Researchers conducted a qualitative descriptive study in Erbil Governorate between July and September 2025. They used maximum variation purposive sampling to recruit 20 participants, including men and women, younger and older respondents, residents with different educational and family circumstances, and young people with varied levels of digital engagement and self-rated family support. All participants were selected from people who had responded to an earlier anonymous survey and had provided written agreement to be contacted again. Data were collected through face-to-face, semi-structured interviews, which were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim.

The transcripts were analysed using inductive content analysis informed by the work of Graneheim and colleagues and supported by MAXQDA software. The researchers reported the study in line with the COREQ checklist. Their analysis identified three broad categories and nine subcategories. The personal and internal category included internalized stoicism, guilt or fear of becoming an emotional burden, and difficulty recognizing and articulating emotions. The social and cultural category covered norms that equate emotion with weakness, fear of emotional exploitation and interpersonal distrust, and gendered expectations and family pressure. The digital and online category included fear of permanent digital exposure, self-censorship and deletion of emotional content, and pressure to perform happiness online.

These findings suggest that the decision to suppress emotion was not presented as a single reaction to social media or digital communication. Participants linked it to the internal meanings they attached to emotional expression, the expectations of family and wider society, and the risks they associated with leaving emotional traces online. The study is restricted to 20 young people in one Iraqi setting, and its design does not allow the researchers to determine the frequency of these experiences or to assess causal relationships between digital use and emotional suppression. The authors instead emphasize that the themes reflect how participants understood their own experiences in the context of personal, cultural and digital pressures.

The researchers concluded that culturally adapted psychosocial and digital-literacy interventions, developed with young people and delivered in community and educational settings, may be worth exploring and evaluating. The source presents this as a direction for future intervention research, not as evidence that any particular program has already produced clinical benefits. Because the study was qualitative and locally focused, additional work would be needed to test the frequency, mechanisms and broader applicability of the reported patterns, as well as the effectiveness of any proposed responses.

Subject of Research: Qualitative study of emotional suppression among young people in Erbil, Iraq

Article Title: Silenced emotions in the digital age: a qualitative study of emotional suppression among young people aged 15–28 years in Erbil, Iraq

Article References: Rasool, A. A., Kareem, M. S., Zainalddin, H. K., Saber, A. F., Ali, A. N., Hussain, H. A., Mohammed, K. S., Faqe, M. G., Ahmed, K. O., & Majeed, N. K. (2026). Silenced emotions in the digital age: a qualitative study of emotional suppression among young people aged 15–28 years in Erbil, Iraq. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05610-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05610-2

Keywords: emotional suppression, young people, digital communication, Erbil, Iraq, qualitative research, social media, cultural norms, self-censorship, psychosocial research, Silenced, emotions

The conversation’s central conceptual move is a rejection of the idea that authoritarianism is a place. Rather than speaking of authoritarian states or authoritarian contexts, Wolfe prefers the phrase spaces shaped by authoritarian practices, following the political scientist Marlies Glasius, who urges analysts to focus on practices rather than regime types. This reframing matters because it dissolves the familiar mental map that divides the world into democratic and authoritarian nation-states, a binary the authors call a container imaginary. Once the lens shifts to practices, such as restricted access to information, censorship, and the concentration of power over knowledge production, authoritarian behavior becomes visible in unexpected places. Wolfe points to the 2024 Paris Olympics, arguing that the way certain Paris neighborhoods were treated bore a stunning resemblance to the treatment of communities ahead of the 2014 Sochi Games, a parallel that traditional comparative frameworks would never prompt researchers to draw.

Kuletskaya deepens the definition by locating authoritarianism in the control of knowledge itself. She invokes Robert Caro’s account of Robert Moses in The Power Broker and Bent Flyvbjerg’s study of planning in Rationality and Power, both set in democracies, to argue that Moses’s methods, including the blatant withholding of information and the silencing of journalists and researchers who questioned his projects, fully fit the definition of authoritarian practice. For her, the core question is who holds the power to create knowledge about the processes we observe, and how tightly that production is controlled. Wolfe adds that this concentration of power explains why authoritarian-leaning governments so often turn hostile toward universities, which represent an alternative form of knowledge production. At its best, academic knowledge challenges dominant narratives and the power to define reality, which the authors describe as the heart of the authoritarian project: to dictate what is real and what is not.

