The Sooty Empiric

Another day, another hoax paper published ! For those who don't know, these hoax papers pop up every now and again, wherein academics deliberately write nonsense, submit it to an ostensibly serious journal, and find that lo and behold they can get it published, despite the checks that are meant to ensure only rigorous scholarship makes it through to the published literature. This is a worry, because in theory being part of the scholarly literature is meant to be a guarantee of quality and a sign that the scholarship can be relied upon. It's always pretty hard to know what to conclude from these hoax papers -- I think it is over-determined that one should not, ever, take the fact that an individual paper has passed peer review to mean its conclusions are secure. Where one wants to be guided by academic work, one should form one's opinion on a matter based on a review of the literature, not just one or two papers therein. Too many journals reviewing too many papers by too m...

Short personal blog post -- just a quick reflection on a difference (as it seems to me!) between aspects of the African American experience when compared with people from the African diaspora in Europe. Not sure how widely this will be of interest to people! It's graduation time, and amidst the celebrations I saw a very talented young African American comrade of mine post a picture of herself in her graduation gown with  a quote from a Maya Angelou poem on her cap -- ``I am the dream and the hope of the slave.'' It was a touching image, and thought, and while I've seen debate about the sentiment, on the whole it's easy to see how one can think as much and take extra pride in one's achievements qua African American. Such thoughts are, I think, just entirely cut off to descendants of the African diaspora in Europe. Or, at least, so it seems to me when reflecting on my own ancestry in Ghana. While I am somewhat embarrassingly unsure about this, my sense of my ...