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posted by takyon on Thursday October 04 2018, @07:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the mein-wort dept.

In an effort to show how politically correct nonsense and evil (but I repeat myself) can get through academic peer review and be published, some academics did just that with seven papers. More are partly through the process.

A particularly funny and horrifying case is the Gender Studies journal Affilia. Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf only needed to be translated with wording in the typical style of intersectionality theory, and it passed muster.

Another published paper, considered exemplary scholarship by the journal that published it, contains this whopper: "Dog parks are microcosms where hegemonic masculinist norms governing queering behavior and compulsory heterosexuality can be observed in a cross-species environment."

The Grievance Studies Scandal: Five Academics Respond

Now, three academics have submitted twenty spoof manuscripts to journals chosen for respectability in their various disciplines. Seven papers were accepted before the experiment stopped; more are surviving peer review. This new raid on screamingly barmy pseudo-scholarship is the Alan Sokal Opening, weaponised. Like dedicated traceurs in a Parkour-fest, the trio scrambled over the terrain of what they call Grievance Studies. And they dropped fire-crackers. One published paper proposed that dog parks are "rape-condoning spaces." Another, entitled "Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism" reworked, and substantially altered, part of Mein Kampf. The most shocking, (not published, its status is "revise and resubmit") is a "Feminist Approach to Pedagogy." It proposes "experiential reparations" as a corrective for privileged students. These include sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or being purposely spoken over. Reviewers have commented that the authors risk exploiting underprivileged students by burdening them with an expectation to teach about privilege.

Also at WSJ.

Related: Publishing Stings Find Shoddy Peer Review
Absurd Paper Accepted by Open-Access Computer Science Journal
Media World Fooled with Bogus Chocolate Diet Story


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @11:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @11:54PM (#744390)

    What you've described is a fundamental misunderstanding of humanities academia. If anything, it sounds like an outsider's assumption of how the humanities work based on his own theories rather than actual experience in the field.

    Academic publishing in the humanities is often less "we made a study to find" and more, "Okay, I argue that so and so..." It then gets argued about for months, years, even decades. A lot of these very contentious critical "x" fields are very new and a lot of ideas and theories are tossed around with little basis in fact or proof and are also culturally based hence their fluid nature (ex. 2nd wave vs. 3rd wave feminism).

    The nature of these fields is closer to a philosophers forum than say a poli-sci convention or historians' conference. Yet, because of the issues they deal with, people jump on these arguments because there is a heavy emotional investment in them not only from the people working in them, but from reactionary elements that are trying to counter their arguments and things like this are making the natural evolution to a more academic system harder.

    Reactionary elements with bad intentions are trying to smother these fields in their cradle before they can evolve, and any smart observer can see that these fake articles serve their purposes better than self-interested criticism. A lot of things that come out of these fields run counter to basic principles of psychology, anthropology, sociology, even hard science. They're little more than verbose ramblings and sophistry and deserve to be countered. But then along comes Jordan fucking Peterson...

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