#FakeAcademics, a Matter of National Concern

One of the dumbest published "scholarly" work abstracts I've seen, and I've seen a few:

Corporal Hauntings
(Re)membering Father

David Purnell
Depart Crit Qual Res, Vol. 4 No. 4, Winter 2015; (pp. 65-82)

This narrative focuses on the use of fiction in conjunction with autoethnography in order to possibly change narrative inheritance. I use speculative autoethnography to seek out alternate outcomes of past life events. In this writing, fictionalized conversations take place with the hauntings of my child self during fragments of past experiences that I consider contributors to a failed familial relationship. I use this method to offer an alternative to the assumed social constructs of needing to "repair" such relationships. Through this account, I suggest ways to redirect the narrative momentum that pushes narrative inheritance into the future.

So he's using the "autoethnography" (which just means "Dear Diary, today I binge-watched Orange is the New Black and felt this way about its transnormative potentialities") of fiction of made-up conversations between, I don't know, his current-time "ghost" and his past child-self (or maybe the latter is the "ghost," visiting the future) in order to "redirect the narrative momentum" about, one assumes, his father's great shame about having begat this buffoon.

Could this be more divorced from reality?

Dude, just watch Frequency with your dad. Problems solved. And then you can write an "autoethnography" about the catharsis you and your shame-ridden father felt when Dennis Quaid goes all shotgunny.

He's not the only "academic" keenly interested in "hautnological" studies, either:

Now, if you'll all excuse me, I'm going to perform a data-generative deep dive into the Ocean of Me, per(form)ing a ritual by which I will videotape my (Real)ity self attempting to commune with the ghosts of my wise American Indian forefathers, who exist on an alternate plane of (Sur)(Real)ity, and use the technique of autoethnography and also Total Bullshit to repair my current (Real)ity by asking questions of (Be)ings who not only don't currently exist, but in fact never existed at all, because I made them up, using the technique of Fictional (Ex)plorations and the hyperreflexive act of watching old videos of myself on the floor with a bong in my hand talking to Dream Warriors and Vision Guides in my WoW (altar)-ego of a half-elf ranger/assassin (15th/18th level, DPS specced). By this process I seek to Re(If)y states of potentiality and also get Sick Loot Drops for my half-elf 'toon in my next Ra(Id).

posted by Ace at 03:37 PM

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