How the taxpayer funds research into "women's experiences of climbing" and "ecocide"

Another day in the cruel world of Tory austerity...

Today on Woke Waste I’ll be explaining how you, dear taxpayer, fund research into “the gendered nature of combat”, the “LGBTQ+ student experience” and “application of intersectional feminist theory to border criminology”, among other degrees somehow surviving in spite of so-called “Tory austerity”.

Intro

As always with Woke Waste, most of us won’t have a clue that we’ve been paying for the research I’m about to cover, nor the umbrella programme responsible for it, the Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP).

This is a partnership between Brunel University London, The Open University and the University of Oxford, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), a subsidiary of UKRI (UK Research and Innovation).

UKRI and ESRC, a quick recap

UKRI is an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (aka the British taxpayer).

It receives a huge amount of funding; its budget for the three financial years 2022-23 to 2024-25 is £25.1 billion, working out at £8,874 million for 2024-25.

From its budget, a total of £362 million (for 2022-23 to 2024-25) has been allocated to the ESCR:

The Grand Union is one of 15 ESRC Doctoral Training Partnerships across the UK (these are listed at the bottom of this Substack; I will return to them eventually).

Student numbers

From 2017 to 2028, Grand Union offers “more than 35 ESRC studentships each year for doctoral study on 23 pathways across our partner institutions.”

The sums

According to the UKRI website, successful candidates will receive a minimum stipend of £19,237 per year as well as support for tuition fees:

The standard length of a studentship is 3.5 years, so let’s say we’re looking at around £67,000 for each person on a Grand Union studentship.

The stipend tends to be non-taxable and students are able to get additional funding for things like “conference attendance” and “overseas research visits”.

When you add it all up, studentships are quite expensive… Imagine 35 students on a minimum stipend of £67k; a conservative estimate for total spend would be £2,345,000.

Excellence?

The Grand Union’s tagline is “Excellence and Innovation in Social Science Research Training”. But I’m not so sure about some of the studentships, which (as with a lot of taxpayer-funded research) sound woke and/or pseudoscientific/ hard to justify in a cost-of-living crisis.

Research methods

In identifying woke waste, I can’t pretend my analysis is as sophisticated as the researchers’, whose methods include “more-than-human geography”, “discourse analysis” and draw on “feminist digital geographies, digital ecologies and political ecology”.

My technique can best be described as “Ya What?” analysis, a human-centred exploration of gobbledygook masquerading as serious academia.

Without further ado, a selection for taxpayers’ consideration:

2023-2024:

My research focuses on the history of LGBTQ+ student experience and organisation at UK universities. Comparing the university experiences of former students who identify as LGBTQ+ will hopefully provide insight into the various roles of universities and their stakeholders in facilitating and limiting LGBTQ+ inclusion and organisation. This will have future implications for how universities address current debates around inclusive university policy. - Link

My research interests centre around the application of intersectional feminist theory to border criminology, and in particular the increasing criminalisation of migration and asylum. I am particularly interested in the experiences of foreign national women in prison, and the treatment of individuals affected by intersectional marginalisation in the asylum process. I look forward to exploring these themes further during my MSc, before progressing to the DPhil Criminology. Link

I am a health and environmental geographer interested in human-wildlife conflict, disease ecologies, and the digital mediation of disease governance. My doctoral research draws on political ecology, more-than-human geography, and science and technology studies to investigate geographies of human-snake conflict and coexistence and the global governance of snakebite envenomation. Link

2022-2023

My PhD research investigates the cultural emergence and social construction of self-harm in the 1990s. This project is designed to fill an important gap in our knowledge of self-harm: prior to the 1990s, it was relatively uncommon, but self-harm is now one of the leading causes of hospital admission in the UK, and is particularly prevalent among vulnerable youth and marginalised communities. By resituating the practice in cultural and historical context, I intend to establish how and why self-harm entered our lexicon during this period and became a popular mode of expression for young people in distress. Link

Hope is interested in how digital technologies are shaping human-nature relations. Her DPhil explores the ways in which technologies are mediating new ways of knowing, experiencing and governing river quality. She draws on feminist digital geographies, digital ecologies and political ecology to interpret these digital mediations. Her research engages with several groups, including citizen scientists, wild swimmers and institutional environmental organisations in the Oxfordshire area. Link