Two decades ago, as a sociology honours student, I was in a tutorial discussing some variety of post-structural “high theory”, which was the dominant flavour of my degree. I made the point to the tutor – a professor of sociology at the time – that the authors didn’t actually believe what they were writing.
I felt that the theory I was being assigned to read contained so many counterintuitive assumptions about the way the world worked that, if I applied those theories to my day-to-day life, I would be incapable of doing practical activities. I still remember the exchange because the professor was surprised by the comment but he didn’t disagree.
This memory came to mind this week during a conversation with a young scholar. By way of introduction, she was born overseas and comes from a different cultural background to me. As we were talking, she hesitantly mentioned that the dominant theoretical approaches to cultural difference that she is expected to adopt in her academic work do not fit with her experience.
She had found another conceptual framework that she could relate to and wondered if she should use it in her research. She felt some internal pressure to quash her intuitive dissatisfaction and apply the expected theoretical approach, mainly to avoid being seen to criticise or reject it.
We had a useful conversation about the ethical drift that occurs as the gap widens between what we really know and believe, and what we actually write and say as academics. Of course, academics don’t just hit the page with everything that comes to mind. A gap between what we think, and what we write, can encourage self-reflection and open us up to new modes of thought. And we need to be strategic about how we express ourselves.
But what if you get into the habit, as an academic, of saying and writing things that you don’t really believe, but that you think you are supposed to believe? After all, saying and writing what other people expect avoids conflict, and makes it easier to get into journals and even win grant money.
But who do you become in the process? What happens as you professionally dissociate from your personal insights, observations and moral impulses? What can creep through a habituated disconnection between professional self-presentation and personal conviction?
These questions are pertinent in the aftermath of the publication (and retraction) of a paper by a PhD student and “pederast” activist in which he describes himself masturbating to child sexual abuse material, published in the prestigious methods journal Qualitative Research.
The author Karl Andersson has long advocated for the mainstreaming of sexual attraction to under-aged boys, publishing his own magazine with eroticised images of boys. In some instances, he appears to have taken and published revealing photos of children in middle and low income countries without their knowledge.
Andersson’s article in Qualitative Research included graphic descriptions of masturbating to sexual images of young boys in Japanese comic books. This content is illegal in many jurisdictions. However, the article did not raise any red flags for the editorial team of the journal, the two peer reviewers, or the hundreds of readers of the article from its publication in April to its retraction in August.
The passivity of the journal’s editors, reviewers and readers were in stark contrast to the outcry amongst academics when the publication came to broader awareness last month. The vast majority of academics were as disgusted by the paper as people outside the higher education sector.
That vocal consensus should not obscure the fact that the paper was reviewed, accepted and published by a top tier journal, and was available for months apparently without raising a complaint.
As outrage around the paper grew, a number of academics went public on social media with gestures of sympathy for the author. They were apparently concerned that the author was being “bullied” or “emotionally abused”, that the response to the article constituted “masturbation shaming”, and that the content of the article was not particularly problematic. For some, the entire incident smacked of “moral panic”.
I think there are two interlinked explanations for the fact that this paper was published and defended, alongside these expressions of support for the author.
The first is what Catherine Liu has called “virtue hoarding”: the tendency of academics, amongst other white collar professionals, to create moral hierarchies that position themselves at the top, counterposed to imaginary hordes of less educated individuals.
There is a long and shameful academic history of using the moral consensus against child sexual abuse as a foil against which the intellectual positions themselves as more sophisticated and enlightened. Many scholars have made their careers by characterising the public response to child sexual abuse as “panicked” and hysterical, compared to their own supposedly more tolerant and intellectually daring stance.
The second explanation is the professional dissociation that I described earlier: people who have become so accustomed to talking the expected talk that they inadvertently walked off an ethical cliff without noticing. Certain academic scripts and cliches have become so banal that people get used to invoking them in any situation, regardless of the underlying facts, which, in this case, were nothing short of alarming.
I’ve spoken to a few senior leaders in the non-government sector about the furore around this article, as well as the tendency of some academics to minimise or trivialise its significance. They made the point that they could never, in good faith, trust those academics to conduct research with their clients.
To put it bluntly, if you really believe that it is disproportionate or punitive to publicly condemn someone for masturbating to child sexual abuse material (and then flaunt this proclivity in an academic journal in an apparent attempt to legitimise it), then there are serious questions about your judgement and suitability to work with children and vulnerable adults.
This logic is self-evident to anyone who is concerned about safeguarding. And yet a surprising number of academics found themselves on the other side of the argument. They were blind to the obvious risk to public safety posed by anyone who is aroused by sexual images of children, or to the serious social implications of publishing scholarly work that normalises such patterns of arousal.
I don’t believe that (the majority of) those academics who reviewed, published, read, supported or defended Andersson share his sexual interests. I think they are detached from their own basic ethical intuitions and insights, and have become accustomed to playing word games and asserting pre-fabricated arguments without much in the way of personal conviction.
What begins as accommodation to professional expectations and a vulnerability to in-group thinking ends in moral hypocrisy and paedophile apologia.
Andersson’s article is not the only example of egregious rationalisations for child sexual abuse evident in recent peer-reviewed literature. There is more to be said about those theoretical tendencies that are conducive to these dissociative ethical failings. Lisa Ruddick describes them well.
But in the meantime, it seems to me that the solution is passionate scholarship: work that is grounded in our deeply held commitments and direct observations about the world, where we are willing to disagree or endure uncomfortable moments, where we ask questions about conceptual frameworks that lead into imaginary spaces where our usual ethical systems for decision-making begin to dissipate.
Many young scholars feel this gap between theory and life - I did, my colleague does. Academia contains incentives to overlook this feeling and internalise complex abstractions that overwrite, or at least dull, our immediate observations and concerns.
The ethical cost of this process is vividly illustrated by the publication of Andersson’s article. It’s a mistake to view this incident as an aberration or a one-off problem. It’s a sentinel event that should serve as a wake-up call to academia as a whole.