His thesis focused on the relationship between regime and state in the contemporary Middle East, and the notions of “enemy”, “revolution” and “civil war” in political and legal theories as well as in the Arab Spring lessons and realities. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia Global Center – Amman. His personal and academic project is about the creation of an Arabic encyclopedia of political philosophy, making in-depth knowledge of state theory literature available, especially for Arab students. His research areas are philosophy of law, forms of regimes and of dictatorship, the totalitarian state and the one-party state. Safi believes in action and in initiative, that’s why he’s very excited to work with Off University. Over the last few years, Safi has been working on his project “the Syrian Library” which is a knowledge-transfer project consisting in providing Arabic-access database about Western studies of the Syrian conflict.Time Stamps:(0:00) Intro(4:50) What is Off University? How a group of scholars at risk created space to sustain academic life and knowledge threatened by anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes(7:04) Challenges facing Exiled Scholars: The growing gap between the idea of academic freedom and the reality of scholars(14:25) Making Space for Community: The Need for Solidarity (20:09) Ongoing Practices, Projects, and Collaborations(25:42) Challenging Traditional Ways of Thinking about Academic Knowledge: How to Collectivize and Transfer Knowledge Production(38:02) Power of Tales: Giving Us Something to Hold on to as we Struggle(46:13) Hijacking the System: Creating New Possibilities for Scholars at Risk (55:04) Outro

This week, we are joined with Sigi Jöttkandt, Joanna Zylinska, and Gary Hall, the Directors of the Open Humanities Press, an international community of scholars, editors and readers with a focus on critical and cultural theory and a mission to make leading works of contemporary critical thought available worldwide. OHP has operated as an independent initiative since 2006, promoting open access scholarship in journals, books and exploring new forms of scholarly communication. OHP’s organization is a community-interest company headquartered in London. The OHP Editorial Board is at the heart of all their activities: participating in journal assessments, reviewing and approving book series proposals, performing and managing peer review, and editing the OHP book series. They act on the principles of access, scholarship, diversity and transparency. They have also partnered with a number of groups and institutions to explore grass-roots solutions to the crisis in Humanities publishing. Sigi Jöttkandt is an Associate Professor in English at UNSW. She is the author of The Nabokov Effect: Reading in the Endgame (Open Humanities Press, 2025), First Love: A Phenomenology of the One (2010) and Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic (SUNY Press, 2005). With Prue Gibson, she edits the SeedBooks series at Open Humanities Press. She is also Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique.Joanna Zylinska is a writer, lecturer, artist, curator, and – according to the ImageNet Roulette’s algorithm – a ‘mediatrix’. She is Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. The author of a number of books on art, philosophy and technology – including The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), AI Art (Open Humanities Press, 2020) and The Perception Machine (MIT Press, 2023) – she is also involved in more experimental and collaborative publishing projects, such as Photomediations (Open Humanities Press, 2016). Her own art practice engages with different kinds of image-based media.Gary Hall is a critical theorist and media philosopher working in the areas of digital culture, politics and technology. He is Professor of Media at Coventry University, UK, and was founding co-director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) from 2017 to 2025. He is the author of a number of books, including Defund Culture (mediastudies.press, 2016), Masked Media (Open Humanities Press 2025), A Stubborn Fury (Open Humanities Press, 2021), Pirate Philosophy (MIT Press, 2016) and The Uberfication of the University (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Let’s get it started here with Open Humanities Press.Time Stamps: (0:00) Intro(4:41) What is the Open Humanities Press?(10:01) OHP as an Independent, Open-Access Publishing Collective (13:16) Balancing Tradition with Innovation: There’s other ways of producing knowledge(21:57) Philosophy of Care and Responsibility: It’s about people becoming connected through different forms of belonging and participation(33:04) Alternative Academic Spaces(37:03) Future of Scholarly Publishing(44:06) Funding Structures and Academic Freedom: Pursuing thought wherever thought wants to go(53:35) Critical Scholarship Amid Pressures: It isn’t easy(1:12:52) Friendship is at the heart of OHP(1:26:05) Outro Support Open Humanities Press:Learn more and support Open Humanities Press here: https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/

People think. This week, we are talking with Rafael Khachaturian from the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, a para-academic institution offering a variety of courses across the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences to people who are interested in pursuing questions outside of the boundaries of the traditional university. We talk about how BISR is turning academic precarity into a site of solidaristic strength, how they’ve moved from an experimental to essential phase as attacks in higher education have increased, what it means to be a scholar, and how people are still coming together to think, despite everything that tries to prevent us from doing so. People never stop thinking. The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is an interdisciplinary teaching and research institute that offers critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences. Working in partnership with local businesses and cultural organizations, we integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century.Rafael Khachaturian is an Associate Faculty member with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where he teaches social and political theory. His research is at the intersection of theories of the state, critical theory, and the history of the social sciences. His writing has appeared in both scholarly journals and public venues, including Jacobin, The Nation, and Dissent. He is the co-editor of Marxism and the Capitalist State: Toward a New Debate, which appeared in 2023. Together with Igor Shoikhedbrod, he is currently translating and editing The Revolution of Law: Developments in Soviet Legal Theory, 1917-1931, which is under contract with Brill and which will appear in the Historical Materialism series with Haymarket. He is a Lecturer in Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. Time Stamps:Intro (0:00)What is the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research? (2:34)Crisis in Higher Education and BISR’s Role (6:33)Building Community at BISR (13:23)Scholarship and Public Accessibility (20:22)Scholarship as inseparable from citizenship (23:33)Future of Learning Spaces: Rethinking the Purpose of Higher Education (28:22)Human Flourishing and Neoliberal Mindset (36:31)We’ve taken the possibility of human flourishing off the table (37:03)Marxism and Historical Materialism (40:44)People Never Stop Thinking (53:16)Outro (54:45)Learn more and support the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research here: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/support/

On our first (pre-episode) of the season, we (Sarah and Ira) share some thoughts about why we started our podcast Scholē IRL, and what is at stake in trying to make a space for thinking together in and out of collapsing university ecosystems. But let’s face it, we’re thinking in survival mode.Sarah talks about her journey in and out of academia, to self-identifying as a para-academic, while Ira talks about how he is situated within the university, but how hard it is to keep the lights on in a burning building. Together, we talk about what it means to make space, both internally and externally, for scholē, for thinking for the sake of thinking, and how this led us to make a podcast where we ask para-academic organizations how they are making new possibilities for people to continue to learn and think together. Huge thank you to Devon Church for making music available from his album All That’s Solid Melts Into Air. Check out more of his music here.