Commissioned Book Review: Aslı Vatansever, At the Margins of Academia. Exile, Precariousness, and Subjectivity
| Author | Paola Rivetti |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211053494 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(4) NP15 –NP16
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1053494PSW0010.1177/14789299211053494Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
review-article2021
Commissioned Book Review
At the Margins of Academia. Exile,
Precariousness, and Subjectivity by Aslı
Vatansever. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2020.
189 pp., €110.00 / $132.00, ISBN 978 90 04 43134 8
Aslı Vatansever’s book is a unique analysis of
precarious academic labour in the neoliberal
university through the case of Turkey’s
Academics for Peace (AfP). The book’s argu-
ment is that today, the precarisation of academic
labour forces should not be understood as an
economic and labour issue only, rather as inter-
twined – often enabled by – mechanisms of
political oppression, of which the arrest and/or
exile of the AfP or the dispossession of scholars’
autonomy via neoliberal reforms of relevant
labour laws are just two articulations. This dou-
ble pressure on academics results into their
downwards social mobility but – the book
argues – also in their potential for challenging
the academic status quo, paradoxically because
of the very economic and political marginalisa-
tion they experience.
Vatansever – a sociologist of work at Bard
College Berlin, formerly associate professor
banned from public service in Turkey for hav-
ing signed the AfP’s Peace Petition in 2016 –
also pushes us to rethink academic freedom,
which international commentators and scholars
tend to locate in the Global North and liberal
democracies, and think of as absent in the
Global South and authoritarian regimes. When
observed through the lenses of labour precari-
ousness, this distinction becomes blurred.
Casualised academics animate similar struggles
against neoliberal authoritarian politics both in
the Global North and South, with the former
often making those who come from the latter
more precarious through what Vatansever calls
the ‘endangered scholars industry’, built on the
supposed moral superiority of the Global North.
The uniqueness of this book is that it dis-
places a case of blatant violation of academic
freedom in a growingly authoritarian country,
AKP’s Turkey, from the framework that is usu-
ally deployed to examine it – human rights viola-
tions, scholars at risk – and relocates it into the
field of neo-Marxist analysis. This allows us to
reflect upon the issues of subjectivation, class
identity, surplus labour, resistance, and precari-
ousness through the conceptual instruments
offered by Braidotti, Bourdieu, Standing, and
Marx among the others, and to hear the author’s
and the research participants’ voices sharing their
personal experience, economic analysis of neo-
liberalism and knowledge production, and analy-
sis of authoritarian politics in Turkey. The book’s
journey ends with a message of hope: precarious-
ness is shared by the vast majority of academics
around the world and subjectivation – the activa-
tion of autonomous political will and action in
spite of oppressing structures – is possible.
Chapters 1 (pp. 23–57) and 2 (58–85) lay
out the theoretical framework of the book.
Vatansever first reflects on the centre-periph-
ery relation in global economy to contextual-
ise Turkey’s neoliberalism and structural
reforms of public education. Chapter 1 also
details the specific position of exiled AfP
‘within the floating reserve army of labor’ (p.
53) by focusing on structural, conjunctural
and exile-related factors, thus bridging the
analysis of political authoritarianism and neo-
liberal economy. Chapter 2 introduces the
notions of subjectivity, subjectivation and de-
subjectivation by analysing how they work in
the context of the neoliberal university, how
they structure ‘the neoliberal academic sub-
ject’ (p. 69), and how they characterise the
lived experience of exile.
Chapter 3 (86–111) is a close-up on the
‘reserve condition’ as experienced by exiled AfP.
In this chapter, the author intertwines the analysis
of the ‘purgatory’ of academic precariousness,
aggravated by the exilic condition (p. 89), and
the testimonies of research participants, AfP
members mostly exiled in Germany and working
on fixed-term ‘risk-scholarships’ and grants. The
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