Weapons-Grade Academic B.S.
One of the best Twitter accounts is New Real Peer Review (@realpeerreview), which combs through abstracts of academic papers looking for crackpottery. It is, unshockingly, a very active account. Take this post from today:
PhD dissertation: Asking 12 people to draw comic strips about being vegan. #IAmVegan https://t.co/cVnAIOArcM pic.twitter.com/jURVIwFcOY
— New Real Peer Review (@RealPeerReview) December 22, 2016
“Queering Veganism” — is it possible to come up with a more academic loony-left title than that? And this young scholar got his PhD for penning such codswallop! Let’s go in a little closer to look at a line that NRPR didn’t highlight:
Notice this line:
“Vegan identity is performed and achieved in various embodied ways. These processes intersect with other social structures such as gender and sexuality.”
Intersectionality! I think that’s a word that means whatever you want it to mean. Inasmuch as virtually nothing exists wholly independent of every other thing, the possibilities for academic bullshitting are endless.
Queer Vegan also writes of his project:
It sets a precedent for the potential use of comics in research…
Coming next: Playing one-potato-two-potato sets a precedent for the innovative research methods in statistics and chaos theory, at the intersection of agriculture. And queer theory. Don’t forget the queer theory. Always with the queer theory.
Sign up for New Real Peer Review. It offers a motherlode of Schadenfreude. Plus, you will get an early look at what historians of the future will be looking at in trying to understand why our civilization went kerflooey.
Finally, I wish to offer you the gift of Uncle Monty (the late, great Richard Griffiths) from Withnail and I, who in this short clip reveals himself to be the paterfamilias of queer vegans. You’re welcome:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPRgi448XfU]
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