A manifesto for intersectional academic freedom: From individual rights to collective accountability

This paper develops a critical, situated, and intersectional rethinking of academic freedom amid rising anti-‘woke’ politics, systemic racism, and the political weaponisation of academic freedom in Quebec and beyond. It argues that academic freedom should not be understood only as an individual right to speak, but as a collectively sustained condition that is unevenly distributed through intersecting relations of race, coloniality, gender, class, employment status and institutional authority. Through three situated vignettes, the paper examines how systemic racism, settler-colonial denial, neoliberal governance, precarity, and authoritarian interventions condition who can speak, teach, research, dissent, and be recognised as a legitimate knower. Rather than treating academic freedom as a neutral entitlement, the analysis shows how academic infrastructures protect some forms of speech, knowledge and authority while exposing others to delegitimisation, surveillance, or sanction. The paper concludes with a manifesto for intersectional academic freedom centred on epistemic justice, collective accountability and structural transformation. It calls for academic freedom to be enacted through concrete practices that redistribute epistemic legitimacy, institutional protection, material resources and responsibility for sustaining dissenting and marginalised knowledge practices.