"Re-Indigenizing Victorian Studies". The £34k research network you're paying for.
"This globalising of the long nineteenth century is long overdue and Victorian Diversities aims to be a driving force to achieve it"
In the grand scheme of Woke Waste, £34k may not seem very much…
After all, the UK taxpayer has spent:
Plus, a small sample of other delights below:
But my rule is that every penny matters when it’s taxpayers’, especially when we are a) being told there’s a £22 billion hole in the national finances and b) waste money on sheer idiocy - more than I am able to document!
Talking of idiocy, since March we have been funding the “Victorian Diversities Research Network” at Kingston University. Its website is here.
Here’s its lead researcher who is “happy to supervise Phds in related topics”:
The project lasts for two years and receives funding via the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which is almost certainly the most terrible research council managed by the UKRI.
The abstract (on the UKRI website) explains:
Victorian Diversities' will expand and enhance knowledge of Victorian literature by recuperating nineteenth-century writers of colour and by exploring new methodologies for reading the literature of race and empire. It will also consider ways in which we can bring this knowledge to the wider public to demonstrate Britain's long history of multiculturalism and to exemplify the global nature of Victorian literatures.
The network includes “members from a range of commonwealth countries and a variety of academic disciplines, such as Literary Studies, Historical Studies, Periodical Studies, Romanticism, Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Transnational and Transimperial Studies, Periodical Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Settler Colonial Studies”.
What on earth is “Indigenous Studies, and Settler Colonial Studies?” you may wonder. Sadly I have no idea either.
Network membership will also include “secondary school teachers and key organisations outside academia similarly working to diversify the arts and education; these include The Black Curriculum, the Black Cultural Archives, and Speaking Volume”, and conclusions from the research will result in “an afternoon workshop for local schools and a public-facing evening event of readings and performances.”
Good-oh! Love a bit of indoctrination on… err… “denaturalising whiteness and problematising the centrality of white experience and white cultural productions within historical literary fields.”
I’m not making it up! See below:
Furthermore:
Network members will also come together at 2 hybrid workshops: 'Re-Indigenizing Victorian Studies' (University of Kent); and 'Victorian Studies Beyond Britain' (IIT Hyderabad)”
Once they’ve done their “Re-Indigenzing”, investigators “will co-edit a Special Issue of the journal Transmotion, and they will present and publish an article in 'English' (not sure why it’s in quote marks by the way - probably to do with us being very problematic people).
Transmotion, in case you were wondering, describes itself as: “a biannual, fully and permanently open-access journal inspired by the work of Gerald Vizenor” and “publishes new scholarship focused on theoretical, experimental, postmodernist, and avant-garde writing produced by Native American and First Nations authors, as well as book reviews on relevant work in Vizenor Studies and Indigenous Studies.”
Lovely!
I particularly loved its new 396-page issue “Indigenous Digital Environments” and “The Sovereign Erotic”:
I found this part interesting:
Although my ‘English’ identity may have got in the way of me understanding what it means and I may need to go off and “decolonise” my whiteness.
But hey, at least I’m not a Victorian.
Upgrade to paid support Woke Waste and get additional content here:
"Every penny matters when it’s taxpayers"
Exactly and this is just the tip of the iceberg, there's a massive amount we won't know about as this is just the stuff done by careless actors. And there's a bunch of stuff that will be more grey, that the taxpayer doesn't really want but there's a justification for. Woke waste delegitimizes it. If this stuff is obvious waste people will then start looking into how much of the rest we really need.