POSTED BY THE AAUP

We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 13 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. Our fall 2021 call for papers, “Memory Laws or Gag Laws? Disinformation Meets Academic Freedom,” invited scholarly responses to the wave of legislation seeking to ban or restrict teaching about race and racism.

As we discussed in the call for papers and in our introduction to the volume, patriotic scripts for the teaching of US history—and attempts to suppress what reactionary legislators deem “divisive” content—are predicated on nostalgia for “white-settler narratives of the nation’s founding.” We sought original articles that would put the legislative frenzy, and the disinformation tactics behind it, in broader local, national, and global contexts. The thirteen contributions selected for the volume reflect a wide range of perspectives on the relation of academic freedom to historical memory and to contemporary multicultural society in the United States and abroad.

We encourage readers to continue the conversation by commenting on articles and sharing links to article web pages on social media. Follow the links in the table of contents below, or access the complete volume at https://www.aaup.org/JAF13.

Please also read the call for papers for next year’s volume, “Landscapes of Power and Academic Freedom.” Submissions are due by March 20, 2023.

—Michael Dreiling and Pedro García-Caro, Faculty Coeditors