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Wanky research pulled off website

NSF discussion of the paper at Vice:

A nearly 4,000 word, first-person essay about a man’s experiences masturbating to Japanese comics of underage boys was published to the peer-reviewed journal Qualitative Research—and is now under investigation after sociologists on Twitter demanded to know how it passed academic review.

Karl Andersson, a PhD student at the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at The University of Manchester, wrote the paper titled “I am not alone – we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan.” Shota is an illustrated Japanese comic genre that depicts young, underage boys in sexualized ways or in sexually explicit scenarios.
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Apparently the article was published in April, but became a cause celebre when a Tory politician tweeted about it a week ago. Initially a few academics tried to circle the wagons, tweeting in defense of the "research", but most pretty quickly realized it was beyond the pale.

Turns out the "researcher" has a long history of sexualizing adolescent boys:

He published Destroyer Magazine from 2006-2010, a publication with the stated purpose of bringing back "the adolescent boy as one of the ideals of gay culture" and featured boys as young as 13.
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It will be interesting to see whose heads roll over this one.
 
Brainster said:
Initially a few academics tried to circle the wagons, tweeting in defense of the "research", but most pretty quickly realized it was beyond the pale.
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I'm generally in favor of airing even the most marginal ideas, but an autoethnographic wank journal strikes me as an edge case at best. Whenever I find myself asking whether Pluckrose actually wrote the article as satire, well, you get the idea.

Brainster said:
Initially a few academics tried to circle the wagons, tweeting in defense of the "research", but most pretty quickly realized it was beyond the pale.
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Goes to show that even some academics don't actually read a paper before tweeting about it. Thankfully that sort of thing never happens on a skeptic forum.
 
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d4m10n said:
I'm generally in favor of airing even the most marginal ideas, but an autoethnographic wank journal strikes me as an edge case at best.
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The entire concept of autoethnography is garbage. It's just a fancy word for "I'm going to talk about myself because I'm too lazy to do any actual research". This specific case highlights the absurdity pretty well, but unfortunately the extreme nature of it also means that the focus will be on the sexual aspects, and autoethnography in general will largely escape the criticism it deserves.
 
Ziggurat said:
The entire concept of autoethnography is garbage.
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Sexy garbage, though.
Rather than abstracting my experience in a way that neatly summarizes or prepackages our encounter, I prefer to extend an invitation to you to join me on this auto(erotic)ethnographic journey. I must warn, however, that moving forward with this story requires that you take a risk, to interact with me, to engage in conversation, and to jump into the process with your body, heart, and mind so that we can create spaces to tell our sexual stories – stories that need to be told, autoethnographically – auto(erotic)ethnographically, regardless of how masturbatory they are, may be, or might become.
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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1363460712459153?journalCode=sexa

Okay, that's cheating. I picked a journal about sexuality.

I do find myself wondering why purportedly scientific journals are basically publishing LiveJournal / Tumblr posts, though. If I wanted to get inside someone's head, there's no lack of volunteers on the www.
 
Reminds me of Nancy Friday's "scholarly" collections of sex fantasies, published in the early 90s. After school, I'd hop on my bike, ride over to the mall, head into B. Dalton's, and quickly skim a story or two for later "academic review".
 
d4m10n said:
I do find myself wondering why purportedly scientific journals are basically publishing LiveJournal / Tumblr posts, though.
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In fairness, the journal doesn't describe itself as "scientific", but merely as "scholarly". And the distinction matters, because fields like literature and history can be quite scholarly without being scientific.

Nevertheless, I don't think autoethnography qualifies as legitimately scholarly either, and your description is accurate. And in fact, one of the articles in their journal is basically just ripped right out of reddit:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1363460720961300
In fact, browsing their article titles is an education in and of itself.

As to why... well, professors need to publish to get tenure, and if that means resorting to autoethnography or trawling Reddit, well, some publishers are going to meet the demand.
 
wareyin said:
You could have posted it as another stellar example of Cancel Culture IRL...
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You remain free to do so. The usual elements of viral denunciation followed by institutional deplatforming appear to be in place, although the "IRL" element seems to be missing since no one involved encountered each other in meatspace.
 
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Ziggurat said:
The entire concept of autoethnography is garbage. It's just a fancy word for "I'm going to talk about myself because I'm too lazy to do any actual research". This specific case highlights the absurdity pretty well, but unfortunately the extreme nature of it also means that the focus will be on the sexual aspects, and autoethnography in general will largely escape the criticism it deserves.
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Autoethnography sounds like a ten dollar word for "TED Talk" or "One Man Show".
 
d4m10n said:
You remain free to do so. The usual elements of viral denunciation followed by institutional deplatforming appear to be in place, although the "IRL" element seems to be missing since no one involved encountered each other in meatspace.
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Which ironically enough actually applies to all of the examples you've been posting in that thread as well!

So I've helpfully posted it, but attributed the finding to you.
 
TBH, seein' as the guy seems to be an anthropology student, this autoethnography exercise strikes me more as the kind of pranking your professor that only seems to make sense when you're a student and drunk. I mean, like when (way back) I wrote my philosophy paper about Murphy's Law after the disk on which I had written the original paper went corrupt, and I absolutely couldn't be arsed to do all that effort again. This one seems to have been either a lot more drunk or a lot more stupid.
 
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