How did Nadia Yahlom receive taxpayer funding for her PhD?
The Palestinian-Jewish artist was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
Yesterday disturbing footage was shared on social media, showing a woman cutting down yellow ribbons for Israeli hostages from a memorial in north London.
She has since been identified as Nadia Yahalom-Switat, a Palestinian-Jewish artist, and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded PhD researcher, “also known as Nadia Yahlom and Nadia Jaglom”:
I’m not the first to identify these details (as you can see via Gnasher Jew’s status above), but thought I’d add some info on Techne - the programme Yahlom appears to have studied with, which I am very familiar with.
First of all, I’ve pasted Yahlom’s profile (from Techne’s website) below.
Yahlom began her studies at the University of Westminster in 2022. Her PhD is titled Ghosts of the Al-Ghaib : A participatory, audio-visual exploration of haunting in Palestine:
Full text:
The practice-led research is a participatory, audio-visual exploration of haunting in Palestine. Working closely with those who have experienced haunting, supernatural sightings and/or spirit possession, I will be using film, sound, photography and other mixed mixed media to explore how jinn (ghosts, spirits, witches, demons and other forces of the al-ghaib or ‘unseen’ world) are experienced, embodied and described by different Palestinian communities. It draws on my background as a visual anthropologist and artist-curator and offers a radically new way of representing and conceptualising the relationship between violence, trauma, memory and the metaphysical in Palestine.
This PhD looks at how concepts of haunting relate to both historical and contemporary violence in Palestine from the British Mandate period (1918-1948) to Israeli occupation (1948-present). It examines what form hauntings take in Palestine and how these apparitions are linked to political volatility, violence, (post)colonialism and intergenerational trauma. Yet it treats ghosts as more than just symbolic, considering how experiences, memories and tales of hauntings may be explored through participatory artistic practice.
Inspired by Tina Campt’s (2017) theory that identity photographs of black communities can be “heard”, this research seeks new ways of working together with Palestinian communities to think about how silent, often invisible forces are experienced and can be audio-visually represented. This will be rooted in an exploration of ethnographies and participatory art work related to themes of trauma, memory and violent aftermaths.
Techne is a consortium of nine universities in London and the South East, which awards 57 doctoral studentships (PhDs) annually, sponsored by AHRC.
Anything AHRC-funded is taxpayer-funded.
AHRC is sponsored by the UK Research and Innovation, which receives around £8 billion per year from the Department for Science, Technology and Innovation (aka taxpayers).
This means Liz Kendall MP, who was recently appointed Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, is the one to quiz on why Yahlom is being subsidised by the taxpayer.
PhDs tend to cost around £20k (in annual stipend) and last approximately approximately 3.5 years. You can roughly estimate that each student will receive (at least) £50k from the taxpayer.
AHRC is by far one of the most ghastly/wasteful quangos in my view. Look at the research it has funded below:
The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000 - £841,830
Remediating Stevenson: Decolonising Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction through Graphic Adaptation, Arts Education and Community Engagement - £809,334
Perverse Collections: Building Europe’s Queer and Trans Archives - £136,909
Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection from the UK to India (DiMuse) - £805,769
Trans Performance Now: Glitching cisgenderism - £185,627
Diverse alarums: centering marginalised communities in the contemporary performance of early modern plays - £805,745
(De)colonial Ecologies in 21st-century insular Hispanic Caribbean film - £205,543
Comics and Race in Latin America - £759,293
Decolonizing South East Asian Sound Archives - £123,470
Everything Is Connected: Conspiracy Theories in the Age of the Internet - £786,083
So it’s not surprising it’s funded some equally awful PhDs via Techne.
These include one that argues porcelain “can be used as a “critique of white supremacy”.
… and others where students researched “garden as a site to cultivate queer anti-racist communities”, “spiritual activism” and “poetic responses to climate grief under patriarchal and anthropocentric hegemony”.
And Yahlom is certainly not the first Techne student to investigate the supernatural (her PhD focussing on “ghosts, spirits, witches, demons and other forces of the al-ghaib or ‘unseen’ world”).
At Techne’s 2024 summer congress, a “queer tarot reader” and “interdisciplinary feminist researcher”, who describe themselves as witches, performed “a series of spells and rituals”. My piece for The Telegraph below:
Time to defund it all…
More on AHRC:
Absolutely unbelievable. Thank you SO much for bringing this to light. I only hope it can be brought before Parliament. Do we still have one?
I wish I could post this information in every household and let the tax payer know exactly where their hard earn tax money is funding…truly disgusting