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

[Imnobody4]

Not just a PhD in wanking, but a peer-reviewed paper on masturbating to images of young boys. Published in "Qualitative Methods". t.co/L3MnSkYQFN

twitter.com/ProfAliceS/status/1556584749447143425?t=v_5NNIZDXKNzFbMBZxWsfQ&s=19

How did this get past Manchester University's ethics process @OfficialUoM ? Masturbating to images of children and writing it up for public consumption does not seem ethical to me. This is hugely disturbing.

Actually I'm speechless.

Greater Manchester Police has opened an investigation. We are assisting them with their enquiries to establish what, if any offences, have been committed in the UK or elsewhere

Good.

'this case has highlighted that we must ensure that our PhD student recruitment processes are sufficiently robust to appropriately scrutinise the legal, ethical and safeguarding issues of the proposed research'

No shit. Here's a tip - check out what anybody is up to when they say they are doing 'Queer Studies'/Autoethnography.

Here's an idea ban all autoethnographic research/studies and insist that any research/studies have real world applications and they are done to the highest possible standards and aren't allowed to quote/reference other poor quality papers to back up claims/results as has become common in gender studies

There is contradictory information regarding when the period of self-immersive research activity took place.

'Self-immersive research activity' - there's a euphemism if I ever heard one!

Quite. You can see the author pausing at their keyboard as they considered how to word that!

Seriously, that is a good response from Manchester Uni. They refer to wider concerns about the student, looking at reviewing wider processes themselves including to doing background checks on students. Refer to police involvement.

A much, much better response than Qualitative Research Journal managed. All they did was throw the peer reviewers under a bus. You would have thought that for a discipline so keen on self- reflection, they could have done a bit more self reflection in n how their culture enabled this.

Now, have Queer Studies scholars been publicly making any self reflective statements? They have birthed all this, after all!

Self immersive research

I'm quite relieved to see that Manchester had no involvement with his thesis. I do wonder what he proposed for his PhD that made their ethics committee say no.

It’s reasonably common for ethics committees to reject projects at the first attempt. The ethics review process should improve the research.

But I suspect this one was horrific and beyond improvement.

This guy has been around doing research into shota users for quite some time. And he’s hardly been hiding his personal interest and affinity with this ‘community’. The acceptance he had so far had obviously led him to become confident to think that article would be acceptable to the academic qualitative research community. And let’s face it, he was very nearly right. He would have got away for it if it weren’t for those pesky kids ( Tory MPs and GC feminist it appears). But from what I have read, it does not appear to be the qualitative research community who called this out. They have been endorsing this.

I’m not sure there is a ‘qualitative research community’. It’s extremely fragmented and silo-y. Tiny sub fields where everyone reads and reviews each others’ work and it’s all
mutually reinforcing.

Of course, that is a big part of the problem really.

I've been thinking the same thing - qualitative research isn't a discipline and doesn't have a community. It's the kind of journal where you might try to place a slightly oddball paper with an untested methodology. I can't think of anyone who'd read it cover to cover - you'd follow relevant citations to it. Doubt many read this man's work - hope not.

Indeed.

Even within academic disciplines, the behavioural economists don’t really give a fuck what the development economists are doing. The economic geographers don’t give a shit what the cultural geographers are doing (and mostly think it’s bollocks). The developmental psychologists aren’t interested in what the personality psychologists are up to. The various subdomains within developmental psychology or cultural geography or behavioural economics mostly manage to ignore what the others are doing or think they’re all idiots who don’t know their arse from their elbow.

There’s so much academic material out there that almost everyone is not even looking at any of it. Because no one reads actual editions of journals any more, they probably aren’t even seeing all the stuff that doesn’t come up on their searches or side bar on the stuff they do read.

That’s part of how a paper like that not only gets published (the same 10 people in the tiny sub field review each other’s work repeatedly) but how it fails to come to people’s attention immediately.

If I was this guy's PhD supervisor, I'd be having kittens, but she seems to be silent so far. Am I the only one who Googles prospective students (and RAs)? Nowadays there's all sorts I'd want to know; not that I care about their politics (for example), but how they present their opinions in public IYSWIM.

Oh yes, and are they paedophiles would be on that list of stuff I'd like to know, if that's not obvious.

I work in a uni that focuses on engineering so it's actually quite rare for ethics to be declined. I don't have much involvement in other areas where there's more likely to be ethical issues.

Not sure about anyone else but at ours there's a lot of pressure on academics to get PhD students. If they're willing to pay, there's little the supervisors can do to reject potential students. I warned them about a troublesome and argumentative MSc student but a junior academic ended up taking him on because he had to.

Different here, thankfully. No one can force me to take a PhD student. I'll push back and say it'll cost more in wasted time, and lost opportunity to take on someone who'll contribute to our work.

Our ethics review (at application, for discrete projects, for change of direction) is taken seriously and the published work wouldn't have got past it - that's with plenty of work in humanities, social sciences, cultural studies under review. Who knows what he suggested for his PhD, though how he'd have been accepted without ethics approval I don't understand. But ethics review isn't universal. I don't know if they do it in Germany.

Fucking hell there's another one:

journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/2/1/182

This time an academic paper aiming to have peadophilia accepted as a sexual orientation, which details the authors sexual interactions with children. In a journal edited by Oxford University. Why didn't the editors immediately send this submission to police? It's a written confession from a child abuser.

Jesus suffering Jehosophats, does nobody vet these bloody articles?!

Autoethnographists - sort it the fuck out!

It's by Brecht Vaerwaeter (pseudonym).

More good work from Reduxx. Those women deserve a bloody medal.

Here's an article with more information:

reduxx.info/pedophile-publishes-auto-ethnography-about-sexual-attraction-to-young-boys-in-academic-journal/

I just… I can’t fucking bear this any more.

A comment that makes so much sense in the context of FWR and MN despite the image of pram product reviews etc.

Chilling that yet another has been peer reviewed and signed off by senior academics. The bit that seems to be missing in these self absorbed writings is the actual/potential harm to the children. How the fuck does normalising paedophilia prevent child abuse?