Yet reality has a stubborn way of resisting. The two scholars trade examples of authoritarian projects colliding with material facts. Wolfe recalls the Soviet agricultural theorist Trofim Lysenko, who insisted that farming follow Marxist-Leninist ideology rather than genetics, with catastrophic results, because seeds grow under conditions and do not conform to ideology. Kuletskaya counters with a contemporary case: reporting by the Financial Times on Saudi Arabia’s Neom project, in which even an extreme concentration of power and resources in one person’s hands could not bend the laws of physics in pursuit of a linear city. The lesson, they suggest, is that authoritarian truth projects can punish dissent and enforce an official reality, but a diversity of thought persists, and part of the academy’s role is to identify and amplify the excluded voices that carry it.

The methodological heart of the conversation concerns what happens to research when a field closes. Kuletskaya began studying Minsk in 2018, before her PhD, examining the government-aligned real estate developer Dana Holdings, owned by the Serbian Karić oligarch family. At the time the context was relatively open: she could travel to Belarus, collect data, and even present at the government-supported Minsk Design Week in 2019. Then came the 2020 protests and the subsequent closure. She has not been able to return since 2021, and her publications now rest either on material gathered earlier or on remotely accessible sources, including documentation produced by witnesses who shared their data. This raises, she says, difficult questions about how researchers should use data collected by others, particularly when the original collectors risk persecution.

Data availability and data reliability emerge as the twin pillars of the problem. In Minsk, some information vanishes faster than it can be recorded: when COVID-19 arrived, life expectancy statistics disappeared from public view because they could be used to calculate excess mortality the government intended to withhold. Reliability is equally fraught. In one case, an activist group verified official mortality statistics and found major discrepancies with the actual figures, but verification required creative methods, including hacktivism, far beyond the toolkit of conventional Western scholarship. Kuletskaya’s advice is blunt: save and document everything as you go, and if material carries any political dimension, question and verify every piece of it, even something as seemingly straightforward as mortality statistics. Wolfe learned the same lesson painfully in Russia, where independent blogs hosted much of the country’s best investigative journalism; when those platforms were shut down, anything not saved locally was gone forever.

Wolfe’s own trajectory illustrates another key concept: the shifting authoritarian red line, borrowed from Glasius, which divides what can be said and done from what cannot. When he first moved to Russia in 1998, the country was far freer, and he never applied a political label to his everyday experiences, such as being stopped by police and asked for papers. He noticed no widespread change until Putin’s return for a third term in 2012, after the Bolotnaya protests, when processes that had been bubbling under the surface became visible and the screws tightened for real. When Wolfe moved back in 2013 as a researcher, his ordinary practices, walking, talking to people, photographing buildings, suddenly brought him to the attention of the authorities. He crossed a red line that had moved beneath him. The line, he stresses, is not stable, and it can even shift retroactively, a point with devastating implications.

Retroactivity is where the ethical stakes become sharpest. In Belarus, legal cases are still being initiated five years after the 2020 mass protests based on photographs or social media posts made when those actions were legal. Iconic protest images that circulated globally were later used to identify and prosecute people in them, and a journalist who scraped publicly available protest videos into a documentary drew renewed official attention that exposed people in the footage. Wolfe notes that social media data carry an expectation of privacy even when publicly accessible, and here the harm was not theoretical but real. He reads retroactive law as part of a deeper authoritarian ambition to control time itself, exerting will over both past and future, with the spread of fear as the primary goal. Kuletskaya observes that the rewriting of the past to serve the present is an old mechanism of historiography; only the timescale is new.

