The students strike back

What happened when I shared an "amazing" PhD funded by the taxpayer

The other day I tweeted about a taxpayer-funded study I found while researching Woke Waste. You can see my thread here.

It evolved into a Telegraph article.

Long story short, while researching the artist above (Victoria Burgher) I spotted that her coursemate had rushed to her defence in an online video.

Daisy Bow du Toit (@daisybow_craft on Instagram) is on the same PhD programme as Burgher, Techne - which is sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Council (AHRC), in turn funded by UK Research and Innovation (aka the taxpayer).

Techne is the subject of another piece I’ve written for The Telegraph. I worked out that the costs for its current intake are around £1 million a year - for PhDs in areas such as “spiritual activism” and “poetic responses to climate grief”:

Burgher and du Toit began their Techne PhDs in 2021, when the stipend was around £17k. With PhDs lasting roughly three years, the final figure for their studies is likely to be upwards of £50k.

Here’s some more info about du Toit’s PhD, The Craft of Content Creation at Kingston University.

Her areas of research interest include “Representation” and "Instagram”:

And here’s what she had to say about my content:

“So hectic”

She describes my publicising research as “horrible propaganda” - but also maintains that “there are some incredible projects”.

If so, you have to wonder what’s wrong about sharing them. All I mostly do is paste the text, like below:

Next du Toit claims “The list of people who are being named publicly... is growing", as though I am chasing the students down, perhaps Predator-style to Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1987 film.

Actually, du Toit and Burgher are the only Techne students I’ve named. Mostly I give details of PhD projects, which are all available online, not least because I know how incredibly sensitive students can be about having their “amazing”/ “incredible” research shown off.

Du Toit then says:

"It's just really sad because the humanities is really under attack financially and the money available for research into topics like my topic 'Content Creation as a Creative Practice' [is] dramatically decreasing"

But look at these 10 current projects below, funded by AHRC (the same body funding du Toit and Burgher). Does this show area “under attack financially”?

1. The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000 - £841,830

2. Remediating Stevenson: Decolonising Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific Fiction through Graphic Adaptation, Arts Education and Community Engagement - £809,334

3. Perverse Collections: Building Europe's Queer and Trans Archives - £136,909

4. Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection from the UK to India (DiMuse) - £805,769

5. Trans Performance Now: Glitching cisgenderism - £185,627

6. Diverse alarums: centering marginalised communities in the contemporary performance of early modern plays - £805,745

7. (De)colonial Ecologies in 21st-century insular Hispanic Caribbean film - £205,543

8. Comics and Race in Latin America - £759,293

9. Decolonizing South East Asian Sound Archives - £123,470

10. Everything Is Connected: Conspiracy Theories in the Age of the Internet - £786,083

(Bear in mind that I haven’t even finished going through every AHRC/ UKRI study - so this is just a small sample).

Du Toit also added this video:

on the “absolutely amazing” work of Burgher.

I thought readers might like to see some of it - and I’m sure du Toit will support my promotion of such amazingness.

Shattering Whiteness: A Provocation in Porcelain

“Whiteness calls the police on black birdwatchers and black barbecuers”.

Working with Whiteness Workshop

(I like the sinister sip of tea):

The strange thing…

is I found du Toit weirdly likeable for fighting back. First of all that she had defended her friend.

But I was also impressed with her Instagram feed, which shows great creativity and versatility across artistic mediums. You can see why brands such as Levi’s, The National Trust and Kew Gardens have collaborated with her. In general, du Toit seems very busy with an online craft shop, where she offers workshops and content creation services, as well as working in the film and TV industry.

With that being said, why is she doing a taxpayer-funded PhD in “The Craft of Content Creation”? Could she not fund it herself, given her many commercial projects?

Unfortunately there does seem to be a widespread pattern of taxpayers expected to fund people’s hobbies, which are then dressed up as "research” or “charitable activities”. Recently, for instance, I wrote about an LGBTQ+ charity working to “promote equality” whose activities include “Rainbow Paddling” kayaking sessions.

Austerity, ey!

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Other posts this week:

I forgot to post this a while ago, but here I am on The Critic podcast in April talking about Woke Waste - before I had even stumbled on Burgher/ Techne.

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