Areo: "Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship"

This case has been followed at wsws.org under the header of "The Fight Against Postmodernism." Three writers, Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose, wrote "hoax" articles and sent them out to prestigious academic peer review journals in fields they together dub "grievance studies," including "culture studies" and "identity studies." Seven were accepted.

The latest wsws article on this situation is here: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/01/17/hoax-j17.html

This Areo article is written by the perpetrators of the hoax themselves. It includes abstracts of the articles sent out, whether they were accepted, and reviews.

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Part I: Introduction

Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the three of us just spent a year working inside the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of this problem.

We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory” because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of “theory” which arose in the late sixties. As a result of this work, we have come to call these fields “grievance studies” in shorthand because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.

We undertook this project to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research. Because open, good-faith conversation around topics of identity such as gender, race, and sexuality (and the scholarship that works with them) is nearly impossible, our aim has been to reboot these conversations. We hope this will give people—especially those who believe in liberalism, progress, modernity, open inquiry, and social justice—a clear reason to look at the identitarian madness coming out of the academic and activist left and say, “No, I will not go along with that. You do not speak for me.”

This document is a first look at our project and an initial attempt to grapple with what we’re learning and what it means. Because of its length and detail, it is organized as follows, putting the factual information up front and more detailed explanations thereafter.

• Our methodology, which is central to contextualizing our claims;
• A summary of this project from its beginning until we were eventually exposed and forced to go public before we could conclude our research;
• An explanation of why we did this;
• A summary of the problem and why it matters;
• A clear explanation of how this project came to be;
• The results of our study, including a full list of all of the papers we submitted, their final outcomes, and relevant reviewer comments to date;
• A discussion of the significance of the results;
• A summary of what may come next

Read more at  https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/