“Queer fish” researcher awarded £196k by the taxpayer-funded British Academy

The Academy received just under £340 MILLION from taxpayers between 2021-25

“I also have a strong interest in monsters and am a founding member of the Monster Network.”

“I am currently developing a project on Queer Fish.”

Can you believe these statements were written by a researcher awarded £196,016.22 by the British Academy? A supposedly prestigious organisation that received just under £340 MILLION from taxpayers between 2021-25:

Meet Dr Donna McCormack, a they/ them “Senior Lecturer English & Creative Writing” who received the grant for “their” project Doing Disability Futures at the University of Strathclyde.

Source: University of Strathclyde website

The project “will use arts-based and speculative methods to engage with global and local histories of colonial violence and ongoing injustices, as well as to tell stories of alternative futures that disrupt existing knowledge and power hierarchies about marginalized communities”:

Wow, that sounds so incredibly useful to disabled people…

In a personal statement on “their” academic profile, McCormack explains: “my research is situated at the intersection of post- and anti-colonial studies, queer theory, and the medical humanities. In much of my work I formulate post- and anti-colonial, critical race and queercrip ways of analysing contemporary fiction in order to both critique systems of violence and to open up space for imagining what is possible. My focus is the body in the context of health and illness and trauma studies. I work across literatures from North Africa, the Caribbean and Canada.”

“They” also “have a strong interest in monsters and am a founding member of the Monster Network. I have written on Richard Goldschmidt’s theory of hopeful monsters, and I am interested in alternative evolution theories as forms of anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-homo- and transphobic resistance. I am currently developing a project on Queer Fish.”

You can read “their” whole profile here - as well as head to the Monster Network website…

… which also has its own Instagram page:

Doing Disability Futures, too, has its own website and Instagram page - which are as bonkers as you might imagine:

For instance, the Instagram page links Palestine to “disability justice”:

Source: Doing Disability Futures’ Instagram

And yeah, the rest of it is just as weird…

The British Academy is not the first taxpayer-funded entity to fund McCormack.

Between Aug 18-Aug 20, McCormack received a £120,080 grant for “their” project Transplant Imaginaries: Haunted Times, Segregated Spaces and Embodied Ethics.

McCormack is one of two so-called experts in Critical Disability Studies/ Theory I have written about this week - the other being Professor Dan Goodley, who comes out with some utter crap (and has had over £2.4 million in taxpayer-funded grants):

Both can be found on the social media output of the British Academy and are clearly meant to be shining examples of academics in the humanities and social sciences:

But their work is not just nonsense but insulting to the people it purports to help. Hundreds of thousands - and potentially millions - of pounds could have been put into making a real difference to disabled people’s lives.

Instead we get a doctor who’s interested in queer fish and an indoor-hat-wearing professor of gobbledygook.

---

My video on Dr Donna McCormack:

---

A note: my writing schedule has been a bit random this week in the aftermath of a big family wedding (which was wonderful). Next week I am going back to my usual schedule of 4pm Monday-Thursday with a weekend round-up.