The conversation also confronts the tangled position of researchers themselves. Wolfe recounts the anthropologist Katherine Verdery, who studied communist Romania believing herself too insignificant to monitor, only to receive roughly three thousand pages of her Securitate surveillance file after the regime fell, revealing that some of her close friends had informed on her and that her presence had endangered them. Verdery describes the researcher as radioactive, and Wolfe knows the feeling: after being expelled from Russia, he no longer contacts friends there because his association could put them at risk. Neither scholar calls themselves an activist, but both reject neutrality as the alternative. Kuletskaya’s formulation is precise: a researcher can be non-neutral but must strive toward objectivity, being explicit about sources, practices, data, and how opinions are formed. The state, meanwhile, may classify the same work as activism or espionage, as Russian authorities did with Wolfe, transforming him into a legal category that justified expulsion.

Their warning to Western audiences is stark. They describe the scrubbing of climate, gender, and inequality data from United States government sites after the 2025 inauguration, the temporary 404 errors on the White House website, and Gallup’s decision to end 88 years of tracking presidential approval ratings, developments they read as following the authoritarian playbook. Kuletskaya, viewed from the East, finds the American events strikingly familiar but shocked by their speed: what took decades in Eastern Europe takes months in the United States. The authors close by invoking Václav Havel’s idea of living within the truth, arguing that the minimal response is to name authoritarian strategies as such. Naming things as they are, Kuletskaya concludes, is the core purpose of the academic project, and one of its main values lies in holding a diversity of perspectives, from the optimistic American to the doomsday Eastern European, against the narrowing of reality that authoritarianism demands.

Subject of Research: Methodological and ethical challenges of academic research in contexts shaped by authoritarian practices

Article Title: Researching the authoritarian: a conversation on methodology and ethics in closed contexts

Article References: Wolfe, S. D., & Kuletskaya, D. (2026). Researching the authoritarian: a conversation on methodology and ethics in closed contexts. Geographica Helvetica, 81(2), 297-304. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-297-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-297-2026

Keywords: authoritarianism, research ethics, fieldwork, Russia, Belarus, data censorship, surveillance, academic freedom, self-censorship, knowledge production, post-Soviet studies, democratic backsliding

The conceptual core of Bauriedl’s argument is a distinction that political debates increasingly blur: the difference between academic freedom, freedom of expression and freedom of ideology. Academic freedom, as she frames it, is not a license to voice any opinion whatsoever. It is a right to produce and communicate knowledge through scientific methods, protected by law because truth claims derived from evidence must remain beyond the scope of political negotiation. In Germany, this protection is unusually strong, anchored in Article 5, paragraph 3 of the constitution, which states that art and science, research and teaching are free. The constitutional right covers anyone who seeks knowledge using scientific methods, and it has functioned as a globalized norm of liberal science since the 1960s. But a university, Bauriedl emphasizes, is not merely a legal construct. It is a social space in which the boundaries of what can be said are constantly tested, and in which perceived freedom depends heavily on whether researchers fear that their own work is under threat.

The strategy she identifies among right-wing actors is to contrast academic freedom with a supposed freedom of ideology, positioning critical research on gender, colonialism or climate change as ideological while presenting other fields, such as research on economic growth or nuclear power, as neutral science. This maneuver, she argues, inverts the actual epistemology of scholarship. Free speech makes no distinction about quality; academic freedom does. When an evolutionary biologist comments on gender studies, that is an opinion rather than science, because academic freedom requires participation in academic discourse grounded in a sufficient understanding of a subject and its methods. There is, in her account, no requirement for political neutrality at universities beyond neutrality with respect to political parties, provided those parties do not seek to abolish fundamental democratic values. Academics are in fact called upon to defend democratic values, and where necessary to be politically active in doing so. Researching uncomfortable truths about climate change, sexism and racism, she insists, is not ideological when the findings are fact-checked, and it may even require uncomfortable scientists willing to communicate them.

The empirical picture she assembles is sobering. A 2024 study by the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies surveyed 9,083 respondents drawn from all status groups at 158 German universities about their subjectively perceived academic freedom. A majority considered themselves free in choosing research topics, with 83 percent reporting freedom in topic selection, 64 percent in the implementation of research projects and 80 percent in publishing results. That still means roughly every fifth scientist feels their research practice is rather unfree. Eight percent expect moral devaluation and ten percent expect career problems, with only minor differences between status groups. Meanwhile, the Academic Freedom Index, an annual assessment covering 179 countries produced jointly by Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, draws on 2,363 country experts in its 2025 edition and tracks five indicators, including freedom of research and teaching, academic exchange, institutional autonomy and campus integrity. The 2026 update shows that although academic freedom remains better protected in democracies than in autocracies, significant losses have occurred in countries including the United States, Argentina and Mexico, with erosion of university autonomy in Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland and, most abruptly, the United States.

