In the world of the new censors, governments continue to try to keep their critics in check, applying pressure in all its varied forms. Threatening, cajoling and propaganda are on one side of the corridor, while spying and censorship are on the other side at the Ministry of Silence. Old tactics, new techniques.
What is the state of academic freedom in 2015? Index on Censorship magazine’s summer 2015 issue took a global vantage point to explore all the threats – governmental, economic and social – faced by students, teachers and academics.
The full issue is available from Sage Publications or Exact Editions.
To tie in with the release of Index’s summer 2015 issue on academic freedom, Index put together a reading list of articles looking at the issues surrounding freedom of speech in universities from all over the world.
Leading actors including Janet Suzman will read from three such authors recently published in Index on Censorship magazine: Ma Jian (China), Meltem Arikan (Turkey) and Costa Book Award-winner Christie Watson.
This reading list groups together a collection of works by and about Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Much of Index on Censorship’s global work involves allowing censored journalists an outlet to publish articles which may be unpublished in their home countries. This reading list, focusing on journalism, looks at issues surrounding freedom of expression and press freedom.
Articles from this list explore the topic of how minority groups are both being censored and also evade censorship.
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow, a supporter of Index on Censorship, passed away on 21 July 2015 at 84.
The arts are an incredibly popular outlet for free expression but too often they are restricted. Index on Censorship have recently published a number of law packs informing artistic organisations of their rights when having their works challenged.
From the Index on Censorship magazine archive, November 1977, banned novelist, playwright, and short story writer Milan Kundera writes on committed literature, the death of the novel, the nature of comedy, and moreÂ
This reading list collates a number of articles looking at the relationship between comedy and censorship, including a recent piece by Samm Farai Monro aka Comrade Fatso
From Index on Censorship magazine January/February 2000, edited transcripts of satirical works by the late Colombian journalist and humourist Jaime Garzion
A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.
The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.
The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.
