A scholar who removed the hoax from the publication defends him: "The papers are good or they are not."

Mike Nayna

Helen Pluckrose, one of three academics who have done a publishing hoax for several journals in the field of identity studies.

TThree academics – Helen Pluckrose, editor-in-chief of the webzine Aero; James A. Lindsay, author and mathematician; and Peter Boghossian, an adjunct professor of philosophy at Portland State University – spent 10 months writing 20 booklets that illustrate and parody what they call "grievance studies" and submit them to the "best journals" of sub- relevant areas. Seven have been published.

When the hoax was revealed this week, some observers, such as Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and Harvard government expert Yascha Mounk, praised the project by exposing at least some of the sub-disciplines of research. identity as emperors without clothes. Other academics have described it as outright fraud, claiming that it had nothing proven beyond the fact that academia works on the fundamental principle of goodwill and of honesty.

The Chronicle On Friday, she arrived at Pluckrose, who is writing a book on "Grievance Studies" in Portland, Oregon, for a hasty discussion during her media whirlwind. The interview was modified for its length and clarity.

Q. You had a whole week. Is the hoax of your grievance studies what you and your co-authors were waiting for? It seemed, with your press kit and your documentary maker, that you knew what was coming.

A. I did not really know what to expect, honestly. It's a bit overwhelming. It is very encouraging that the media, which are often very critical of academics themselves of social justice universities, are charitable and balanced. We were very pleased to note that BuzzFeed, for example, had some criticisms but was actually quite balanced and raised some of the criticisms we were trying to make.

Q. Your Areo bio says you are secular, a liberal humanist, a mother and a dog lover. But can you tell me more about you? Where are you from? Where did you study? What are you doing to amuse yourself in addition to shaking the foundations of the human sciences?

A. I come from East London. I graduated from East London University with a Bachelor of Arts degree and my Masters in Modern Science from Queen Mary University, University of London. I was interested in ideology and psychology. I therefore examined religion, how it shaped the culture from 13:00 to 17:00. More specifically, how does it affect women, how women use religious narratives for their own authority and autonomy, and are also affected by them.

I wanted to be a feminist historian. I've also examined how religion affects people now. I've been an ardent humanist layman and critic of religious ideology, which leads me to criticize other irrational and backlit ideologies. This includes postmodernism and the branches of theory that flowed from it.

Q. There are many ways to question things in academia. How did you and your co-authors decide to take the path of hoax?

A. For several years, we have been directly criticizing, in various ways and in different ways, disciplines and epistemologies that are based on personal perspectives, systems of power and privilege, and marginalization, which are not really evidence-based or reason, which removes them from any sense of the term. to be objective. It is something that concerns us all.

I am not sure how the idea of ​​engaging in such a strategy – to try to write something in it, to try to highlight the problems – has come up. This kind of organic development after "Conceptual Penis" [a hoax her co-authors staged last year] and reviews of it. A deeper and broader attempt to work within the system, to see how it works and to show how it works, has somehow emerged.

Q. Did you have the impression that no one had heard these criticisms when you wrote them in a more direct way?

A. I think a lot of people have heard them. My article on postmodernism and its development has reached a wide audience. But working within the entire university publishing system was necessary to show people who were not necessarily doing the links.

Because it's quite counterintuitive. We have the "white privilege," "male frailty," and so on. – all these buzzwords, those who stayed in your way, a lived perspective, lived experiences in society – and many people just think that these come from nowhere. . We try to show where they come from, the idea that knowledge is a construction of power, that it is formed by means of speech, so we must be very careful about what is and is not said or discussed . It has a 50-year intellectual history that is not apparent to the general public.

We really want people to look at the publications we have cited, as well as the reviewers' comments, to see where the researchers who are trying to submit work are headed. It's complicated, and it takes a lot of unpacking.

Q. How did you choose the newspapers you submitted?

A. These newspapers are quite varied. We have one in geography, one in social work discipline, but we are not specifically looking at geography or social work. If there are more problems in these disciplines, we do not know them and we do not criticize them.

What we are looking at is the approach of grievance studies in these different disciplines. Gender, place and culture It's not at the top of geography, but at the top of feminist geography. Thus, when we look for various ideas, articles that come back again and again, influential and important articles, bring us back to a small group of journals in which these ideas are the strongest.

Next, we examine their influence, their impact factors, and we aim at the most influential and reputable journals in this type of sub-discipline, at the crossroads of grievance studies and broader social science disciplines. A good example: we found ourselves searching and finding Hypatia again and again, so we targeted our own work to Hypatia.

Q. One comment I read compared the hoax to the check of bad checks and to a blatant exaggeration showing that it shows the fragility of the global banking system. Does this depreciate unfairly what you did?

A. We have to let people decide for themselves. Our newspapers are very well located, blend very well in what exists. If people do not think it matters, I really do not know what to say to them.

Q. The specialists in gender and ethnicity studies, whether external or not, wonder why you have targeted their disciplines and suggest various reactionary motives. Why did you target these fields?

A. The fields of identity studies – because that's where the ideas come from. We look very specifically at postmodern theories. We examined these theories from this particular state of mind and used this particular epistemology and that particular ethic. Other people are looking at different issues related to the production of knowledge and we are also in favor of that.

Q. What about criticism of bad faith – this academic publication is not designed to filter out pranks and that hoax wastes critics' time and poisons the atmosphere. I know how Yascha Mounk answer that, but how do you respond to that?

A. If we talk about bad faith, we are talking about motivations. We have a principle here. We want to see how things are spoken, what is published, why it is published, how people are led. This is our project and we participated in good faith.

"The scholarship should not depend on the identity or motivation of the writers."

I do not understand the idea that it makes any difference that the purse we wrote, which they accepted as good and published, was either sincerely or not. The scholarship should not depend on the identity or motivation of the writers. Newspapers are healthy or they are not.

If journals find that they can not distinguish who is sincere or who is not, they must refocus on those who are the writers and their origin, and look at the research itself and determine should publish and be proud of the edition.

Q. You and your co-authors describe you as liberals, but the hoax is a red joke for right-wing mockers and anti-intellectuals. You probably planned this, but does it bother you?

A. If right-wing reactionaries expect us to support their anti-intellectual goals, they will be deeply disappointed.

Alexander C. Kafka is editor-in-chief and oversees Idea Lab. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or write to him at [email protected].