- Convenors:
-
Nofit Itzhak
(Universitat Rovira i Virgili)
Naomi Bueno de Mesquita (Amsterdam University in the Arts)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
Academic freedom and freedom of speech are today divisive and politically polarized topics. This panel invites contributors to reflect on the lived experience of silencing, self-silencing, and the place of silence in academic life and the production of academic knowledge.
Long Abstract
Academic freedom and freedom of speech are today divisive and politically polarized topics. Top-down processes of silencing by governmental or other institutional actors are threatening academic freedom, leading scholars to self-censor and modify research agendas to align with political powers. At the same time, practices of silencing and self-silencing operate throughout academia in more subtle ways. Fearing criticism or ostracizing by peers, colleagues, or mentors, scholars find themselves under pressure to silence dissenting opinions or perspectives. In the case of anthropological investigation, speculating on the potential reactions of our interlocutors can also shape anthropologists' expression in interesting ways, either in the course of fieldwork or writing. Considering that the plurality of perspectives is essential to the creative process and the production of knowledge, speaking openly about practices of silence in academia is an urgent task.
This panel invites reflections on the lived experience of silencing and self-silencing, and on the place of silence in the production of anthropological knowledge. We welcome ethnographically grounded as well as conceptual contributions that address both overt and subtle forms of silencing—whether institutional, interpersonal, or methodological. We ask: how do scholars negotiate silence and speech in their research, teaching, or public engagement? What motivates silence over expression, and with what epistemic and ethical implications? How do digital technologies and social media amplify or shape these dynamics? Under what conditions might silence be generative, creative, or subversive? By foregrounding silence as an often-overlooked practice, the panel seeks to open space for critical reflection on the conditions of knowledge production today.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
An existential-phenomenological account of academic speech and silence in the fraught context of academic antisemitism after October 7, 2023, and the search for some kind of moral and analytic coherence that will allow me to go on teaching, writing ethnography, and participating in the field.
Paper long abstract
The response of professional anthropology to the events of October 7 and the bitter war that followed intensified my crisis of alienation from a field to which I had devoted myself for decades, but which I have come to believe has fundamentally failed on both analytic and moral grounds to adequately grasp the world I inhabit. These failure of anthropology are of course also my own failures, inasmuch as ideas and methods I teach have championed increasingly seem implicated in academic antisemitism that sometimes apologizes for or contributes to real violence. My goal in this paper is not to rehearse or defend these claims, but rather, given their background, to describe in an existential or phenomenological vein the dynamics of speech and silence, forced and chosen, that have come to define a new precarity for me and other scholars I know, somewhere between despair and resilience. In particular, I want to describe three different relational matrices in which I have made different (and admittedly imperfect or contestable) decisions about how to speak, or not speak: with respect to my disciplinary field and intellectual partners, with respect to a broader public world, including my Jewish community, with respect to the people I encounter in fieldwork, and with respect to my own current and former students on all sides our this current desperate moment. Can I do justice to all of them? Can I still find a degree of moral and intellectual coherence in this fractured reality?
Paper short abstract
Drawing on autoethnographic experience after 7 October 2023, this paper examines how a Jewish studies scholar became an unexpected public intellectual in the Netherlands and how ideological gatekeeping, silencing, and contested expertise reshape academic freedom in polarized times.
Paper long abstract
This paper reflects on an unexpected transformation following 7 October 2023, when my position as a professor of Jewish studies became an unavoidably public role. Trained as a historian of colonialism and Jewish history, I found myself compelled to speak publicly about context, complexity, and historical framing in debates on Gaza and Israel/Palestine. I had never imagined myself as an “academic activist,” yet circumstances blurred the boundaries between scholarly expertise, personal identity, and political positioning.
Based on an autoethnographic account of my experience in Dutch academia, I examine how speaking as a Jewish studies scholar about Israel/Palestine generates layered forms of silencing: professional marginalization, the withdrawal of collegial solidarity, and the policing of “legitimate” expertise. Teaching at a university with a large Muslim student population and working within a progressive intellectual milieu that once felt like home, I encountered unexpected fault lines. The post–7 October moment produced both exclusion from familiar scholarly communities and forms of support from unlikely quarters.
I argue that these dynamics reveal a hegemony of thought within contemporary academia, and a widening gap between professed commitments to pluralism and the reality of ideological gatekeeping. By tracing how silence is imposed, negotiated, and sometimes resisted, this paper asks what academic freedom means when certain forms of speech—and certain speakers—are rendered transgressive. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on self-silencing, expertise, and the conditions of knowledge production in politically polarized times.
