Time & Location

May 19, 2026 | 04:00 PM s.t. - 06:00 PM

Cluster of Excellence SCRIPTS
Altensteinstr. 15
14195 Berlin

Further Information

Please register via Dr. Julten Abdelhalim (SCRIPTS Science Manager Collaborative Research) at julten.abdelhalim@fu-berlin.de.

Roundtable Experts

Marianne Braig is a Professor of Political Science with a focus on Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and former Director of the Lateinamerika-Institut. Her research examines social inequalities, gender relations, and political transformations in Latin America, with particular attention to transnational dynamics, labor regimes, and the role of civil society. Based on extensive fieldwork across the region, her work also addresses the conditions under which research can be conducted in politically contested contexts, linking empirical field research to broader debates on academic freedom.

Ophira Gamliel is a senior lecturer at the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on Jews in South India and in Indian Ocean history, Malayalam language and literature, and religions and languages in contact. She actively engages in discourse concerning academic freedom and campus politics. Her most recent book is Judaism in South India, 849-1489: Relocating Malabar Jewry (ARC Humanities Press 2023), and she is currently working on a research project titled Hindu-Muslim-Jewish Origin Legends in Circulation between the Malabar Coast and the Mediterranean, 1400s-1800s under the auspices of the AHRC-DFG (with Ines Weinrich, Jena).

Nassim Mehran is a senior researcher in urban sociology. Committed to inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration, she critically engages with the ethical and methodological complexities of academic freedom and researching and producing knowledge on the social ecology of (mental) health and care in urban contexts. Her work focuses on vulnerabilities and inequalities as they are shaped by intersecting processes such as urban infrastructures and governance structures, environmental breakdown, and migration, with a geographical focus on Germany (Berlin) and the Middle East (particularly Iran).

Sushmita Nath is the principal investigator for ‘South Asia’s Future’s Past: Transformations in Democracy and Populism in Times of Communicative Capitalism,’ at the Universität Leipzig, supported by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. She is a political theorist with research interest in theory and history of empire and decolonisation, post-colonial democracy, and intellectual history. With a focus on modern South Asia, her research engages with debates on secularism and secularity, religion and law, and democracy and populism. Her first monograph, The Secular Imaginary: Gandhi, Nehru and the Idea(s) of India, examined the ostensibly Western concepts of secularism, secularisation, and secularity in a non-western society like India without assuming them to be simply derivative of Western modular forms or as colonial legacies.

Jonathan Ngeh is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Cologne, where he is affiliated with the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Global South Studies Center (GSSC). His research examines social inequalities – focusing on labor exploitation, migrant exclusion, and epistemic inequality – as well as practices of collaborative knowledge production. His work has a regional focus on the Gulf states, Northern Europe, and West Africa. His recent publications include the co-edited special issue “Re-Examining Migration Categories: Refugees, Migrants, Non-migrants and Human Trafficking Across the Global South and North” (with Ester Gallo and Souleymane Diallo, 2024). He is currently finalising a monograph with Michaela Pelican and Tu Huynh, titled Parity in Research: The Third Space of Knowledge Production (Routledge, 2027), which analyses the challenges and potentials of co-producing knowledge.

Janika Spannagel is a postdoc researcher at FU Berlin. Her work focuses on the diffusion and contestation of academic freedom norms as part of a long-standing research interest in rights protection and state coercion in democratic as well as authoritarian contexts. She was previously a visiting scholar at Stanford University, USA, and a research fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute, Germany, where she co-developed the Academic Freedom Index. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Freiburg.

Dmitry Uzlaner is a senior researcher at the department of Political and Social Sciences, Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of "The Moralist International. Russia in the Global Culture Wars" (with Kristina Stoeckl, Fordham University Press, 2022). His primary scholarly interests include sociology of religion, social theory, and religion in Russia.

Kathrin Zippel is a Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Freie Universität Berlin whose research focuses on the globalisation of higher education, the governance of science and gender and diversity in academia. Her work examines academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and the political conditions shaping universities in comparative and transnational perspective. Her recent publications on academic freedom include: Gold, Jessica R., Laura K. Nelson, and Kathrin Zippel. 2025. “DEI as Infrastructure—And Why We’ll Miss It When Its Gone.” Contexts 24(2):19–21; and Zippel, Kathrin. 2025. “Anti-Gender, Anti-Science, Anti-Democracy: The War on DEIA in US Higher Education (English Version).” CEWS/journal (2):16–19.