Marrying the Shrimp: How Performance Art Became Peer-Reviewed Science

In the annals of academic absurdity, there are moments that make even seasoned critics pause in awe. “Loving the Brine Shrimp: Exploring Queer Feminist Blue Posthumanities to Reimagine the ‘America’s Dead Sea’” is one such moment. This is not a parody—though it reads like one—but a “serious” paper, or so the author insists. In what is best described as a surrealist love letter to brine shrimp, the author, Ewelina Jarosz (she/they), wades through a soup of critical theory, environmental activism, and performance art, asking the reader to reconsider their relationship with brine shrimp—not as mere crustaceans but as symbols of queer resilience, ecological ethics, and, somehow, hydrosexual love.

This paper is part of a growing tradition of postmodern scholarship that prioritizes ideological signaling over intellectual rigor. Following in the footsteps of infamous works like the 2016 “Feminist Glaciology” paper—which posited that glaciers are gendered—“Loving the Brine Shrimp” sets a new standard for academic ridiculousness. Its culmination in a cyber wedding to augmented reality brine shrimp makes feminist glaciers seem like a grounded scientific pursuit by comparison. But before we arrive at the nuptial climax, let’s examine how this spectacle unfolds.

John Carter is a former academic who has long substack essays. If you’re interested and have time some long winter night this is worth a read:

Crumbling DIEvory Towers
Every aspect of the academic polycrisis illustrated in a tour of the ruins on either side of the Atlantic

“Decline and fall: how university education became infantilised is an elegy from a Cambridge scholar who has grown heartsick at what has happened to his beloved home.

Last month, after 21 years studying and teaching Classics at the University of Cambridge, I resigned. I loved my job. And it’s precisely because I loved the job I was paid to do, and because I believe so firmly in preserving the excellence of higher education, in Britain and beyond, that I have left.

Male flight in action. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of this over the coming years. The author, David Butterfield, is was a Cambridge Fellow in the Classics department, and has a long history (as you can see at that link) of opposing academia’s iDIEological suicide. He’s one of the good ones.”

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/crumbling-dievory-towers

This smells like a hoax "social sciences" paper! Lots of previous social science paper hoaxes...

What an Audacious Hoax Reveals About Academia
Three scholars wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions.
By Yascha Mounk
October 5, 2018
We’ve been here before. Over the past 12 months, three scholars—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions, and tried to get them placed in high-profile journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. Their success rate was remarkable: By the time they took their experiment public late on Tuesday, seven of their articles had been accepted for publication by ostensibly serious peer-reviewed journals. Seven more were still going through various stages of the review process. Only six had been rejected.

And...

A Massive Hoax Involving 20 Fake Culture Studies Papers Just Exploded in Academia
By Mike McRae
October 4, 2018
Stop me if you've heard this one before: a physicist, a philosopher, and a medievalist got together and decided to hoax cultural studies journals with a score of fake research papers.
The story is familiar, but this time the joke is far bigger. Their intention was to expose the shoddy standards that count for publishing in certain academic fields - but not everybody is convinced this is the solution we all need.
It's fair to say that Portland State University assistant professor of philosophy Peter Boghossian and mathematician James Lindsay aren't exactly fans of the emerging fields of cultural and identity studies.
Last year they wrote a paper on the 'conceptual penis' as a social construct and successfully saw it published in a social science journal. The research was a complete sham, and the paper's wording reflected the convoluted, dense language they associated with the field. Its publication – the pair argued – showed these journals will accept just about anything that seems to fit.
The conceptual penis hoax was far from the first to make a statement about the lack of critical review in certain 'critical' cultural research fields. Just over 20 years ago, New York University mathematician Alan Sokal famously had his nonsense paper Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity published in an academic journal of postmodern studies.

The "conceptual penis" LOL. My little friend objects to that characterization.

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