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Facilitated and chaired by: Dr Richard Budd who is the co-convenor of the Student Access and Experience Network. For more details about the network and its activities, please click here.

Overview

Threats to academic freedom are widely touted across the political spectrum, from infringements on autonomy and free speech on the one hand to  the need for accountability and protection from harm on the other. Research shows how this debate is not limited to higher education alone but sits within wider global and nationally-specific discourses that represent tensions between contested value.

This session explores this topic from the student perspective in four different countries (Myanmar, Ghana, Belarus, and Turkey, with each presentation considering the sociopolitical context and students’ positioning within that. Across the talks and ensuing discussions we will be exploring how students understand and experience academic freedom and what mediates this, both socially as well as within their own specific (higher) education spaces.  Attention in particular will be paid to the extent to which – and how – they are able to express agency in exercising academic freedom in their own classrooms and wider educational contexts. This will include alternative, informal, university models, ideology and power relations with staff, and the sources and invisibility of academic   freedom violations.

Schedule

Speaker bios

Tin Maung Htwe is a Research Fellow at the Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD) at Chiang Mai University. His research focuses on migration, education, and human rights, with a particular emphasis on how academic institutions serve as vehicles for resistance in authoritarian regimes.

David Kyei-Nuamah is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China. His research examines governance mechanisms in Africa’s higher education. He also uses indigenous African philosophies to inform K-12 teaching pedagogies and curriculum.

Ester Gallo is Associate Professor at the University of Trento, Department of Sociology and Social Research. She is the PI of the Jean Monnet Project: ‘European Societies and Academic Freedom’-ESAF: https://cjm.unitn.it/esaf/overview. Ester is also the PI for UniTrento within the recently funded Erasmus Cooperation Partnership StAR – The Students at Risk Project (2025-2027) led by ESU and in cooperation with SAIH, GSF, UniTrento and UniPadova. She is currently conducting research on forced migration and displacement in higher education with a focus on Turkish university students’ post-2016 diaspora and on displaced scholars from the Global South in Europe.

Cristina Mazzero is a PhD Candidate in Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento, where she also gained her MA in Sociology with a thesis on the experiences of academic freedom of exiled Belarusian students. Her paper on student academic freedom won the first prize in the Essay Competition launched by the OSUN Global Observatory on Academic Freedom. Her PhD research investigates the characteristics and implications of higher education policies addressing the inclusion of displaced students in Italian academia. She is also a member of the Jean Monnet Project ESAF and of the StAR – The Students at Risk Project (2025-2027).