Why are UK taxpayers funding these international students?

A round-up of pointless degrees, paid for by YOU, the British taxpayer

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Thanks for all your support so far.

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Note, the students mentioned in this piece are funded by bodies I describe in the article below. It may be worth having the page up as you read through:

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Sophie Marie Niang - France
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)

Niang pictured on the Palestine encampment at Cambridge University

Last week Cambridge student Sophie Marie Niang, “Originally from Paris, France”, celebrated passing her viva “with no corrections”. In short, it now means that she is a Doctor, funded by us (under the ESRC’s studentship programme), in “black worldmaking practices in contemporary France”.

According to her Cambridge profile, Niang: “uses an approach informed by queer theory/queer of colour critique (El-Tayeb, Muñoz) and the work of Deleuze and Guattari to study the lines of flight traced by black worldmaking practices in contemporary France, focusing on art, activism, and popular culture.”

It continues:

“Besides her academic work, Sophie is passionate about literature, and is the Features Editor of Bad Form, an online and print literary review by and about black, asian, and racialised community writers.”

She has also clearly found time to hang out in the Palestine encampment.

Professor João Florêncio - Portugal
Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

Florêncio is currently working on the £840k taxpayer-funded study “The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000”, and appears to be based in Sweden - having voted in its recent elections.

Before that, AHRC awarded him £194,183 to study “gay ‘pig’ masculinities”.

The article above explains more on his cutting-edge research.

Stuti Pradhan - Himalayan Borderlands
Funder: ESRC

Pradhan’s “research interests are based on Gender and Citizenship in the Eastern Himalayan Borderlands”. Her project is described below and lasts four years:

“This project examines how postcolonial regulations and practices of citizenship operate among the Sikkimese in Northeast India along the axes of gender and indigeneity, and how they are experienced by Sikkimese women. The study combines the postcolonial legacy of indirect rule, that is, the use of customary law by colonial powers as a means of ruling colonised populations, with indigenous feminist perspectives on citizenship to examine how such legacies are brought to bear on the lives of Sikkimese women today.”

I’m just not sure why British taxpayers should fund this?

Pavithra Natarajan - India
Funder: ESRC

Natarajan - who sometimes uses the surname “Sarma” (see above) - describes herself as “a Brown, cis woman from the city of Chennai (the capital city of Tamil Nadu) in the South of India who considers herself to be a new Scot now having lived in Scotland for a while.”

Saying that, she doesn’t seem to like Scotland very much, describing “institutionalised racism during both of her pregnancies and births” and having “witnessed and dealt with systemic racism in education, academia, NHS / maternity, community engagement, within the government”. It sounds exhausting!

She also thinks Edinburgh University is “complicit” in Colonialism:

and “racist”:

and doesn’t seem to like British universities very much generally:

or white people:

It’s amazing that she stayed at all, to continue with her four-year taxpayer-funded research titled “Early years in Scotland: An exploration of "race", class, gender and coloniality in child-centred learning within home educating communities of colour”.

Especially as she says: “I carry on with this work that has been fashioned by the blood, sweat, tears, rage, frustration, joy in transformation and so much more from me, the communities I serve and that of my family.”

Luckily she has been able to have a bit of time off from the sweat/tears/rage - apparently partaking in a Global Strike in December last year:

In general, she tweets a lot about Palestine - even on October 7 (aka the day Hamas massacred, raped and paraded dead Israelis):

Definitely worth paying for her studies, right?

My piece on her for The Telegraph below:

Isabel Collazos Gottret - Bolivia
Funder: AHRC

Meet Collazos Gottret, whose taxpayer-funded study is titled “Defining decolonisation in Bolivian museums: from rhetoric and practices to conceptualisation”.

She appears to be on the “Year 2” phase of her research, which requires “ten months of ethnographic and action-based research in Bolivia.”

Collazos Gottret explains:

“I will analyse the museums' exhibition narratives, texts, public programmes, accession priorities and collection taxonomies. I will interview museum workers to understand their backgrounds, perceptions and subjectivities. The action-based research will consist in participative workshops with workers, drawing on their decolonial practices, values and knowledge in order to conceptualise these practices, and collectively build tools appropriate to their values and goals. This will allow me to further understand the dynamics in place. Year 3 will consist of an evaluation with museum workers regarding the implementation of the new tools, data analysis and writing.”

Wow, this sounds so useful to Brits…

Looking at Collazos Gottret’s X page, you’d have no idea she is stationed at Leicester University, aside from a few retweets of its social media content every now and then.

It feels a bit like we are funding someone’s gap yah!

Kate Luxion - United States
Funder: ESRC

Remember the academic who claimed on BBC News that trans milk is “at least [as good as] if not higher quality” than its natural equivalent?

Meet Kate Luxion, who’s a researcher on a taxpayer-funded UCL project investigating “similarities and differences between lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, nonbinary, intersex, and/or transgender (LGBTQIA+) pregnant persons and heterosexual pregnant persons whose gender matches with their assigned sex at birth (cisgender).”

Based on her accent and LinkedIn, you can see that Luxion is from the US.

Why are we funding someone who believes biological males should breast feed, never mind an international student? We have enough of our own crazy people to deal with.

Another piece below - on a recent conference Luxion took part in:

I’m sure this won’t be the last such update, but that’s enough austerity for one day…

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Suggested articles:

Inside the all-expenses-paid degrees for foreign students (and the family can come too)

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Shameless self-promotion

In case of interest, here’s a clip from my recent appearance on the Daily Sceptics podcast.

Very usefully, the DS team added shows screenshots and videos of the bodies I am describing; I think it makes it a lot easier/ more interesting to understand than me just talking at a screen:

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More self promotion: Fanny Studies:

I feel a bit ridiculous clarifying this, but I need to point out that my Fanny Studies series is a parody.

When I posted two videos on X (here and here), people really did think it was real - and I actually felt a bit guilty for alarming them (lolz).

Although I look a bit mental doing this (I’ve asked my friends to tell me if I go over the line of mentalness), this does have a serious point. The drama is entirely based around what I see PhD students regularly say.

In fact, my parody turned into real life the same day I posted it. Check out this composer (I don’t think she’s taxpayer funded, thankfully) “embarking on a new composition that is centred around menstruation”. God help us:

link here

And here’s an academic saying we should all buy PhD students “a free coffee or five”:

In general, one thing I’ve noticed with PhD students is how self-pitying they can be. “Academic Twitter” is full of posts about researchers’ mental struggles - with each reassuring the other that they’ve “been there, sista” - before the inevitable post about how they can’t find a job afterwards (perhaps because there’s no demand for Queer Arctic Intersections in Timbuktu). Their tone honestly makes them sound like they’d been sentenced to 10 years hard labour by Chairman Mao, not elected to undertake a pointless degree, often funded by the taxpayer or a generous foundation.

*I found this post below quite amusing. “Identity loss” is why PhD students can’t get a job…

Gotta say, I have 0 sympathy for these “academics”. Many are not only using up taxpayer money, but promoting pernicious ideologies.

No doubt the trauma of having taxpayers look at their PhDs will soon be added to their self-pity list.