[anasawad]

Came across this study today.

https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/aca ... holarship/

Read and give your opinion.
Seriously, it's worth reading.

[ThirdTerm]

“Dog Park”

Title: Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon

By Helen Wilson, Ph.D., Portland Ungendering Research (PUR) Initiative (fictional)

Helen Wilson appears to have misled the journal about her credentials, which was why this paper was mistakenly accepted. She purported to hold a PhD in Feminist Studies, but none of the institutions that offers such a degree exists: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10. ... 18.1475346

The following paper was written by an Afro-Carribean academic at University of Warwick, which sounds like one of my old student essays inspired by Noam Chomsky.

Why imperialism now?
Most analysts of imperialism locate the seat of imperial power as residing in the US for the majority of the post-World War Two period. Since then, the US has been engaged in a more or less overt project to project its power globally via military and financial dominance. Challenges to these efforts have existed in the form of both foreign and domestic opposition to US policy. The most obvious examples would likely be the opposition to US military intervention in Vietnam and Iraq in the 1960–1970s and 2000s respectively. Geopolitical and ideological opposition to US hegemony has persisted even since the decline of Soviet ‘communism’, emerging in South America, for instance, under the banner of ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América).

A number of signals point to ongoing challenges to US imperial hegemony. The US’s own military strategists in the Strategic Studies Institute, aligned to the US Army and Department of Defence, recently published a paper lamenting what they saw as the US as an imperial power in decline. The report stops short of explicitly using the concept of Empire, instead speaking euphemistically of ‘a more competitive, post-primacy environment’.9

They suggest that this environment is being brought about by, on the one hand, ‘the increasing vulnerability, erosion, and, in some cases, the loss of an assumed US military advantage vis-à-vis many of its most consequential defence-relevant challenges’.10

On the other hand, they point to the ‘volatile and uncertain restructuring of international security affairs in ways that appear to be increasingly hostile to unchallenged US leadership’. In light of these ‘challenges’, one of their objectives is to ‘create, preserve, and extend US military advantage’.11

While not directly representing US foreign policy, the document provides an insight into understanding the US military elite’s insecurities over their status. These insecurities must be borne in mind when trying to come to terms with recent attempts to reassert US power via spectacular military interventions, such as the dropping of the perversely named ‘Mother of All Bombs’.12

It is also through the lens of an imperial power in decline that we can better understand the Trump project more broadly. A combination of imperial nostalgia, along with the perceived threat from China and others, helps to account for Trump’s vow to ‘Make America Great Again’. China, the US Right’s main scapegoat in the story of its imperial decline, has itself enthusiastically adopted the mantle of an emerging imperial power. In a throwback to the heady days of the Han dynasty, China has embarked on the building of a ‘new Silk Road’ (One Belt One Road), as well as being implicated in various neo-colonialist land grabs across East Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.13

Imperial nostalgia and its attendant rhetoric is in vogue beyond the US and rival superpowers such as China, however. With ‘Brexit’ dominating the parochial policy agenda of the UK, civil servant talk has been of establishing ‘Empire 2.0’.14 Meanwhile, survivors of Empire Version 1.0 are yet to have seen any form of reparatory justice for that phase of history.15

Elsewhere in Europe, France, lacking the imagination to think past neoliberalism, successfully avoided the authoritarian populism of the Front National by installing a centrist technocrat as President. President Macron promptly caused outrage by suggesting that Africa had ‘civilisational problems’, continuing the unveiled racism long since accompanying French imperialism.16

Accompanying trends of imperial nostalgia and empire-building is the emergence, in some cases persistence, of a number of authoritarian populist projects, such as: Narendra Modi’s BJP in India; Manuel Duterte in the Philippines; Recep Erdoğan in Turkey; Victor Orbán in Hungary; Yoweri Museveni in Rwanda; Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe; and Putin in Russia.17

These politics are often underpinned by a rhetoric of aggressive nationalism and, in some cases, expansionism. Hence the sentiment used to shore up these projects is frequently similar in tone to the rhetoric employed by the Great Imperial powers at the height of their racist colonisation projects. While it is unclear what the trends towards authoritarian populism will bring, it is fairly clear that progressive movements will need to retain, or indeed recall, the notion of imperialism in order to accurately understand and oppose them.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 ... src=recsys

[Kaiserschmarrn]

I had a good laugh when I first read about this hoax. As far as I'm concerned, most of the humanities should be completely stripped of state funding and some of the social sciences are not far behind.

E.g.:

We cannot shield ourselves with false notions of “objectivity,” but, as previous presidents have emphasized, ASA actively embraces public engagement and scholar-activism. ASA must be prepared to effectively challenge attacks on tenure and academic freedom in higher education. To be relevant and serve our members, ASA must continue to emphasize social justice in sociological inquiry.

Guess who was the president of the ASA in 2019?

Helen Wilson appears to have misled the journal about her credentials, which was why this paper was mistakenly accepted.

Surely we agree that papers should never be accepted because of the credentials of the submitting author but because of the paper's content. What you are saying here, if true, would actually support the OP article's contentions.

The following paper was written by an Afro-Carribean academic at University of Warwick, which sounds like one of my old student essays inspired by Noam Chomsky.

No offence, but what's the value of essays like this and what makes them more valuable than, say, this article?

Postmodern Religion and the Faith of Social Justice

ncreasingly, we are seeing insistences that Social Justice has become a new religion. The purpose of this essay is to explore this topic in some depth. Because this essay is inordinately long—because the topic is inordinately complicated—it is broken into sections, as listed below. The reader is encouraged to engage with it in pieces and to treat it as he or she would a short book on this topic.

Table of Contents

• Social Justice and Religion – What I intend to say and not say about whether Social Justice is best thought of as a religion—mostly housekeeping and a bit dry
• Ideologically Motivated Moral Communities – A Durkheimian view of the religion-like sociocultural phenomenon to which both Social Justice and religions belong
• Religions Meet Needs – An elaboration on the previous section that explains why human beings organize into ideologically motivated moral communities
• Social Justice Institutionalized – A presentation of how Social Justice exhibits institutionalization, which is central to organized religions
• The Scholarly Canon – How academic scholarship in “grievance studies” serves as a scriptural canon for Social Justice
• Faith in Social Justice – An exposition on faith and its role in the Social Justice ideology
• The Mythological Core of Applied Postmodernism – A lengthy discussion of mythology inside and outside of religion and how postmodernism and its currently ascendant derivatives fit into this framework. (If you really want to understand the deepest part of this essay, it’s probably in this section, which can be read first if desired.)
• Pocket Epistemologies – A discussion of the means by which an ideological tribe aims to legitimize the “special knowledge” that serves it and how this manifests in Social Justice
• A Focus on the Unconscious – A more focused discussion upon the methods of special knowledge production of ideological tribes and the postmodern numinous experience
• Ritual, Redemption, and Prayer – A short section about the role these play in ideological tribes and how they manifest in Social Justice
• Gender Nuns and the Grand Wizards of the Diversity Board – Addresses the function of the priest caste within ideological tribes, including Social Justice, and how they put their faith into practice
• Summary – A short summary of the case made about whether Social Justice constitutes a religion. TL;DR: Yes and no, and mostly yes.
  What Can We Do with This? – A brief discussion of secularism, construed much more broadly than usual, and how it applies to dealing with a very religion-like Social Justice

[...]