The experiences of academics affected by conflict remain under-researched, despite the crucial role they play as educators and in generating, documenting, preserving and challenging knowledges. This is particularly concerning given that academics have−and continue to be−at risk as targets of sanction, persecution and oppression.
This edited volume seeks to address this gap by exploring, and evoking, the complexities of academic subjectivity, place and practice in contexts where intellectual and state authority are contested or in transition. It features contributions by academics, artists and memory activists who have stepped bravely outside of the parameters of their disciplines, with modes of enquiry and representation that include conversations, vignettes and case studies, critical ethnographies, oral life histories, interviews, poetry and collage. Within the ten chapters are consideration of conflicts within Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, England, Mexico, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Palestine, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Syria and Venezuela.
Being in Shadow and Light encourages a deeper understanding of academics’ navigation of these difficult conditions. The authors’ insider-outsider positioning brings forth the richness of ways through dilemmas−of omission, trauma, displacement, inheritance, injustice, distortion, desire. Grounding the many social, cultural, economic, and epistemic politics within academia, troubles the enclosure of ‘conflict’ in politics at the grand level, as if only within the realm of interest for state and international actors. Against sanitising the uncertainties and particularities of being an academic figure, the authors reflect on the states and sites of conflict as spaces which shape living.
The book is edited by Mitchell Institute Fellow: Legacy, Professor Dina Belluigi, with a chapter contributed by Mitchell Institute Fellow: Rights and Social Justice, Professor Colin Harvey.
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Dina Belluigi, Being in Shadow and Light: Academics in Post/Conflict Higher Education (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2025)
