As the weekend rolls in here in Aotearoa, I am getting ready to have a weekend of much-needed sleep. This past week has been one of many late nights, staying up crafting a petition, collaborating with fellow academics, and gathering signatures in support of the academic-activist Professor Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt. Reshmi is being subjected to an external investigation by her employer for her social media posts.
You can read more on the petition here, sign on to it, and circulate it.
When the Newsroom story, "Academics divided on their own freedoms," made its way into my mailbox in the morning, I was looking forward to reading it. The story was behind a paywall, and I had to wait until noon, when a colleague kindly forwarded the text of the story for me to read.
The story reported from a survey commissioned by the Free Speech Union and carried out by Curia Market Research. Curia boasts many clients including Pfizer, Microsoft, and National (the party). In its opening page, the company pitches itself as having run polling services for New Zealand Prime Ministers and opposition politicians.
The Free Speech Union in Aotearoa New Zealand was formed initially as the Free Speech Coalition n response to the canceling of an event at an Auckland Council-owned venue to be held by the far-right white supremacists Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux.
Although it claims support from both sides of the political and ideological spectrum, the positions expressed by the Free Speech Union since its formation in 2018 seem to be concerned with the safeguarding of a particular form of free speech, the freedom to speech of those occupying hegemonic positions.
In multiple instances where the Free Speech Union has run an organized campaign, the campaign seems to be driven to safeguard the expressions of white, patriarchal, colonial structures.
The podcasts on the website of the Free Speech Union seem to be predominantly concerned with what it terms "American style culture war," "woke culture" etc.
It seems the "chilling effect" the Union is concerned about is the speech of those in hegemonic positions of power. It seems the Free Speech Union's narrative constructing the fear of being canceled is driven to safeguard those identity positions in power that have historically and in contemporary contexts perpetuated the silencing of the raced, gendered, colonial margins.
In December 2021, the Union created an academic freedom fund in support of two academics who were being investigated by the Royal Society for a letter they wrote to the New Zealand Listener disputing the scientific legitimacy of Mātauranga Māori.
When the survey from the Free Speech Union had initially made its way into my mailbox, I ignored it because of the seeming parochial ideological investments of the Union.
It was the same reason I had declined the invitation from the Union to a debate with Don Brash on Massey campus. When the Free Speech Union called me to tell me that it wanted to host me to an interview on the film "The Kashmir Files," I declined, seeing that it platformed Roy Kaunds, a far-right Hindutva ideologue who has been called out by Indian diaspora activists for his Islamophobic speech. Kaunds previously appeared on the far-right hate infrastructure, Counterspin Media. The film, The Kashmir Files, has been critiqued for its role as a propaganda device in spreading Islamophobia, and Hindutva ideologues have deployed the film to produce and circulate Islamophobic hate speech.
It seemed that I was on the radar of the Union as an academic on the Left (in the words of the person who called me), and yet I hadn't registered a word of solidarity from the Union over the six or seven months my academic freedom was being threatened by the supporters of Hindutva, a far-right nationalist political ideology, here in Aotearoa. As an exemplar of communicative inversion, the turning of materiality on its head, is the disinformation infrastructure targeting me crafted by Roy Kaunds, the Union's proponent of Free Speech in the context of The Kashmir Files.
The Newsroom article did not tell us much about the sample for the survey, what it looked like, and what are demographic and ideological characteristics of the sample. Going by my social media, I would think a large majority of academics working with critical questions of social justice that challenge hegemonic power would respond similarly, either deleting the survey or blocking the sender.
My concerns about source credibility related to the survey are validated by the survey items that were reported in the Newsroom article.
For instance, the newsroom article suggests that 21 % of respondents score 0-2.5 on a 10-point scale in indicating the freedom to “question and test received wisdom.” Without further elucidation of what the item means by received wisdom, the reader is left to guess what the item is pointing toward. In other words, the perception of academic freedom reflected by the item seems to depend on what the operationalization of “received wisdom” is.