What has changed, according to Bauriedl, is not the existence of pressure on critical scholarship but its mechanism and scale. Scholars of critical theory have faced marginalization for decades, and feminist academics in geography endured mockery from colleagues well into the 1980s. What is new is that policing now arrives through coordinated public attacks by authoritarian groups, journalists or politicians, amplified through press and social media, naming and shaming individual researchers for allegedly ideologically motivated work. In Hungary, gender studies have been eliminated at universities, creating pressure on feminist scholars elsewhere. In the United States, aggressive action against specific research topics threatens to become a template exported to countries like Austria or Germany. At the national conference of the Alternative for Germany party in January 2025, the party leader announced that, should the party come to power, she would abolish gender studies and dismiss all professors who teach the subject. These campaigns, Bauriedl notes, are not attacks on specific people but on critical positions, and their function is to force unwanted voices into self-censorship while consuming researchers’ time, resources and health.

The German case illustrates how legal and institutional structures mediate these threats. Because German professors are employed by state ministries rather than by their university presidencies, they cannot be dismissed easily, which offers a measure of protection unavailable elsewhere. Yet gender, colonialism and climate studies remain fundamentally under pressure, requiring scientists to legitimize and defend the relevance of their topics repeatedly. Bauriedl also points to two resolutions of the German Bundestag, adopted in May 2019 and January 2025, which were intended to counter antisemitism but which, in her assessment, subject academics researching land grabbing, settler colonialism or genocide to general suspicion. By applying a definition of antisemitism that was not formulated for use at universities, the resolutions, she argues, fail to differentiate critical statements and can equalize descriptions of settlement colonialism and apartheid with the denial of Jewish self-determination, with a social media post criticizing the Israeli government potentially ending an academic career. She stresses that countering antisemitic discrimination at universities is important and appropriate, but that the instruments chosen violate academic freedom and university autonomy.

Neoliberal dynamics inside universities compound the external pressure, in Bauriedl’s analysis. Intensifying competition for research funding and excellence awards makes institutions more susceptible to the ideology of neutral science, anticipatory obedience and mechanisms of exclusion. Large research collaborations that must win competitive funding to operate avoid system-critical perspectives, pursuing seemingly neutral concepts instead of clusters of excellence on the causes of climate catastrophe, the social impacts of multiple crises or postcolonial extractivism. When university management prioritizes public image and the battle for attention over the conditions of academic freedom, even small political campaigns against individual members can succeed. In many recent cases, she observes, university administrations have capitulated rashly and failed to stand up for their scholars. Mission statements and general commitments, she argues, are not sufficient; universities have become norm takers rather than norm shapers, and different views on the meaning and scope of academic freedom have left institutions without coherent defensive strategies.

The resistance she documents is still fragmentary but growing. The German Association of Geography published a statement expressing concern about developments in the United States and Hungary, yet stumbled, in her view, into the discourse trap of ideological freedom by pairing a defense of diversity with a call for ideology-free research. More promising are the self-organized networks that scientists have built, including the Alliance for Critical Scholarship in Solidarity, the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies and the geographers collective Orangotango. In January 2026, geographers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland began forming a dedicated network on academic freedom, and major German research institutions have published guidelines for dealing with authoritarian attacks on scientific communication. Bauriedl proposes a concrete program: universities should refuse inquiries from political parties about the activities of academics, develop guidelines for handling hate speech from influencers and politicians, debate how to respond to research assignments from right-wing actors, prepare strategies for colleagues whose social media statements have been spied on and scandalized, and organize discipline-specific task forces capable of issuing rapid statements when research projects come under attack.

