The communicative inversions of academic freedom: Justice-based scholarship as resistance to whiteness and colonial violence

This essay critically examines how academic freedom operates within intersecting systems of colonization, whiteness, and capitalism in contemporary universities. Drawing on testimonio methodology and narratives from BIPOC academics across multiple global spaces, I analyze the communicative inversions that deploy academic freedom to serve colonial-capitalist interests while silencing decolonizing, anti-racist scholarship. The study reveals how white supremacy, misogyny, fascist politics, and racial capitalism operate through right-wing disinformation campaigns, bureaucratized audit cultures, and precarized academic labor to systematically constrain the academic freedom of scholars engaged in justice-based scholarship. I propose a justice-based framework of academic freedom anchored in collectivization and solidarity as strategies for resistance. This framework challenges the hegemonic construction of academic freedom by centering the voices and struggles of historically marginalized academic communities, offering pathways for transforming colonial-capitalist structures within universities. The essay explicitly contributes to intercultural communication scholarship by theorizing academic freedom as an intercultural and sociocultural formation, produced at the intersections of culture, structure, and power in the global university, through which whiteness, coloniality, and racial capitalism organize whose voices travel across cultural difference and whose voices are foreclosed.