Paper short abstract
Though ethics committees’ duty is to protect research subjects, they mediate research legitimacy, determine which projects can be undertaken and what must be left unsaid. This talk discusses (self-)silencing as structure and experience in human sciences scholars’ dealings with those gatekeepers.
Paper long abstract
Scholars in the human sciences have long examined tensions between ethical concerns and the demands of regulatory compliance emanating from institutional research ethics committees (EC). First formally established in the 1970s in the USA, ECs have become over the decades a basic feature of research worldwide, and a central element of the “audit culture” that permeates academic institutions. Critics have described their increasing punctiliousness and their expansion to all disciplines (a process amplified since the promulgation in 2016 of the EU “General Data Protection Regulation”), as well as the extent to which they reflect the epistemologies of the biomedical sciences, are dominated by specialists from experimental disciplines, and tend to reject or constrain types and sites of knowledge-production associated with the social and human sciences. ECs have the power to shape and block research projects; they delimit what counts as legitimate and thereby, the form of knowledge that is produced. In critics’ view, their main consequence beyond individual circumstances is a form of systemic loss for the world of knowledge.
However, straightforward coercive silencing is not usual. What cannot be proposed or undertaken is more often justified in terms of ethical restraint, or takes the form of anticipatory compliance on scholars’ part. Self-silencing can be understood negatively as self-censorship, or positively as ethical competence (valuable per se, but also necessary for professional survival). Either way, it has professional, institutional, and epistemic impact. This presentation will sketch such a situation and discuss several first-person documented cases.
Paper short abstract
This paper reflects on the different dynamics surrounding my potentially complicit or respectful silences that I feel compelled to engage across field sites, from Vietnam, where I am perceived as a ‘foreigner other’ to Israel, where I can pass as a ‘native insider.’
Paper long abstract
Silence is polysemous, spanning affective, moral, political, and temporal dimensions (Shohet forthcoming 2026). In this paper, I juxtapose my own and interlocutors’ silences in the field to examine these dimensions, using a phenomenological approach. I reflect on how my positionality as a neo-colonial ‘foreigner other’ during fieldwork in Vietnam, or as a ‘halfie’ or ‘native insider’ (Abu-Lughod 1991; Narayan 1993) during fieldwork in Israel, shapes the complicit or respectful silences and ‘refusals’ (Simpson 2007) I engaged in, both during fieldwork and in the ethnographic writing process. I use these reflections to discuss anthropology’s implicit hierarchies regarding who or what constitute an “appropriate” or “accepted” subject for ethnographic research. I conclude that stakeholders’ claims about academic freedom and freedom of speech may reveal more about who they believe should count as a ‘moral self’ or legitimated community, than they do about ‘silence’ and ‘silencing’ as neutral or objective entities in the world.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how everyday objects mediate speech and silence in a Romanian diasporic community in Madrid. Focusing on the orange, it shows how sensory memories of socialism enable migrants to express belonging, loss, and eastalgia through tacit, embodied practices rather than words.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how everyday objects mediate forms of speech and silence within a small Romanian diasporic community in the Madrid area. Romanian migration to Spain intensified after 1989, becoming one of the most significant post-socialist mobility trajectories and giving rise to long-standing, cohesive migrant communities.
Many Romanians migrated prior to Romania’s accession to the European Union, during a period of restricted mobility and material scarcity. Limited in what they could bring with them, migrants encountered difficulties in articulating loss, belonging, and continuity through material means. In this context, memories and sensory experiences became key sites through which what could not always be openly spoken: due to social marginalization, post-socialist legacies, or everyday precarity, was nonetheless expressed. Ordinary objects thus acquired layered, emic meanings, functioning as silent yet powerful communicative devices within the community.
Focusing on one such artifact (Seremetakis, 1994)— the orange. This paper traces how its meanings shift across historical periods and social positions. Although mundane and readily available in Spain, the orange carries dense symbolic significance for this Romanian micro-diaspora, evoking memories of scarcity, privilege, and desire shaped by late socialism. Drawing on interview excerpts, the analysis highlights sensorial memories and forms of eastalgia (Boym, 2001), showing how migrants negotiate speech and silence through everyday sensory practices. By attending to what is communicated without words, the paper contributes to broader discussions on how silence becomes a mode of expression in polarized social and political contexts.