Turkey: Alternative Academies
Dismissal, exile and imprisonment drove Turkish researchers to build their own academies
Yücel Demirer should have been teaching in September 2016, but instead he began the month sipping tea in a café in Kocaeli, an industrial city close to Istanbul.
A softly spoken, unassuming man, he was one of more than 2,000 Turkish academics who were fired and banned from working
after signing a petition opposing state violence against Turkey’s Kurdish minority in January 2016.