The far right’s attack on justice-based scholarship is often legitimized through the language of freedom to test “received wisdom,” held up by the communicative construction of "woke culture" as a strategy to further marginalize voices at the margins. Indeed, the item then is interpreted to support the preconfigured agenda of the Union, that there is an "American culture war" problem in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The items that follow, freedom to debate or discuss “gender and sex issues” and “treaty issues,” give away the ideological agenda of the Union. We learn that 50% of the academics feel silenced about debating treaty issues (20% scoring 0-2.5 and 20% scoring 2.6-5.0 on a 10-point scale). We also learn that 47% of the academics feel silenced debating about "gender and sex issues" (27% scoring 0-2.5 and 20% scoring 2.6-5.0 on a 10-point scale).
When the Newsroom story, "Academics divided on their own freedoms," made its way into my mailbox in the morning, I was looking forward to reading it. The story was behind a paywall, and I had to wait until noon, when a colleague kindly forwarded the text of the story for me to read.
The story reported from a survey commissioned by the Free Speech Union and carried out by Curia Market Research. Curia boasts many clients including Pfizer, Microsoft, and National (the party). In its opening page, the company pitches itself as having run polling services for New Zealand Prime Ministers and opposition politicians.
The Free Speech Union in Aotearoa New Zealand was formed initially as the Free Speech Coalition n response to the canceling of an event at an Auckland Council-owned venue to be held by the far-right white supremacists Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux.
Although it claims support from both sides of the political and ideological spectrum, the positions expressed by the Free Speech Union since its formation in 2018 seem to be concerned with the safeguarding of a particular form of free speech, the freedom to speech of those occupying hegemonic positions.
In multiple instances where the Free Speech Union has run an organized campaign, the campaign seems to be driven to safeguard the expressions of white, patriarchal, colonial structures.
The podcasts on the website of the Free Speech Union seem to be predominantly concerned with what it terms "American style culture war," "woke culture" etc.
It seems the "chilling effect" the Union is concerned about is the speech of those in hegemonic positions of power. It seems the Free Speech Union's narrative constructing the fear of being canceled is driven to safeguard those identity positions in power that have historically and in contemporary contexts perpetuated the silencing of the raced, gendered, colonial margins.
In December 2021, the Union created an academic freedom fund in support of two academics who were being investigated by the Royal Society for a letter they wrote to the New Zealand Listener disputing the scientific legitimacy of Mātauranga Māori.
When the survey from the Free Speech Union had initially made its way into my mailbox, I ignored it because of the seeming parochial ideological investments of the Union.
It was the same reason I had declined the invitation from the Union to a debate with Don Brash on Massey campus. When the Free Speech Union called me to tell me that it wanted to host me to an interview on the film "The Kashmir Files," I declined, seeing that it platformed Roy Kaunds, a far-right Hindutva ideologue who has been called out by Indian diaspora activists for his Islamophobic speech. Kaunds previously appeared on the far-right hate infrastructure, Counterspin Media. The film, The Kashmir Files, has been critiqued for its role as a propaganda device in spreading Islamophobia, and Hindutva ideologues have deployed the film to produce and circulate Islamophobic hate speech.
It seemed that I was on the radar of the Union as an academic on the Left (in the words of the person who called me), and yet I hadn't registered a word of solidarity from the Union over the six or seven months my academic freedom was being threatened by the supporters of Hindutva, a far-right nationalist political ideology, here in Aotearoa. As an exemplar of communicative inversion, the turning of materiality on its head, is the disinformation infrastructure targeting me crafted by Roy Kaunds, the Union's proponent of Free Speech in the context of The Kashmir Files.
The Newsroom article did not tell us much about the sample for the survey, what it looked like, and what are demographic and ideological characteristics of the sample. Going by my social media, I would think a large majority of academics working with critical questions of social justice that challenge hegemonic power would respond similarly, either deleting the survey or blocking the sender.
My concerns about source credibility related to the survey are validated by the survey items that were reported in the Newsroom article.
For instance, the newsroom article suggests that 21 % of respondents score 0-2.5 on a 10-point scale in indicating the freedom to “question and test received wisdom.” Without further elucidation of what the item means by received wisdom, the reader is left to guess what the item is pointing toward. In other words, the perception of academic freedom reflected by the item seems to depend on what the operationalization of “received wisdom” is.
