The theme of the 2025 symposium will be ‘Scholarly Knowledge in the Context of Epistemic Injustice and Authoritarian Censorship'.

The symposiumwill cover a range of issues including, among other things; the decolonial approaches to scholarly knowledge production in contemporary autocracies and regions of the Global South, the impact of authoritarian politics on knowledge production; and the past and future of knowledge production and histories of knowledge production under political pressure.

Schedule

09.00 - 09.30 Morning coffee / Opening remarks

09.30-11.00 Para-Academic Knowledge Production and Dissemination

Chair: Petr Torkanovskiy, King’s College London

Konstantin Koryagin and Anna Mikheeva (Syg.ma)

Weak Editorial / Strong Community: How to Foster Diversity Under Pressure?

Maxim Alyukov, Svetlana Erpyleva (Public Sociology Laboratory)

Studying Wartime Russia: Methodological and Ethical Challenges

Mohammad Salemy (The New Centre for Research & Practice)

Platformed Epistemologies: The Emergence of The New Centre for Research and Practice

Ekaterina Kalinina (Stockholm University)

Doing research on activism and resistance in Russia after 2022

Gulzat Botoeva (Swansea University) and Sofya du Boulay (University of Sussex)

USTA Academic Mentorship project: Empowering Central Asian Voices

11.00-11.15 Coffee break

11.15 – 12.45 Historical Approaches to Knowledge Production

Chair: Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, King’s College London

Egor Sokolov (University of Oxford)

Late Soviet intelligentsia and official Marxism: Aleksei Losev and Sergei Averintsev cases

Rudolf Stichweh (University of Bonn and Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science)

Science in an Authoritarian State: The Case of Prussia

Shu Wan (University at Buffalo)

Academic censorship in ancient and contemporary Chinese society

Eszter Pál (Eötvös Loránd University)

The Transformation of the Scientific Field: From Decolonising to the Re-colonisation of Science

12.45 - 13.45 Lunch

13.45 - 15.15 Colonialism and Knowledge Production in the Global South

Chair: Dr Marina Yusupova (Edinburgh Napier University)

Bakhytzhan Kurmanov (University of Central Asia)

Making the Golden Horde “Great Again”: Historians as Memory Actors and Reinterpretation of the Historical Narratives in Independent Kazakhstan

Mariya Y. Omelicheva (National War College, National Defense University)

Knowledge and Power: Challenges to Decolonization in the North Caucasus

Sofya du Boulay (University of Sussex)

Legitimising Provincial Rulers: Power and Knowledge Production in Azeri and Kazakh Khanates

15.15-15.30 Coffee break

15.30 – 17.00 Under Pressure: Censorship and Science

Chair: Iris Magne, King’s College London

Yana Kirey-Sitnikova (N. A. Semashko National Research Institute of Public Health)

The impact of politically motivated censorship on transgender studies in Russia

Olga V Bychkova (European University at St. Petersburg)

Caught Between Two Fires: Russian Climate Sciences Between Global and Local Constraints, 2022-2024

Dmitry Dubrovskiy (Charles University)

Russian Academia at the Time of War: Sanctions, Academic Boycott, “Cancelling”?

Sanshiro Hosaka (University of Tartu)

“Decolonization” Hijacked: Russian Intelligence Practice in Higher Education and Academia

Diana Kudaibergenova (University College London)

Hiding behind the big “A”: Erasure, Silencing, and Self-Censorship in the fieldwork on authoritarianism

18.00 - 20.00 KRI Spring Reception, the Exchange (NE Bush House)