Elmi Spektr – Open Scientific Platform
The fall of the Soviet Union took the scientific industry (among other industries) and discourse along with it. My generation of people in Azerbaijan grew up in this landscape of ruins, in a Wild West of a place where religious sects with dubious sources of funding and relation to human trafficking dominated the scene, simply because they were the only ones with money. Most notable of these, the Adnan Oktar gang, given free rein, churned out book after book polluting the information ecosystem with creationist crap. The famed invisible hand of the market was nowhere to be seen for almost 30 years. This was the context in which we (me and several friends studying science and engineering) started a small online science communication website where we wrote and translated long-form popular scientific articles inspired by the likes of Aeon in English. In addition to communicating science, it is a place for educational activism; we campaign and raise awareness on various issues surrounding the public education system. One of our most notable works is the push for translating modern scientific textbooks into the Azerbaijani language and making them freely available to everyone. Find out more here.
Azerbaijan Neuroscience Society
Despite the risk of sounding like a boomer, I have to say that as you grow older, you come to appreciate the advantages of being part of a larger whole over acting as an individual. Things that were not possible or feasible before suddenly become very much possible, and in fact, the group acts like an accountablity machine and provides the necessary momentum to reach places you wouldn’t otherwise go. This is why I became involved in establishing the Azerbaijani Neuroscience Society alongside a group of talented and driven early-stage researchers from Azerbaijan scattered around the world. Although I wasn’t the primary driver of this initiative, I enjoyed contributing to its growth and the numerous teaching activities it organizes. The teaching materials I produced in the context of these courses now live on this website.
DokuBaku International Documentary Film Festival
In the year I completed my master’s studies, I returned to Azerbaijan to get a glimpse at what’s outside of academia. While studying in Amsterdam, I had met an Azerbaijani director at the IDFA. Back in Baku, I reconnected with him through a friend and began forming a team to launch a documentary film festival, where none existed at the time—there weren’t even regular film festivals, let alone documentary-focused ones. Our team was a motley crew of five very dedicated individuals who worked relentlessly to turn the vague desire to bring people together around documentary filmmaking into a reality. In 2017, we successfully debuted the festival in unconventional venues like cafes and bars, a necessary approach in Azerbaijan for independently showcasing documentaries, especially those covering sensitive topics.
The film industry was supportive in general, with many partners donating film rights, and we also received backing from some international organizations. For the second edition, the festival expanded in both the film lineup and audience size, attracting new partners. However, managing the festival proved challenging as our organizational skills struggled to keep pace with our desire to cultivate something in the barren landscape that Azerbaijan’s cultural sphere was (and still is). Our disagreements about the festival’s direction caused a split in the team due to mistakes we made in laying down the ground rules. Eventually, the director guy claimed the entire project as his own, giving us a hands-on lesson on early capitalist enclosures and modern norms of appropriation within the art industry. The festival still runs, but has lost its independent edge and got appropriated by the powers to be. We, on the other hand, learned how not to organize our labour.