Just when I thought Academia couldn't sink any lower.

One academic on twitter (can't remember who she is now) pointed out that this phd student has the same name and might be the same person who received a huge amount of criticism in the past for running a magazine called Destroyer.

There's a whole wikipedia page about the controversy over this magazine as its subject was adolescent boys.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroyer_Magazine

If that is the case then you wonder why Manchester University and his supervisors didn't do some basic research into who they were offering phd funding to.

Seems like academic twitter are finally catching up with this story.

twitter.com/r4dyc/status/1556888873698938880?s=20&t=7GJ_wLspjI1fb2kzE-eFQQ

Quite a few international academics are saying they are either going to complain or have already written to the journal to ask for some kind of statement or investigation.

My understanding was that the article was based on his personal experience 🙄 and didn't involve other people (hence my comment that he probably didn't need to go to an ethics committee). However, the question about whether the journal should have checked the legality of the material he used is I think very important.

Most journals are signatories to COPE

publicationethics.org/about/our-organisation

There seems to be so much about plagiarism and falsifying data but nothing about submissions that are based on indirect exploitation of others.

I wonder if this is the avenue through which we should complain?

That is a direct rip off of Piero Manzoni.

www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/manzoni-artists-shit-t07667

1961 - I guess we just don't use a tin anymore.

There was a documentary about Goldsmiths years ago. One of the students there crapped on a table and said it was their project. Another copied a known artist and submitted the emails from that artist complaining as their final year project.

The whole university should be shut down. Obviously not an academic institution.

And this film he made confirms he is aware of the illegality of the shota magazines.

This man lives in Manchester, he confirms in this video.

I actually really like that idea. It has promise.

Emperor's New Clothes revisited.

Oh what the ‘winning’ project was…

We had to create artwork for some event or other. I persuaded everyone to close their eyes and imagine it for themselves. I waffled on about ‘see in your minds eye the most amazing canvas - imagine the colours and the brushstrokes… the composition is completely in balance… feel the emotion of the subject… bla bla bla’.

dammit I could have been the next Damien Hurst with that…

Yes, I’d not done any work on the project.

It looks like this is published work from his masters (not at Manchester).

I won the competition for passing off the biggest load of crap at a ‘project progress seminar’ where you had to present your project ideas and show your work to date (for the lecturer to tear to shreds if he was in the mood…).

He sat there with a look of confusion on his face (I think he was debating whether I was taking the mickey or had completely lost the plot) as I presented my project to the class. He later said that my work was quite ‘humorous’.

I didn’t win anything (he got his own back by submitting my most embarrassingly worst artwork in the end of year show - or maybe it was actually genius…).

Is it too outing to say what won?

I've read on a thread somewhere that it has been rejected and is being resubmitted.

Not unusual ...

I didn't realise that the article was different from the PhD research but it appears it is (?) according to the video I watched.

When I was at art school we would sometimes try to see who could get the biggest load of hogwash past out lecturer for a laugh. Maybe this is the PhD version?

(and yes I won)

I've read on a thread somewhere that it has been rejected and is being resubmitted. Imagine being the reviewer...

I think this is likely. I got my social research professional qualification at a well regarded uni about two decades ago. It was clear then that the phd students had a contempt for any attempt at objectivity or impartiality and saw themselves as ‘activist researchers’ pursuing political ends. These people will now be senior academics.
Naval gazing also was a big thing under the academic mantle of ‘reflexivity’.
That guys work actually reflects many strands in the way qualitative research, particularly academic qualitative research has been developing over recent decades. I am disgusted but it is perhaps, sadly, not surprising that a work like this has been produced.

There is a very old joke I remember way back from my student days. A bunch of academics did studies into why there is a head on the end of a penis.
The Cambridge study concluded it was to give the man pleasure.
The Oxford study concluded it was to give the woman pleasure.
The Bangor University study concluded it was to stop a man's hand falling off the end while he was having a wank.

It appears that this ribald joke shares the same basis and rigour as academic research at Manchester University. What was a stupid joke has become reality, the child porn is just the cherry on top.

That definitely should have gone for an Ethics review!

All PhD research should be through some level of ethics review, usually this is risk based so research that doesn't involve people/risky research tends to be more light touch in terms of ethics

I'm not in academia, but can I ask about the role of the ethics committee? Do all PhD proposals go in front of an ethics committee, or just those that involve other people?

I work in a STEM department, where we are now really reluctant to take on self-funded PhD students. The majority of ours are industry/Research Council funded which means very clear deliverables. Self-funded students invariably end up problematic through lack of progress (no sponsor pressure) or running out of cash.

There is clearly a supervision issue here, and a failure of management to oversee projects and closely monitor potentially sensitive topics.

One of the reasons why I left academia six years ago was because I was getting more and more concerned about the way things were going. Some of the research outputs in the social sciences in the faculty where I worked were just, to my mind, becoming almost wilfully perverse.

One paper I reviewed, for example, tried to argue that the modern attitudes of one particular ethnic group towards the ethnic group of a former imperial power (under which that former group had suffered oppression and genocide) were nothing but racism because their community experiences hadn't really been that bad under imperialism.

This was like arguing that there was no reason for Armenians to mention the Armenian genocide, and if they did so, it was because of racism and bigotry towards Turks.

It was pretty clear to me at the time that these kinds of frankly batshit arguments began to appear more prolifically as the old guard of academics, who had been born in the late 1940s and 1950s, began to retire. I suspect those older academics had been a line of defence against it, and once they were gone, all kinds of shit began to creep in.

What I also noticed in the later years was that, in my institution, people that I regarded to be doing really solid and useful research were constantly managed out all the time. Either contracts were not renewed, or their working lives were made so awkward that they left. Yet people who were pursuing "angels on the head of a pin" types of navel gazing research kept their jobs.

So I wish I was surprised by the op, but I'm not.

How did he recruit his research subjects?
An ad in the Uni newspaper?
From online forums?
From his “friend” network?
I hope the police uncover whatever web of MAP/PIE connections this person appears to be part of…