“We can become more powerful in our struggle if we unite” | Camilla Croso on why Truth Matters at the Coalition for Academic Freedom in the Americas (CAFA)

This year, SAR celebrates 25 years of a global academic freedom movement strong enough to meet the challenges ahead. In this special series, we are inviting partners from across the network and around the world to share what the 25th anniversary Truth Matters theme means to them and their work. Join the movement »

Camilla Croso, Executive Director of the Coalition for Academic Freedom in the Americas (CAFA), one of three coalitions for academic freedom founded in partnership with Scholars at Risk, joins SAR Executive Director Rob Quinn to discuss the importance of truth-seeking for a healthy democracy. Croso describes CAFA’s work to deepen collaboration, in particular through partnerships between the global North and South. She also highlights that creativity cuts across all intellectual areas, uniting academics, artists, and journalists. “We can become more powerful in our struggle if we unite.”

Episode highlight:

Rob Quinn: You know,  one of the ways I describe [SAR’s] work is that scholars are at the intersection of power and ideas. And that’s why they get targeted. And that’s a dynamic that happens everywhere. But the manifestations are different, and sometimes cultural. So I wonder, are there particular manifestations of this pressure on truth that you see across CAFA’s area of activities?

Camilla Croso: I’ll take it a step back, and then I’ll go into CAFA.When you speak about the intersection of power and ideas, it reminds me of something that I’ve been hearing the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, Farida Shaheed, speak a lot about. She talks about creativity, and how creativity cuts across all the intellectual areas, everything that has to do with ideas. So, academia, culture, science, communications.

And that struck me, Rob, because I think that it’s very important that for those of us, like you and I, who are really engaged in academia and the right to academic freedom to always be able to take a step back and actually see that this attack, as you’ve just said, around power and ideas, is really at the intersection of all of those of us who are working towards creativity. Academia, media, the arts, culture.

That’s something just for us to remind ourselves… that we are taking into account these other actors that are also being alongside us. We can become more powerful in our struggle if we unite.

Additional resources:

Learn more about the Coalition for Academic Freedom in the Americas (CAFA).

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