CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Potapova, Elizaveta |
|---|---|
| Title | Making Sense of Academic Freedom in Russia |
| Summary | A common assumption within the academic discourse is that only `democratic` environments enable the existence of academic freedom in academic institutions. Hence democracy is viewed as a necessary pre-condition for academic freedom. However, research in the field shows that irrespectively of the political context there is no compromise on what is it that needs to be protected, or what is even more important in today’s context, what can be threatened, and by whom. The main ambition of this research is to see how academics in the challenging political environment of today’s Russia make sense of academic freedom, a concept which does not belong to Russian higher education discourses, yet is considered to be a necessary condition for knowledge production and dissemination. I conducted a series of semi-structured interviews in Moscow and Saint Petersburg and then explored participants’ narratives following the analytical cycle of qualitative text analysis. In order to better understand the context of respondents’ performance, I made an assessment of the legal landscape of academic freedom in Russia using methodology suggested by Karran and Beiter (2017). At the end of the dissertation, I propose to use the findings from the narrative and legal parts of the analysis to construct a framework of academic freedom targeted populations inspired by the original model of Ingram and Schneider (1993). Adapted to the field of academic freedom assessment, this framework allows identifying the most vulnerable part of the academic community, as well as the groups with the capacity to academic freedom mobilization. Thus, apart from insights on the meaning-making process of academics and the role academic freedom plays in one’s professional identity, this research contributes to the higher education policy studies bringing there reflexive potential of interpretivist epistemology and nuanced vision of academic freedom as a practice and a belief. |
| Supervisor | Matei, Liviu |
| Department | Public Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/potapova_elizaveta.pdf |
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