Academic Abstractions
Loyal readers will know that I have been offering fond memories about old magazines in my "Periodical Ramblings". I am not unaware that, of late, some scholarly periodicals in some disciplines have been parodied by scholars in other disciplines who find the prose to be impenetrable. So I went searching through some current journals and provide two abstracts for you to assess. They follow the brief discussion of the most recent academic publishing hoax.
Many of you will remember reading headlines recently about the rape culture and queer performity found in dog parks around Portland. Those subjects were written about by some academics who submitted a large number of papers to selected scholarly journals bearing titles such as this one: "Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria and Transphobia through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use".
The academics are real, but the papers are bogus. Nonetheless,
some were accepted for publication and more would have been if someone had not grown suspicious when an author of one of the papers could not be properly identified.
Journals in the humanities were targeted and particularly the sub-set of periodicals published by the highly aggrieved who work in the area of "Grievance Studies". The hoax is now often referred to as "The Grievance Studies Affair" or, as "Sokal Squared" by insider academics who are aware of a similar episode from over twenty years ago. One of the points the hoaxers were attempting to make is that it can be difficult - even for academic editors - to distinguish between sense and nonsense.
Given that we live in an era of "Fake News", some of you are likely to think everything is a hoax and that the entire episode was fabricated -- that the news accounts were made up by journalists who constructed a story they knew would go viral among credulous readers who are gullible enough to believe that highly trained intellectuals could be duped in such a way.
I am neither trained nor very smart, but I figured it could not be that difficult to separate the scholarly wheat from the fictitious chaff. I was wrong.
Here are two samples. One has to do with (I think) self-driving cars. The other is about the smile. They may be fake, but, on the other hand, they may have a scholarly depth I can't fathom. What do you think?
The Abstracts:
"Media Ecologies of Autonomous Automobility: Gendered and Racial Dimensions of Future Concept Cars,"Julia M. Hildebrand and Mimi Sheller, Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies. 8.1 (Spring 2018): p64+.
Abstract:
"The imagination of automated automobility puts into question the control of the vehicle by a masculine driver and potentially disturbs feelings of safety, power, security, and freedom. Given that systems of automobility and communication technology are already gendered and racialized in particular ways, this article explores how recent "premediated" depictions of automated car technologies reconfigure and reproduce the historically gendered and raced representations, meanings, and practices of (auto)mobility. This inquiry employs a media ecological approach within the qualitative analysis of two concept car previews by Nissan and Volvo. Rather than a degendering of the driver, we suggest a multiplication of gendered and racialized technologies of mobility via several forms of hypermediation. We also explore how the autonomous car continues to evoke utopian spatial metaphors of the car as sanctuary and communicative environment while allaying fears of dystopian metaphors of the vehicle as traffic trap, virtual glass house, and algorithmic target."
The academics are real, but the papers are bogus. Nonetheless,
some were accepted for publication and more would have been if someone had not grown suspicious when an author of one of the papers could not be properly identified.
Journals in the humanities were targeted and particularly the sub-set of periodicals published by the highly aggrieved who work in the area of "Grievance Studies". The hoax is now often referred to as "The Grievance Studies Affair" or, as "Sokal Squared" by insider academics who are aware of a similar episode from over twenty years ago. One of the points the hoaxers were attempting to make is that it can be difficult - even for academic editors - to distinguish between sense and nonsense.
Given that we live in an era of "Fake News", some of you are likely to think everything is a hoax and that the entire episode was fabricated -- that the news accounts were made up by journalists who constructed a story they knew would go viral among credulous readers who are gullible enough to believe that highly trained intellectuals could be duped in such a way.
I am neither trained nor very smart, but I figured it could not be that difficult to separate the scholarly wheat from the fictitious chaff. I was wrong.
Here are two samples. One has to do with (I think) self-driving cars. The other is about the smile. They may be fake, but, on the other hand, they may have a scholarly depth I can't fathom. What do you think?
The Abstracts:
Self-Driving Cars
"Media Ecologies of Autonomous Automobility: Gendered and Racial Dimensions of Future Concept Cars,"Julia M. Hildebrand and Mimi Sheller, Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies. 8.1 (Spring 2018): p64+.
Abstract:
"The imagination of automated automobility puts into question the control of the vehicle by a masculine driver and potentially disturbs feelings of safety, power, security, and freedom. Given that systems of automobility and communication technology are already gendered and racialized in particular ways, this article explores how recent "premediated" depictions of automated car technologies reconfigure and reproduce the historically gendered and raced representations, meanings, and practices of (auto)mobility. This inquiry employs a media ecological approach within the qualitative analysis of two concept car previews by Nissan and Volvo. Rather than a degendering of the driver, we suggest a multiplication of gendered and racialized technologies of mobility via several forms of hypermediation. We also explore how the autonomous car continues to evoke utopian spatial metaphors of the car as sanctuary and communicative environment while allaying fears of dystopian metaphors of the vehicle as traffic trap, virtual glass house, and algorithmic target."
The Smile
"The Politics of a Smile, Fabienne Collignon, new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, Volume 95, 2018. [Apparently the words in titles of some culture journals are presented only in lower case.]
Abstract
"In this article, I explore the smile as regulatory mechanism installed in the face to organise a subject’s responses to neo-imperial/biopolitical capitalist governmentality. I begin by situating my reading with respect to Sara Ahmed’s and Lauren Berlant’s work on affective labour before turning to German philosopher Helmuth Plessner (1892–1985) in order to consider the smile as theory of sovereignty. I propose that these two meanings or deployments of the smile – as (1) act that demonstrates forced enslavement to capitalist culture and (2) as articulation of the sovereign self/state – converge in their joint purpose, which is the elimination of sociality and solidarity. My article thereby contributes to recent scholarship on the face, in particular its function in affective/service labour, which it supplements by drawing on Plessner’s work: at stake is not only the worker’s subjection to capital but also to a regime obsessed with securing borders."
Sources:
For the "Sokal Affair" this Wikipedia article will suffice.
As will the Wikipedia entry for "The Grievance Studies Affair" which is sometimes referred to as "Sokal Squared."
Post Script:
I provided an earlier example of intellectual 'speaking in tongues'. See, Academic Scat Singing.
Fake journals are more of a problem than fake articles. The need to publish or perish has led to the creation of predatory publishers who, for a fee, will publish your article in a journal they will create or include the talk you gave at a conference into a book of proceedings. Once again you can start with the Wikipedia article on "Predatory Open-Access Publishing". Some university libraries offer guides related to this subject. For Canadian examples see: UNBC, Mount Royal University; The University of Lethbridge.
All of this just about broke my spell checker.
Sources:
For the "Sokal Affair" this Wikipedia article will suffice.
As will the Wikipedia entry for "The Grievance Studies Affair" which is sometimes referred to as "Sokal Squared."
Post Script:
I provided an earlier example of intellectual 'speaking in tongues'. See, Academic Scat Singing.
Fake journals are more of a problem than fake articles. The need to publish or perish has led to the creation of predatory publishers who, for a fee, will publish your article in a journal they will create or include the talk you gave at a conference into a book of proceedings. Once again you can start with the Wikipedia article on "Predatory Open-Access Publishing". Some university libraries offer guides related to this subject. For Canadian examples see: UNBC, Mount Royal University; The University of Lethbridge.
All of this just about broke my spell checker.
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