Violence and the University
The idea of making the experiences of early-career researchers in so-called ‘Global South’ or ‘peripheral’ countries more visible is not new to me. I had suggested five fellow PhD candidates from my university (Universidad Nacional de Colombia) to write an article based on collaborative autoethnography in the past. The article was published in Teaching in Higher Education. We started with online group sessions (due to COVID-19) and took notes to make a conceptual map. After the sessions, we grouped the most frequently mentioned topics under four sections. Afterwards, everyone wrote a separate text on their experiences with the mentioned topics. Then, we all read each other’s texts and held online group sessions to discuss these texts. Each section had a moderator whose research was more in line with the respective topic. Mine was ‘armed conflict and violence’. Revising my old documents, I found the text that I sent before the group session. Since it was rather long, I decided to revise it and shorten a bit. I also added a short conclusion sub-section since the text was not written for publication and it rather abruptly ended in its original version.
My experiences with violence as a researcher in Colombia
As someone whose work focuses on political violence, the armed conflict is the reason why I chose Colombia as my destination of doctoral studies. This means that almost all of my academic activities are affected by the violence in Colombia in one way or another.
One problem that affected the rest of my experience occurred towards the end of my first semester. With a lot of enthusiasm to finally start my doctoral studies, I immediately pursued personal research projects. I had to cancel the first one, a very promising one in my opinion, along with an already accepted conference paper because the region that I was going to conduct the research was declared extremely dangerous and I was heavily discouraged by academic and administrative personnel due to the level of danger. Apart from other armed actors, I could also have problems with public security forces if I didn’t have some kind of official document from the university and I wasn’t going to obtain that, so I just canceled everything. This experience shaped my future work because I had to consider the invisible borders that denominate ‘off-limit’ spaces and tried to focus my research on places where I knew that I will have access without problems.
Another major problem was related to teaching activities. In my first semester I was an auxiliary professor for a first-year introductory political science course. I prefer connecting political theory to ongoing political events so that the concepts that I am trying to explain are less abstract. However, during the classes I noticed high levels of self-censorship. I saw that most students didn’t express their opinions about Colombian politics in order to avoid conflicts with their peers. This self-censorship wasn’t limited to students because I have also censored myself when teaching the class. As a foreigner, I didn’t want to offend the students or create hostile feelings that would alienate them. Foreigners talking about the political situation of your country can cause a certain level of discomfort when they are too outspoken. So, I tried to avoid talking too much about my opinions on Colombian political actors, and in time, I started to present more and more examples from different parts of the world, such as the Middle East since I am very familiar with it. I think this decision was affected by an example about Venezuela that caused visible discomfort among some students due to the polarization of public opinion on Venezuela in Colombia. We were talking about foreign intervention, especially via economic sanctions and embargos. I switched the example to Syria and felt that the atmosphere got a lot better and more students became involved. I think after that point I’ve started to use more examples from different regions that have a problem of political violence and fewer examples from the local political context. This was due to the political polarization in Colombia, which made discussing controversial topics very complicated. My observations were quite different when I was teaching the same course virtually during the pandemic, but that will be the subject of another post.
The high level of violence that involves university actors also strongly affects both research and teaching activities since it directly shapes the daily lives of university actors. This includes state violence on campus, state violence against student protests, and violence between different groups within the university campus. First, it is difficult to focus on research or teaching when the police are attacking the students with tear-gas cannons, beating them up, or detaining them. Even when one is not directly affected, it is never easy focusing on academic activities while listening to police sirens and smelling tear gas. Plus, you lose whatever self-respect you have if you cannot stop your students from facing arbitrary state violence just for exercising their right to protest. I mean, what political science are you going to teach after that? That question, of course, assumes that there wasn’t a complete shut-down of the campus and halting all academic activities until further notice, which occurred various times during my doctoral studies. This may be responded with strikes and campus occupations, which also halt all academic activities. As someone who is profoundly against state violence towards university students, I felt the need to participate in protests and strikes whenever they occurred. However, doctoral studies come with a lot of responsibilities which didn’t permit me to participate in these protests as frequently as I would have liked to. This situation resulted in a permanent state of guilt. If I am at the protest, I feel guilty for not working; if I am working, I feel guilty for not being at the protest. In any case, this violence on campus generates worries about the well-being of students, colleagues, and the university as an institution. You may say that protests occur in everywhere, but if your country is relatively high-ranked in rule of law indices and the like, I can assure you as a researcher principally working on political violence that you haven’t seen in your university what I saw in Colombia.
