Global Dialogues Series: Scholar Rescue at Stanford

Date
Wed November 3rd 2021, 12:30 - 1:45pm
Event Sponsor
Stanford Global Studies Division
Location
Virtual via Zoom
Speaker:

Each year, thousands of scholars face threats to their lives and careers because of their research, activism, or identities. Since 2002, Stanford has worked with the Institute of International Education's Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE-SRF) to host threatened and displaced scholars from around the globe. Today, the need for an institutionalized program at Stanford to support at-risk scholars is greater than ever as scholars from around the world continue to confront threats that are unprecedented both in scale and complexity.

This webinar will look at the fight for freedom of speech in contexts around the globe and the individuals who have risked everything to stand up against authoritarianism and advocate for human rights. Panelists will discuss some of the threats facing scholars today and the ongoing efforts, at Stanford and elsewhere, to support endangered scholars and protect academic freedom.

This Zoom webinar is the first in Stanford Global Studies' inaugural Global Dialogues Series: Crises, Connections, Concepts

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Please RSVP here.

Speakers:

James King is the Director of IIE-SRF and has worked with the program since 2011. A former Fulbright fellow in Jordan, James holds an M.A. in Islamic studies from Columbia University. He has published extensively on Yemen and is also the co-author of two studies published by IIE and the University of California, Davis that focus on the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on higher education in Lebanon and Turkey.

Nicholas Opiyo is the Executive Director and Lead Attorney at Chapter Four Uganda, a civil rights charity working to defend civil liberties. He is the recipient of the German Africa Prize, 2017, Voices for Justice Award from Human Rights Watch, 2015, and the European Union Parliament Sakharov Fellows Prize, 2016. He was until March of 2017, a member of the Team of Expert to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Peaceful Assembly and Association. He was also a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center for African Studies in 2019.

Halil Ibrahim Yenigün is from Istanbul, Turkey. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia's political theory program. While living in Turkey after his Ph.D., he was dismissed from his assistant professor position at Istanbul Commerce University during the mass academic purges that started in January 2016 after signing the Peace Petition by the Academics for Peace. Thereafter, he was an IIE-SRF fellow and visiting scholar at the Stanford Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. Since then, he's taught at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and San Jose State University as a lecturer.

Moderator:

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor, by courtesy, of political science and sociology at Stanford.

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