“Inflatables are important to the world in so many ways.”
These are the words of Dr Michael Shaw, yet another “academic” promoted by the British Academy, “the UK's national academy for the humanities and social sciences” - which received £339,073,050 from taxpayers between 2021-25.
The BA posted this video of Shaw (above), in which he explains the wonder of inflatables. I wonder if a fart sounds more intelligent than this:
“And the research that you can see behind us is several inflatable sculptures that become slightly site-specific by the fact that you take the air from the place that you inflate them and blow them up. They’re also site-specific because they start to draw the reflections of their surroundings of this amazing building onto their surfaces, and also when they’re suspended, they kind of move around on the convection currents that occur in most buildings.”
Shaw is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Loughborough University, whose pronouns are “He/him”:
You’ll be pleased to know that, aside from an AHRC Fellowship between 2005-2008, he doesn’t seem to have had much taxpayer-funding.
Even so, why are we are we being charged HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS for the British Academy? An organisation promoting an academic whose research profile reads:
“The giant inflatables seek to re-invigorate space by reconfiguring how the viewer moves around the gallery or building. Each response is wholly bespoke, and any inflatable can only exist thanks to its host architecture. The intent is to develop a meaningful interaction, whereby the sculpture reinvigorates viewers’ perceptions by complementing or contrasting the space’s geometry and flow. These universally accessible inflatables are immediately engaging for the young and family visitors; and intriguing to others as they nuance pathways of motion, block existing site-lines, create overhangs and continually curving forms that kiss the ground in limited contact points. In brief, they are sculpturally dynamic, animated works that enliven any space.”
Not forgetting its promotion of Professor Dan Goodley, an expert on “Critical Disability Studies”…
… who claims that “Depathologisation works in concert with disabled artists, disabled activists, and disabled intellectuals, whose politics have learned much from their own engagements with decolonising activists and postcolonial theorists, depathologising the university creates conversations with black scholars and others who have decolonised the university, and it pulls in disability politics as a key resource, depathologisation is therefore but one theory and practice-a praxis that sits with disability as the driving subject of critical inquiry and social change.”
Worse still, there are even more awful examples to come.
What a load of HOT AIR!
This post is free to read. Fund my independent journalism by taking out a subscription or making a donation on Buy Me a Coffee. With a subscription you will get:
Full access to all investigations and the research archive
Early access to exclusives
&
be able to comment on posts and discuss investigations
Thank you to everyone who has funded and supported my work!
total and utter bollocks. tax payers money wasted on crap!
Man will grow up physically, the inner child will remain. This is kindergarten stuff, and why the heck we are funding such complete balderdash is beyond me. On the other hand, given the standards of education permitted by a trade union it is not altogether surprising.