The far right’s attack on justice-based scholarship is often legitimized through the language of freedom to test “received wisdom,” held up by the communicative construction of "woke culture" as a strategy to further marginalize voices at the margins. Indeed, the item then is interpreted to support the preconfigured agenda of the Union, that there is an "American culture war" problem in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The items that follow, freedom to debate or discuss “gender and sex issues” and “treaty issues,” give away the ideological agenda of the Union. We learn that 50% of the academics feel silenced about debating treaty issues (20% scoring 0-2.5 and 20% scoring 2.6-5.0 on a 10-point scale). We also learn that 47% of the academics feel silenced debating about "gender and sex issues" (27% scoring 0-2.5 and 20% scoring 2.6-5.0 on a 10-point scale).
In and of themselves, these items once again don’t really elucidate much. They remain vague about the aspects of "gender and sex" and "treaty issues" where academics seem to be experiencing chilling effects.
The focus on these two areas (gender and treaty) seems random, unless read from the ideological agenda of the far-right here in Aotearoa. The focus on these issues also seems far removed from the actual threats to academic freedom that I have evidenced empirically in the scholarship of the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) that point to issues of precarity, privatization of universities, surveillance cultures, and organized attacks of the far-right based on disinformation and hate.
In my analysis of the digital infrastructures of the far-right catalyzing the #Convoy22 protests, "gender and sex issues" and "treaty issues" seem to be salient, along with COVID-19 disinformation and conspiracies constructing a totalitarian takeover.
For these far-right discursive infrastructures, “gender and sex issues” and “treaty issues” are key sites for perpetuating hate that is targeted at the margins. The freedom of speech here is deployed specifically to legitimize and circulate hate. The language of "cancel culture" is discursively deployed to erase and silence articulations from the raced, classed, gendered margins of the settler-colonial state.
Elsewhere I have argued that the rhetorical trope of free speech works as an instrument of the colonizer to erase indigenous articulations, actually producing violent erasures through the racist construction of indigenous knowledge as primitive. This is the communicative inversion that forms the whiteness of free speech; it deploys the freedom of speech of the white colonizer to silence, erase, and dismantle the speech of the colonized subject it targets at the margins, actively working to perpetuate erasures. It is this historically white structure of colonization that is threatened when the margins agitate against whiteness and seek to build registers for communicative equality.
Returning then to the survey, which is framed as a survey on academic freedom, let's then turn to the concept of academic freedom. Academic freedom refers to freedom that is connected to an academic's area of expertise. My role as a critic and conscience of society would relate to my area of academic work on health, communication inequality, marginalization and injustice. I wouldn't seek to have academic freedom to make claims in molecular biology as that doesn't fall within my area of scholarship.
It is worth noting therefore that the Free Speech Union survey picks out "sex and gender" and "treaty issues" as two subject areas for examining academic freedom. Unless the academics responding to these items on the survey are academics actively engaged in generating scholarship in these specific areas and participating in the peer-reviewed literature in these areas, the concept of academic freedom in these areas doesn't extend to them. In other words, the freedom to pursue scholarship in the relevant areas ("sex and gender" and "treaty issues") ought to apply by definition to academics participating in knowledge generation in these areas.
The survey fails in the indicators of validity.
A physicist's academic freedom to make statements about "treaty issues" or "sex and gender" is as legitimate as my claim about academic freedom to make pronouncements about the muon G-2 experiment.
In the absence of details about the sample and analysis of the findings by area of scholarship, I can only speculate given the context that the academics who responded to the survey are not scholars who actively conduct research in the areas of "sex and gender" and "treaty issues." In the absence of grounded empirical evidence, the survey needs to be read as a politically motivated campaign to deploy the tropes of "cancel culture" and "wokeism" to target the voices of the intersectional "margins of the margins."
In a political climate where the far-right has weaponised diverse forms of attacks on academic freedoms to uphold the hegemonic structures of whiteness, patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism, the Free Speech Union's survey of academic freedom is an exemplar of communicative inversion, directed at perpetuating a chilling climate in the name of promoting academic freedom.