Her conclusion is that the institutional, political, social and economic conditions enabling critical research and teaching must be actively defended, because academic knowledge production depends on accepting the provisional nature of knowledge, its openness to criticism and revision, and methodological standards without submission to the disciplinary mainstream. There is a right to dissent in democratic societies, at universities and in geography, including analyses critical of the state. Defending that right, she argues, cannot be delegated to diversity managers or left to individual self-help. It requires collective practice within every discipline, solidarity with colleagues under pressure, and universities willing to provide legal assistance, protect communication channels when email accounts are flooded with hate messages and support scholars whose families are attacked. Safeguarding academic freedom demands significant effort from all academics, and that effort, she concludes, is essential for critical scholarship as much as for the capacity of societies to confront global crises and injustices.

Subject of Research: Threats to academic freedom in critical geography and strategies for institutional resistance

Article Title: Academic freedom for critical geography: principles, threats, resistance

Article References: Bauriedl, S. (2026). Academic freedom for critical geography: principles, threats, resistance. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 421-425. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-421-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-421-2026

Keywords: academic freedom, critical geography, right-wing politics, gender studies, climate change research, university autonomy, self-censorship, Academic Freedom Index, cancel culture, research funding, Germany, higher education policy

The immediate trigger for the editorial is a cluster of recent US regulatory developments, most prominently Executive Order 14279, titled ‘Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education,’ published in the Federal Register in April 2025. The editors read this order, alongside related regulations that could restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, as imposing constraints that may undermine three pillars they identify as foundational to academic life: the freedom to learn and teach, the freedom to conduct and valorize research, and the freedom to communicate scientific results both within and beyond academia. Their concern is not abstract. They cite reporting of anger and despair from within the US federal research system, including accounts of scientists who feel compelled to publish their work anonymously out of fear of potential repercussions, a practice that strikes at the heart of scientific accountability and attribution.

The first pillar the editors examine is the freedom to learn and teach. Academic freedom, they argue, is the cornerstone of a vibrant educational environment and is profoundly connected to societal development and human well-being. It guarantees that educators and students can engage in open dialogue, explore diverse perspectives, and challenge prevailing norms without fear of retribution. In their assessment, the recent US regulations prioritize certain ideological standards over educational quality and significance, threatening to stifle intellectual diversity and critical thinking. The technical consequence, they suggest, is a narrowing of the epistemic range within classrooms and curricula: when accreditation frameworks reward conformity to prescribed positions rather than intellectual rigor, the educational experience itself degrades, knowledge development slows, and universities lose their function as spaces for free and open inquiry. For a discipline like occupational therapy, whose practitioners must reason across biological, psychological, social, and cultural domains, that narrowing is not a peripheral concern but a direct threat to professional competence.

The second pillar concerns the freedom to conduct research and to translate its results into value for society. The editors emphasize that the ability to pursue inquiries wherever the evidence leads, without undue interference, is essential for scientific progress. Research on health, disability, aging, and social participation, the core territory of occupational science, depends on the willingness of investigators to follow data into politically sensitive terrain, whether that involves inequities in access to care, the lived experience of marginalized groups, or the evaluation of policies that affect daily functioning. Regulations that could restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives may, in the editors’ view, pose a direct threat to this freedom by limiting both the scope of permissible research questions and the dissemination of findings. The downstream effect is a slower and less reliable pipeline from discovery to application, hindering the advancement of knowledge and its use in addressing societal challenges and improving people’s health.

The third pillar, communication, receives perhaps the most pointed treatment. The editors describe the freedom to communicate scientific results as vital for the dissemination of knowledge, for democracy, and for the overall advancement of society. Researchers must be able to share findings with both the academic community and the public. Recent US policies, they warn, could create an environment of fear and self-censorship in which researchers become reluctant to publish controversial or politically sensitive results. The mechanics of this loss are worth spelling out: science advances through the open circulation of results, methods, and replications, and public policy depends on access to the best available evidence. When scholars withhold findings, bury inconvenient data, or anonymize their authorship to avoid retaliation, the scholarly record becomes incomplete and unattributable, peer review loses leverage, and the public is deprived of information that can inform policy and improve lives. The editors characterize this as a significant loss of valuable scientific contributions that would affect everyone, not only the academic community.

