Across Europe, university staff and students have been challenging their institutions' complicity in oppression and occupation in the Palestinian West Bank and genocide in Gaza. This has led to numerous research efforts from ad-hoc coalitions at universities across Europe uncovering their own university's ties to institutions engaging in and enabling this violence, as well as an uptick in interest in existing research, mostly done by actors not in establishment academia.
Academic Complicity (
academiccomplicity.eu) is a mapping project collating the most recent research on this and displaying it in a form usable by journalists, activists and the public. The first database was set up for the Netherlands in Summer 2024 and has since spread to Belgium, Germany, France, and Norway. It is currently expanding to Denmark and, in late May, we will have published a new database on Horizon Europe collaborations across Europe.
In this session, we will talk about how we ensured safety and anonymity of our sources and how this affected our decisions; how we maintain the volunteer-run database; how we verify the data. We will discuss our design decision and rationale based on these factors and what lessons we learned from maintaining a database like this. This session is useful to journalists working in the theme of activist repression as well as those who want to build up databases via crowdsourcing.
