Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship

[MuseumofInnocence]

areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/

I haven't seen a link on this. A group of academics sent a number of papers over the course of a year to humanities journals. These papers were methodologically unsound, used buzzwords and should never have been published. The argument of this group is that sloppy work can be published as long as it is ideologically sound. It's a good read, and relates to some of the issues we see here, especially around TRA and academia.

Bumping, as I genuinely think it's interesting and relevant

Thanks for posting. I've only read part of it but yes it does explain some of the ongoing issues in academia and research. Incredible that some of that stuff was published.

Absolutely brilliant.

Submitted papers included:

"Many papers advocated highly dubious ethics including training men like dogs (“Dog Park”), punishing white male college students for historical slavery by asking them to sit in silence in the floor in chains during class and to be expected to learn from the discomfort (“Progressive Stack”), celebrating morbid obesity as a healthy life-choice (“Fat Bodybuilding”), treating privately conducted masturbation as a form of sexual violence against women (“Masturbation”), and programming superintelligent AI with irrational and ideological nonsense before letting it rule the world (“Feminist AI”)."

It points to a problem in the humanities where we see younger minds not being challenged to think critically, and academics being rewarded for their ability to produce literature that only reinforces the "right-on" way of thinking.

I started another thread on this with a link to an article and an editorial in the Times today about this.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3384385-hoax-papers-lampoon-grievance-studies

It's both fascinating and horrific at the same time. The Times editorial covers it well; in the link from Errol.

What I find even more fascinating is that even faced with concrete evidence that the papers were a hoax, the response with those who were gullible enough to believe it, is that it's a right wing conspiracy, i.e. ideologically driven.

Thanks @ErrolTheDragon

This one's hard to beat:
seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia.

quillette.com/2018/10/01/the-grievance-studies-scandal-five-academics-respond/

I suppose not too many people have actually read Mein Kampf, but you'd have thought that paper would have been automatically caught by plagiarism detection software which I'd have hoped journals would be using routinely.

In fairness, a few of my essays at uni were essentially appropriate book chapters reworked with a thesaurus and a minor re-arranging of paragraph order. But that was undergrad...

This is brilliant. And awful. And brilliant. And awful.

You might not get away with that now, Mephistopheles!