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.

How can this not be career ending? I know some universities study weird stuff, but unless I missed it no one has a professorship of wanking?

I very much hope it will be, but having worked in academia for several years and seen all manner of abusive behaviour tolerated and even encouraged, I’m afraid I don’t hold out much hope of these types of people being investigated and held to account. I obviously hope I’m wrong!

Sharon Kinsella has a website listing all her work and research.

As a complete aside, not about the subject of this thread, I found a chapter about 'Cute' trends in Japan. This page stood out re the trend this board discusses: (I think it was written a while ago as I'd imagine trans would make an appearance there.)

Will do. The Manchester police website crashed but he's resubmitting his report as I type.
👏
Hopefully it crashed because it’s being flooded with reports about this man!

And continues...

Well this bit in his article just made me want to throw up. Beyond grim.

I think it ought to be career ending but will it? Look at how the NSPCC reacted when photos were published of one of their employees who said he enjoyed wearing bondage stuff at work. Or the Grievance Studies papers published even though they deliberately based on completely fictional data?

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

I am not sure that PhDs based on looking at published material have to go to an ethics committee but I haven't read the full article describing what he did so I am very conscious that I could be wrong.

Well this is a very disturbing continuation of the drive to normalise paedophilia.

Did anyone scroll down the page of the Twitter link in the OP? Ur old friend Yaniv is blatantly using racist insults and making death threats. How are they not locked up?

MAPs going mainstream 😡

I used to work on a helpline for people facing h personal difficulties. The excerpt above reads like some of the sex calls we used to get. The link being that the caller was getting off on the female listener listening to him. This dude's supervisor - a woman - is very likely playing an unwitting part in his fantasies.

And I hate to say it, because it's important that it's been shared so he can be (hopefully) stopped, but those men also satisfied their (masochistic) exhibitionist fetish by knowing they were being discussed.

As I've had a previous deletion for suggesting someone might think a certain way, Mods I've no idea what this guy is thinking, I'm merely stating what some other men told me they were.

PhDs are research surely that's a great topic to investigate?

By wanking off to it?

Article on redux- . reduxx.info/phd-researcher-masturbated-to-fantasy-child-sexual-abuse-material-for-research/

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…

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.

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.

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?

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

That definitely should have gone for an Ethics review!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Is it too outing to say what won?

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…).