Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Comparative Political Sciences and Political Systems of Eastern Europe

All those who did not have the possibility to visit the Kaba Kopya during our "We, the City. Plurality and Resistance in Berlin and Istanbul" conference now have the chance to come to see it in the frame of "Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften".

Kaba Kopya, meaning ‘rough copies’, takes its title from a description made by a Turkish politician of the academics who had signed the 2016 peace petition, who he called ‘rough copies of academics’. Kaba Kopya is an installation with three videos of different spaces where the academics convene and documentation of the efforts of these academics to create a network of experiments in academia, as a response to being expelled from their jobs and facing ongoing trials.

Across the country, academics who have been dismissed from their positions are building 'Solidarity Academies', experiments in pedagogy that question not only the direct crisis they are facing but the crisis in contemporary academia internationally. The separation of academia from society, the siloing of disciplines, the corporatization of the academy and education, censorship and intellectual freedom, these are all questions being addressed in different ways by the Solidarity Academies.

Kaba Kopya seeks to document these efforts and to share them in a manner that celebrates the ‘roughness’ and the unfinishedness of them, the experimental nature, the questioning, the ability to try and to change, and the toughness needed to imagine these possibilities in a situation of duress. Kaba Kopya is a way to share these experiments and questions with a wider community of academics internationally, to open up questions around critical pedagogy, and the crisis in academia.