Underpinning the entire editorial is a normative claim about the legal and moral status of academic freedom. The editors assert that academic freedom is a key right, an inherent part of the human right to education, as recognized by the United Nations and by the European University Association. They point to the UN’s 2025 report on academic freedom and the freedom of opinion and expression, issued by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and to a further UN document, the report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to education on the right to academic freedom, which together articulate a framework in which academic freedom encompasses the freedom to access, disseminate, and produce information, to think freely, and to engage with a diversity of knowledge. The European University Association has similarly published guidance on how universities can protect and promote these freedoms. Within this framework, the editors argue, the recent actions of the US administration could threaten fundamental freedoms and pose a significant risk to the integrity and progress of higher education and research.

The editorial is also notable for its institutional provenance. Its lead author, Anita Björklund Carlstedt, is Editor-in-Chief of the Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, based at Jönköping University in Sweden, and the co-authors include national editors affiliated with VIA University College in Denmark, Gothenburg University, Umeå University, and Oslo Metropolitan University, alongside the presidents of the Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, and Norwegian associations of occupational therapists, several of whom serve on the board of the journal’s foundation. This breadth matters because it signals that concern about academic freedom is not confined to political scientists or legal scholars but extends to applied health disciplines whose practitioners work daily with people whose well-being depends on evidence-informed services. The journal’s leadership explicitly positions itself as part of the global research community, using its editorial platform to amplify what it describes as unprecedented challenges facing peers in the United States.

The editors are candid about the immediate consequences for their own fields. As professionals in occupational therapy and occupational science, they write, they are acutely aware of the effects these actions have on their disciplines, from disrupted collaborations to constrained research agendas. But they insist the implications extend far beyond occupational therapy, affecting the entire research community and undermining the trustworthiness of science and evidence itself. Their argument here is essentially one about epistemic infrastructure: modern evidence-based practice, whether in healthcare, education, or public policy, is built on the assumption that research is conducted and reported without ideological filtering. Once that assumption weakens, the credibility of every downstream product, from clinical guidelines to systematic reviews to public health recommendations, is called into question. The editors argue that scientists carry a responsibility to uphold these principles and to ensure that their work remains credible and impactful for societal growth, a responsibility they frame as inseparable from the scientific role itself.

The editorial closes with a call to action rather than a resignation. The authors urge the global academic community to defend and advocate for worldwide academic freedom and to stand in solidarity with colleagues in the United States. What solidarity looks like in practice is left to readers to determine, but the editorial itself models several possibilities: journals can use their editorial pages to document threats to scholarship, professional societies can lend their institutional weight to cross-border statements, and researchers in less affected countries can publish, cite, and collaborate in ways that keep threatened lines of inquiry alive. The piece, published on 23 June 2025 and available open access under a Creative Commons license, is short, spanning just two pages, but its reach is deliberately global. By framing academic freedom as a human right and its erosion as a shared professional emergency, the Scandinavian editors have turned a regional journal’s editorial into a signal flare for researchers everywhere who believe that science cannot function under conditions of fear, censorship, or ideological control.

Subject of Research: Threats to academic freedom in US higher education and research and international solidarity with affected researchers

Article Title: Defending academic freedom and showing solidarity with US researchers

Article References: Björklund Carlstedt, A., Helle, T., Häggblom-Kronlöf, G., Nilsson, I., Sveen, U., Thordardottir, B., Kåhlin, I., Nør Langager, T., Wikman, K., Leosdottir, T., & Holst Skyer, T. (2025). Defending academic freedom and showing solidarity with US researchers. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 32(1), Article 2520102. https://doi.org/10.1080/11038128.2025.2520102

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1080/11038128.2025.2520102

Keywords: academic freedom, US higher education, Executive Order 14279, occupational therapy, occupational science, research ethics, science policy, self-censorship, human rights, Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, DEI restrictions, scientific communication

The clearest window into this phenomenon comes from an editor who has seen it firsthand. Alexander C. Tsai of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, writing in the journal SSM – Mental Health, describes handling a manuscript during review when the author disclosed that the grant supporting the study had been renegotiated. The revised award language was understood to extend its restrictions to publications acknowledging support from the grant. What that meant in practice was anyone’s guess. The author received conflicting advice about how broadly the restriction should be interpreted, including whether it reached the manuscript text itself. Faced with this ambiguity, the author adopted a conservative interpretation and surgically excised the offending terminology from prominent parts of the manuscript, while leaving in place other language that might plausibly have raised similar concerns but had not been specifically flagged.