The violence on campus also has indirect effects. I consider that one of the reasons for the lack of an academic community among postgraduate students (a topic that we mention in the article and I will write about it in the future) is this violence. Since the violence creates a polarized and tense atmosphere and it also regularly interrupts academic activities, people who aren’t obliged to be on campus (such as most postgraduate students) prefer to work in ‘calmer’ places.
There are three other problems that derive from the political violence in Colombia, but I won’t write about them in detail. One is the underfunding of higher education due to military expenses in a country that prioritizes military expenses over public services. Another is the stigmatization of public universities and their students due to protests and police violence. Colombia has been dominantly right-wing and many people that vote for conservative political parties consider public university students ‘terrorist sympathizers’ because they tend to exercise their right to protest more frequently. The third one is the risk of conducting research on politically tense topics, which may result in threats from anonymous individuals or criminal groups such as paramilitary organizations. The risks may result in self-censorship among PhD students and eventually lead to a change of research topics from ‘riskier’ to ‘safer’ areas. Members of the academic community in Colombia suffered violent attacks in the past, which in some cases led to their murder. In a country where academics may be killed, stabbed, attacked in their homes, arrested, threatened, and spied on, it is difficult to conduct research on controversial topics or freely express oneself in the classroom.
Political violence is not the only kind of violence that is common in Colombia. High crime rates also generate problems for everyone including PhD students. I have been robbed once when I was living in Colombia, my cell phone was taken by pickpockets in public transportation and I didn’t even realize it at the time. I didn’t get robbed again and I was physically attacked only once. As one may note, I consider getting robbed once and being attacked in the street once a pretty lucky situation because being attacked and getting robbed were more frequent experiences for most of my peers in Bogotá. This happens more frequently with international students, a European student from my program was mugged three times in the span of one year and I know several other postgraduate students that were robbed multiple times since I’ve met them. This also affects the doctoral process. I mean being mugged isn’t a nice experience and most people need a couple of days before they feel themselves good enough to go back to work. Plus, most people prefer not staying on campus until too late because the streets are safer during the day. This also hinders the possibility of building a close academic community with the peers. Criminal activities also create invisible borders and off-limit spaces. It is difficult to conduct research in neighborhoods with higher crime rates and one doesn’t always feel safe when working in these zones. In such situations, it is common for researchers to ask someone to accompany them so that they are not alone in these ‘more dangerous’ parts of the city.
Conclusion
In a blog post we made about the published article, we wrote the following about our experiences with violence as PhD researchers in Colombia:
“We study, teach, and conduct research in a violent context. This violence significantly affects us. It shapes our relationships, our practices, and our identities. Our university is frequently attacked by the police, and our students and colleagues are stigmatized. The education is interrupted various times every year due to protests, strikes, or clashes. The atmosphere is polarized. When we leave the campus for field research, we are affected by the violence again. There are places that we cannot go because of the violence, there are people that we cannot interview, data that we cannot collect, experiences that we cannot hear. And when we conduct research in these ‘off-limit places’ collaborating with ‘untouchable’ subjects, this implies danger and stigmatization for collaborators as well as the researchers. If we add the possibility of suffering a violent attack, robbery, or assault on our way to the university or during other kinds of daily activities, it is obvious that many of our practices are shaped by the atmosphere of violence.”
I have extensively written about how academics and universities are affected by violence in conflict-ridden countries. In the conclusion of one of these articles on the case of Turkey, I made the following call:
“...it is important to fight against the isolation that critical intellectuals face in authoritarian countries, such as Turkey or India, to defend the academic sphere against neoliberal and authoritarian pressures.”
So, I repeat the call. Show solidarity with academics from violent contexts, especially precarized ones without financial security. Listen what they have to say. Support them however you can. As you probably know, academic work is already hard enough without having to worry about your well-being and physical integrity.