Global 292 HR: Just Futures: Academic Freedom and Democratic Cultures

This course, "Just Futures: Academic Freedom and Democratic Cultures," offered through the Global Studies Department is a yearlong colloquium that includes weekly meetings, workshops, and roundtables on academic freedom. The course is team taught by Bishnupriya Ghosh (English and Global Studies), Javiera Barandiaran (Global Studies), Sherene Seikaly (History), and Shiva Balaghi (Area Global Initiative).

Our seminar and our yearlong project asks: What is academic freedom and why does it matter? In US universities today, the question is inextricable from reimagining a democracy the core principles of which are under severe duress, domestically and internationally. Academic freedom is the canary in the coal mine. It is an ever-shrinking critical space that once harbored studies of racial, ethnic, sexual, religious, or economic difference as well as experiments in democratic engagement. The university’s broader civic mission is to provide a learning environment in terms of time, space, infrastructure and resources for members of the university community to become active citizens. Can the university sustain or even better proximate such an environment in the face of cascading challenges to academic freedom? 

The year long graduate seminar is organized around three themes:

  1. Academic Freedom After 9/11 (Fall Quarter 2026): Sherene Seikaly and Shiva Balaghi will co-teach this seminar focused on institutional histories of academic freedom and its limits to understand the shrinking critical space of the US university at the current conjuncture. (Subjects to include: Histories of academic freedom general; US academia post 9/11 in relation to Ethnic Studies, Area Studies, Black Studies and Gender Studies; UCSB institutional possibilities).
  2. Locations of Difference (Winter Quarter 2027): Javiera Barandiaran and Bishnupriya Ghosh will co-teach this seminar’s exploration of UCSB democratic cultures that once imagined or now university spaces attuned to social justice, including archives of dissent and of independent media. (Subjects to include: focus on independent media histories and concepts, and building university archives.)
  3. Campus Climate for Just Futures (Spring Quarter 2027): Co-taught by all four co-PIs, this seminar will study the underlying values that shape academic institutions which institute policies and procedures to “protect” all university citizens. What institutional and protest histories shape UCSB and the UC-system? What role can the university community play in ensuring/harvesting democratic practices across university spaces? (Subjects to include: UCSB student movement histories, UC system and professional organization interfaces, present anti-discrimination policies.)