Tsai argues that his experience is unlikely to be unique, given the scale at which grant award documents have been revised under duress. The proximate cause is not mysterious. Biomedical research funding in the United States has been aggressively politicized. Grants have been terminated mid-cycle for proposing to study topics the administration disfavors. Other grants, spared outright termination, have had their noncompeting continuations slow-walked. The National Institutes of Health has reminded grantees that the force-revised language represents substantive changes in the scope of their awards, and that those changes constitute new terms and conditions with which recipients are expected to comply. Importantly, the NIH notice did not explicitly prohibit particular words from appearing in publications. Instead, it places grantees in the unenviable position of determining how award-specific changes in scope apply to the research activities and scientific products arising from the award.

These executive branch actions unfold within a broader context of attacks on science and academic freedom, compounded by concurrent state-level measures. State legislatures in Indiana, Ohio, and North Dakota, among others, have introduced or passed bills altering post-tenure review procedures, expanding grounds for disciplining or dismissing tenured faculty, restricting institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and expenditures, and imposing politically prescribed requirements on faculty evaluation and teaching. The provisions differ substantially by state, but their conjoint effect has been to deploy a tightly woven dragnet of political oversight over public higher education while weakening the institutional buffers that traditionally protect academic autonomy. Many American scientists now work in environments where tenure protections are eroded, DEI activities are restricted, and the climate for academic freedom is measurably colder.

The result, Tsai writes, is that science now stands in the meat locker of anticipatory compliance. Because the NIH compliance notice does not specifically instruct grantees to eliminate specified terms, but the consequences of noncompliance could be catastrophic for a laboratory, institutional counsel, research management offices, and investigators have strong incentives to adopt conservative interpretations of what the revised terms require. The sanitization takes familiar forms. Terms that have been standard scientific vocabulary for decades—gender-affirming, health equity, justice, racial segregation, sexual and gender minorities, structural racism—closely correspond to terms appearing on screening lists that NIH staff reportedly supplied to Senate staffers and investigative reporters. In manuscripts written under award-specific restrictions, such terms may be replaced with oblique constructions, with older behavioral categories the field has outgrown, or with awkward periphrases whose only virtue is that they do not contain a disfavored word.

The sophistication of this censorship, Tsai argues, is that it requires no censors at all, because scientists can be induced to do the work themselves—in exchange for the continued possibility of maintaining their effort and employing their postdocs. He is careful not to fault individual scientists for making these calculations, acknowledging he would likely do the same. But this is a collective action problem. If manuscript sanitization becomes common, each individually rational act of compliance reveals a degree of elasticity that the administration can then extrapolate to an entire field, and an initially bounded list of keywords that trigger review is unlikely to stop expanding once it has been shown to work. He likens the dynamic to episodes in which major American law firms, targeted by executive orders threatening financial consequences, entered into accommodation agreements that failed to insulate them from further executive pressure. The arrangement, he writes, is elegant: it converts the coercive effects of state action into private editorial decisions, distributes the moral injury across thousands of individual scientists each making a defensible compromise, and leaves executive power free to deny with curious vigor that any censorship is occurring at all.

