Roundtable

Academic Freedom and the Assimilation of Critique: On Gender Studies and the Outside Within

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Abstract

This essay examines the relationship between academic freedom, critique and the neoliberal university through the example of Gender Studies. Drawing on anarchist and abolitionist thought, it examines how critique becomes institutionalised through professionalisation and self-reflexive forms of knowledge production. Through practices of reflexivity, positionality and ethnographic engagement with movements and marginalised communities, Gender Studies incorporate resistant knowledges into the university’s mechanisms of critique and legitimacy, assimilating them into its institutional processes of self-critique. At the same time, this instability opens the possibility for a different understanding of institutional resistance. Drawing on post-anarchist theory, the paper proposes understanding Gender Studies not as a space either internal or external to the university, but as a contradictory and unstable “outside within” the institution itself. Ultimately, this paper calls for a form of critique that resists institutional assimilation and recognises the breaking points already emerging within the university. 

Keywords: Academic Freedom, Gender Studies, Critical Studies, Anarchist Theory, Undercommons, Abolitionism, Feminism, academic freedom, gender studies, critical studies, anarchist theory, undercommons, abolitionism, feminism

How to Cite:

Chiotaki, C., (2026) “Academic Freedom and the Assimilation of Critique: On Gender Studies and the Outside Within”, DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 13(1), 26–33. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.101175