So there was another case where some jokester generated a bunch of words and phrases basically at random, sent it as a paper to a scientific conference, it was peer-reviewed, nobody noticed anything was wrong… and now the jokester is mocking them. Rightfully so.
But even more interesting is the field in which it took place. Did you know there are “fat studies”? We’d better call it fatology. A field that deals with fat people, their behaviour, their feelings, their specific culture and, of course, discrimination.
Actually, it’s not new. There has been a category of BBW in pornography for ages.
The traditional ones like psychology, sociology, anthropology, statistics and so on are based on method
It is good to note that there are two kinds of studies in universities. The traditional ones like psychology, sociology, anthropology, statistics and so on are based on method. The student is taught the proper procedures – how to conduct research, how to tabulate, how to make observations and how to make a proper record of them. The reviewer then checks in the first instance that the method has been correctly applied. This is also how the natural sciences work.
But in technical universities, for example, they teach differently. There, if you study, say, “medical electronics”, there’s a bit of maths, a bit of physics, a bit of circuit theory, a bit of materials science, a bit of computer programming… just everything you might need to design or work with those complex devices. There have been attempts over the last generation to create something similar in the humanities, but the result is utterly trivial. We have “gay studies” (all about gay people), “gender studies” (all about feminists), the aforementioned “fat studies” (all about fatness), and in America a few years ago, even Trump studies (all about Donald Trump) took off. But how can you control the correct use of the method?
It’s high time to abolish all those “x… studies”.
And that the view is otherwise too narrow? Traditionally, this has been handled by having a sociologist, a psychologist, an economist, a statistician and others working in a team, each of whom should have a good handle on their research method.
It’s high time to abolish all those “x… studies”. American universities are running out of students, so it’s probably a good time too.
