Dr. Alhayek will highlight the challenges of conducting research while displaced and focus on issues of ethics and online ethnography and methods.

Dr. Altinkas will speak on the problems of displaced scholars after they relocate, focusing on these scholars being the "national assets" of their home countries and how the host countries benefit.

Dr. Mohammadpour will speak on securitizing ethnicity in Iran and will share his decade-long experience as a displaced scholar.

While the 2016 Peace Petition signified the culmination of academic repression during Turkey’s tumultuous era of democratic breakdown, it also revealed the long-simmering global onslaught against academic freedom and free thought. While the growing literature on the rise of global populisms has identified universities and other spaces of free thought and discussion as among the major targets of autocratic leaders’ political agenda, economic transformation and the increasingly precarious status of the academic class have also been noted. In this presentation, I discuss what we can learn from Academics for Peace in their resistance and building of alternative academic spaces while the bleak global situation is marred with unceasing moments of academic repression, both in Turkey and globally. I will also consider the relative weakness of building global solidarity networks and efforts to overcome this challenge, given the extensiveness of the global onslaught against academic autonomy and free thinking.

Before the Syrian uprising (2011) and the subsequent war, Syria’s literacy rates were amongst the highest in the MENA region. However, after a decade-long humanitarian crisis and devastating war, all aspects of life, including education, have been fundamentally transformed. Building on ethnographic fieldwork (2014-2019) that includes 76 interviews with Syrian refugees and asylum seekers in the United States and six remote interviews with displaced families inside Syria, this contribution examines the impact of the Syrian conflict on education by showing the challenges that contribute to the alienation of displaced Syrian children and youth inside Syria as well as in the United States. Inside Syria, I discuss the institutionalization of violence and the construction of internal “othering” through the implementation of different and competing educational curriculums that invest in identity politics. Outside Syria, I examine how educational gaps affected asylum seekers and refugees in the United States. I show the ways in which the lack of systematic and sustainable support to address linguistic, cultural, and financial challenges that displaced Syrians face sustained this gap. I conclude by proposing policy recommendations that address these challenges which, I argue are key determinants to any future efforts of peacebuilding and reconciliation in Syria.