Wissenschaft ist zwangsläufig Teil der bestehenden Ordnung. Dennoch bieten sich Räume des Widerstands. Aber wie ist die Beziehung zwischen Wissen, Normativität und Macht in der Wissenschaft ausgestaltet? Neben der kritischen Analyse der Machtbeziehungen im akademischen Alltag liegt ein weiterer Fokus des Bandes auf künstlerischen Formen der Wissensproduktion, die danach streben, mit den gängigen wissenschaftlichen Ausdrucksformen zu brechen.

Aisha-Nusrat Ahmad ist wiss. Mitarbeiterin an der International Psychoanalytic University in Berlin. Maik Fielitz ist wiss. Mitarbeiter am Institut für Demokratie und Zivilgesellschaft in Jena. Johanna Leinius ist wiss. Mitarbeiterin an der Universität Kassel. Gianna Magdalena Schlichte ist wiss. Mitarbeiterin am Bremer Institut für Kriminalwissenschaften.

Introduction: Critical Interventions in Knowledge Production from Within and Without Academia AishaN. Ahmad, Maik Fielitz, Johanna Leinius and Gianna M. Schlichte Where We Begin The conditions for conducting critical research have deteriorated globally in the recent decades, which consequently poses fundamental challenges for emancipatory knowledge production. First, the neoliberalization of the university, understood as the permeation of the logic of economic utility and the increasing marketization of knowledge (see Brown 2015), has contributed to enlarging the gap between the production of academic knowledge and its transformative potential for emancipatory social change. Generally evaluated in accordance with its immediate use for advancing national economies or stabilizing political systems, academic knowledge production is, secondly, becoming increasingly decentralized. Specialized research centers with predefined agendas and unclear mandates, with far greater financing and influence than public universities, have mushroomed, thereby diluting academia's independence from the interference of the state and private sector. Third, the recent political shift to the right across the Americas, Europe and Asia, along with the establishment of authoritarian figures in leading liberal democracies, has revitalized the debate on the normative basis of critical research as newly established disciplines within the social sciences are coming to be deemed irrelevant and pseudoscientific. The allegation that critical research indulges in the creation of escapist ghettos for like-minded people, while broad swaths of the population are endorsing protectionism, nativism and isolation, has become an oft-repeated comment on the state of critical research. The current setting has placed scholars pursuing a critical and emancipatory agenda at a crossroads: On the one hand, and in tandem with the increasingly aggressive anti-academic discourse fueled by far-right ideologues and consumerist mainstream attitudes, the de-centralization of academic knowledge production has put the progressive promise offered by academia in peril. While the close overlap of teaching and research at public universities has ensured to a certain extent, the social and political relevance of academic knowledge, academic research has become deeply compartmentalized within separate disciplines. The spaces in which knowledge is created have multiplied and are no longer confined to the university: a multiplicity of research institutes, think tanks and other organizations are creating and disseminating academic knowledge. At the same time, however, research results are rarely communicated in an approachable form and language. On the other hand, the expansion of academia has also enlarged the spaces of academic knowledge production, which may generate competing ideas about the potential for effecting broader social transformation. The inherent need to justify research approaches and results potentially exposes academic knowledge production-wherever it is produced and disseminated-to critique from approaches pursuing a normative emancipatory agenda. Against this backdrop, we distinctly position this volume as an intervention into the prevailing atmosphere of control and enclosure that has imposed itself at the crossroads of politics and academia. We argue that there is a need for academia to articulate an emancipatory perspective and approach which challenges the dichotomies and hierarchies that inhibit the achievement of social justice and equality. The purpose of this volume is put forth an understanding of academia as a normative order that adheres to certain rules of self-justification (Forst and Günther 2011, 15-20) and to reflect on the repercussions of this paradigmatic shift, not only in regards to the practice and norms of knowledge production but also for the sake of identifying possibilities for critique itself, without or within academia. Approaching