This chapter draws together the findings to argue for a transnational theory of academic freedom and the production of knowledge. Based on original empirical data from Lebanon, the UAE, the United Kingdom, and the United States, I argue for the necessity of taking account of the complexities of globalisation, internationalisation, and geographical and historical inter-connectivities, as well as the particularities of context. I argue that the construct of academic freedom is premised on inclusivity, rather than the principles of academic freedom being construed as in tension with the principles of diversity and inclusion. This argument is developed from the recognition of the positionality of the knowledge producer, thereby positioning knowledge as relational, contextualised, and within the politics of power relations. Methodological conclusions consolidate arguments for a move away from the methodological nationalism underpinning the study of academic freedom and for its transnational framing in theorising the relationship between academic freedom and the production of knowledge.

This chapter sets out the basic structure of the book. Through the intellectual biography of Max Sering we will learn the history of the evolution of Germany’s relationship with Eastern Europe from 1871 to 1945. This chapter shows the connection between Max Sering’s journey to North America in 1883, the settlement he saw there on the western frontier, and how he returned to campaign for the same kind of program on Germany’s eastern frontier. The idea of “emptiness” or “fullness” in the colonial gaze, and the definition of “inner colonization” are explored, as is the historiography that links the American West to the German East. This book uses biography to tell the history of a nation.

Sering’s son died in the last week of the war. Following this, Sering asked to write the Reich Settlement Law (Reichssiedlungsgesetz), which covered plans to settle veterans and Freikorps. Sering fought the Diktat of Versailles. There were calls for plebiscite in Posen to divide Poles from Germans. Sering then spent the early, poor years of Weimar attacking Versailles treaty, setting up the Sering-Insitut, and training PhDs, before formally retiring in 1925. The chapter goes on to cover the rise of racial thinking among Sering’s inner colonial peers. Sering then returned to the USA in 1930 with his student Constantin von Dietze. During the rise of the Nazis, Hitler turned to the agrarian sector for votes. Chancellor Brüning was a big fan of Sering. Initially, in 1932, Sering seemed open to some of the more radical language.

This chapter addresses a fundamental debate in the field – the presumed irreconcilability of the principles of academic freedom on the one hand and diversity and inclusion on the other. It examines contested conceptions of academic freedom through academics’ experiences in Lebanon, the UAE, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In response to polemical and polarised debates, it has been theorised that the principles of justice and inclusion and the principles of academic freedom are complementary rather than contradictory. However, this potential complementarity has not been examined to date in relation to the production of knowledge. This chapter makes the original proposition that this complementarity between inclusion and academic freedom is also a requisite in the production of ‘inclusive knowledge’.

This chapter investigates ‘forbidden’ knowledge, examining the structures and processes that impede the production of knowledge, and how such knowledge can threaten powerful interests mediated through institutions and sociopolitical and religious cultures. This can entail both formal and informal processes including self-censorship, peer review, internal university restrictions, and external sociopolitical restrictions. The chapter considers the construct of ‘forbidden’ knowledge, recognising it as more than gaps in knowledge, and also in terms of structural and sociopolitical processes, consolidating this knowledge as too dangerous or ‘taboo’ to produce. Drawing on empirical accounts of the daily lived experiences of academics operating within this terrain, four areas of forbidden knowledge – ‘bioethics, psychology, and genetics’; ‘Palestine’; ‘gender and sexuality; and ‘race, religion, security, and extremism’ are explored. In addition, questions of power, agency, positionality, and sociopolitical and historical contexts are critically elucidated.

Egeria, a late fourth century Christian pilgrim to Jerusalem, describes a dramatic ritual on the morning of Good Friday. This text is remarkable on several counts: it is written by a female, it has an early date (soon after Constantine’s initiatives in establishing Christian pilgrimage) and it provides a wonderfully detailed description of the areas visited in Jerusalem during Holy Week. She and the other pilgrims venerate the wood of the cross, the inscription over Jesus’s head, the horn used to anoint the kings of Israel, and the ring of Solomon. Throughout her account, Egeria stresses the importance of pilgrims being assured of the truth of their faith by encountering physical landscapes and tangible objects. Theatrical studies in dramaturgy and stagecraft affirm the role which props play in helping actors activate memory and achieve a rich performance. This chapter examines the network of symbols in these artifacts using ritual studies, theatre analysis and space and place theory, demonstrating how these objects were used as props in a complex ritual drama, which offered material, sensory and embodied experiences for religious pilgrims.

What does this history of Germany and the East, told through the biography of an agrarian economist, tell us about the larger questions of Modern German History? One of the most central of these questions centres upon the transformation of the German Right, from the Bismarckian 1870s to the Hitlerian 1930s. By following a character who was always amongst key conservative groups, but never wholly belonged to any of them, we see perhaps more clearly how it all transpired. In Sering, we encounter many tensions found in the conservatism of the era. His opinion of farmers combined an intractable contradiction: a desire for them to be free yeomen who were simultaneously restricted by the state in what they could do with their farms. This is an excellent illustration of the vexed relationship between German conservatives and the working, or farming, class. A version of “reactionary modernism” can be seen in (a) the Sering who had a deeply agrarian romantic idea of what small plot farmers breathing in fresh air could make of the Fatherland, and (b) the Sering who simultaneously served as a high-ranking member of the Navy League, demanding more money for steelworkers to weld ships in industrial ports, again, for a better Fatherland. The same man who saw endless work to be done within Germany was also in favour of a global colonial empire.