History suggests how such pressures play out. Three recent episodes offer instructive precedents. The first is the near-total freeze on federal gun violence research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after the National Rifle Association campaigned against the agency’s injury center following a landmark 1993 study linking household firearms to homicide risk. The 1996 Dickey Amendment did not explicitly ban gun violence research, but its language was ambiguous enough to achieve its intended effects. As researchers Arthur Kellermann and Frederick Rivara observed, no federal employee was willing to risk a career or agency funding to find out what was permitted. Publication on gun violence subsequently declined by 64 percent relative to the growth of the indexed literature between 1998 and 2012, and the number of scientists focused on the topic plateaued, trends that did not reverse until the amendment’s meaning was clarified years later. The second episode concerns the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, which came under organized attack after issuing a clinical guideline favoring conservative treatment of acute back problems; it survived only through a political compromise that cut its budget and ended the guideline program, and its successor agency, AHRQ, now faces renewed existential threats, mass staff reductions exceeding two-thirds of early-2025 levels, website removals of peer-reviewed publications, and a collapse in new grantmaking.

The third precedent may be the closest analogy, because it targeted vocabulary itself. In 2003, then-Representative Patrick Toomey introduced an amendment to rescind funding for five NIH grants studying sexual behavior; it failed by two votes, but NIH Director Elias Zerhouni was subsequently compelled to justify roughly 200 grants on a circulating hit list, many concerning HIV prevention and sexual behavior. No grants were ultimately terminated, yet the chilling effect persisted. When researcher Joan Kempner surveyed affected scientists three years later, half had removed red flag words—gay, lesbian, homophobia, sex workers, needle exchange—from the titles and abstracts of subsequent applications, and a quarter had abandoned entire research topics. NIH-funded research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender health declined by more than 50 percent in the two years after the failed amendment, and sexual and gender minority health research remains below one percent of the NIH portfolio today. Crucially, those earlier attacks traveled through Congressional processes; the present ones proceed through executive and administrative action, a distinction that gives additional weight to concerns about recovery.

That concern is grounded in a specific asymmetry, one that the history of Soviet biology under Trofim Lysenko illustrates. After Lysenko’s fall, formal genetics research revived with surprising speed, but the accumulated institutional damage did not: no Soviet genetics textbook was published between 1948 and 1963, a generation of biology instructors had been trained in Lysenkoist doctrine, and administrators who rose under his patronage remained in power into the 1970s. Restrictions can be imposed quickly and removed quickly, but rebuilding lost personnel, training pipelines, institutional trust, and scientific trajectories takes considerably longer. Tsai is careful not to over-extrapolate—Soviet scientists were fired, imprisoned, and executed, circumstances plainly different from those in the contemporary United States—but the lesson about institutional inertia stands.

Why does vocabulary matter so much? Because scientific vocabulary is the medium through which the field conveys findings about the pathways by which large-scale forces produce disease. Concepts like institutionalized racism, minority stress, racial segregation, and structural stigma are central to mature literatures on how social conditions shape health. Consider a study measuring gender-based violence—a construct that specifies the gendered relations and structures of power in which violence occurs—and relabeling it in publications as generic interpersonal violence. Readers must reconstruct a critical feature of what was actually studied, and the populations most affected lose the precision of the finding. Tsai canvasses the coping strategies available to authors, from awkward periphrases to coded substitutions—his satirical suggestion of replacing structural racism with pink polka dotted bananas exposes the absurdity of purely lexical enforcement, which would not even defeat automated semantic screening—and portfolio segregation, in which investigators with non-federal funding allocate their most vocabulary-vulnerable work to genuinely non-federal support. None of these strategies will preserve scientific communication against a determined state adversary, but they make the pressures visible rather than subsidizing them invisibly. The deeper remedy, he argues, is collective: editorial statements, professional society position papers, and coordinated commentary that turn isolated, private accommodations into a documented collective act performed under duress. Scientists, he insists, deserve to have their compliance recorded accurately as compliance rather than as consent.

Subject of Research: Anticipatory self-censorship among U.S. biomedical scientists under federal funding and political pressure on scientific vocabulary

Article Title: Inside the meat locker: anticipatory self-censorship and pressure on the vocabulary of American science

Article References: Tsai, A. C. (2026). Inside the meat locker: anticipatory self-censorship and pressure on the vocabulary of American science. SSM – Mental Health, 10, Article 100696. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100696

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100696

Keywords: self-censorship, NIH, scientific censorship, academic freedom, federal grant terminations, chilling effect, research funding, public health, structural racism, AHRQ, Dickey Amendment, Lysenkoism