Woman, Life, Freedom (Jin, Jiyan, Azadi)

Inspired by the insights of Kurdish thinker Abdullah Öcalan, the Academy of Social Science conceive the sociology of freedom as a holistic and open research programme that values knowledges produced by social movements and communities in struggle alongside more formal scholarship.

Havin Guneser and Harriet Friedman will introduce the Academy of Social Science, its communes and the journal Democratic Modernity as a collective platform for decolonial bottom-up learning, research and political education.

The talk offers an accessible entry point into democratic modernity as a horizon of hope rooted in feminist struggle, community self-organization and transnational solidarity. The presentation will be followed by a Q & A. 

About the speakers 

Havin Guneser is an engineer and a long time women’s freedom activist. She was one of the spokespersons of the International Initiative “Freedom for Abdullah Öcalan—Peace in Kurdistan” for a long time and organizer of the Network for an Alternative Quest conferences. She has translated Abdullah Öcalan’s books into English. She is on the advisory board of the Jineolojî journal, writes a monthly column for Newaya Jin and is the author of The Art of Freedom (PM Press, 2021).

Harriet Friedmann is a food system analyst, writer and lecturer. Since retirement from the University of Toronto in 2012, she freely pollinates worlds of academia, policy and activism across scales of organization. Beginning at the intersection of Rural Sociology, Geography, and World Systems, she has progressively engaged with natural sciences and explored different ways of knowing. She understands world history since 1500 as intertwined histories of commodity frontiers — monocultures connected to global cities — on one side, and evolving place-based foodways created by diverse peoples in their shadows. She looks to the future by exploring transitions to regenerative ways of inhabiting places in the earth, to renewing biocultural landscapes within Gaia. 

About the Academy

The Academy of Social Science, founded in 2025, is dedicated to the study, research, and promotion of integrative social science, the sociology of freedom. They see this as an integral part of the struggles to break the current societycide and create a world of collective freedom.

Join us in person at the SHIFT Centre or online on zoom: register here.

Refreshments will be served.

This event is coorganized by the Social Justice Centre and the Academy of Social Science.