Academic waffle at its purest

I learned, while checking in on the Bluesky home of Professor Sandy O'Sullivan [the trans/non binary light skinned aboriginal who recently celebrated getting an Irish passport (as all Australian people indigenous do 😐) and "gender affirming surgery"  - which I would assume is breast removal - at the tender age of 60] that a university in Ireland is currently hosting the European Intersectional Humanities Summer School.  

While I (like all reasonable people) am appalled at the Right turning into an anti science conspiracy cult in the US, and rabidly anti-immigration populist in most of the West, and consider its ideological extremes are much more significant that those on the Left, in the interests of balance, it's still fair that from time to time I note the nutty vacuousness of Lefty academia in identity politics that produces nothing but hot air and well paid employment for people with nothing productive to do.   (I feel a bit guilty dissing O'Sullivan, who frequently appears emotionally fragile,  but have a look at a talk like this one on video that she has given, and I just have to question the funding of this corner of academia.)     

Anyway, lets read about the summer school and be amazed at the way words can be combined to say nothing of significance:    

The European Intersectional Humanities Summer School 2026 will be held in Maynooth University Arts & Humanities Institute from Monday, 22 June to Friday, 03 July. It will offer an innovative and transformative experience at the intersection of critical theory, social justice and humanities scholarship. Convened by Professor Anna Hickey-Moody, the Summer School will bring together scholars, activists and students for an immersive exploration of how intersectionality shapes and is shaped by the human experience across various fields of inquiry. Teaching alongside Professor Hickey-Moody will be A/Prof Loïc Bourdeau. As Associate Dean for Research & Engagement at Maynooth University (MU), Loïc brings extensive interdisciplinary expertise in creative methods, gender and sexuality research, languages, and the medical humanities. 

“Remixing”offers a methodological and conceptual framework for our interdisciplinary summer school grounded in the intersectional humanities. It foregrounds creativity, criticality, and relationality: remixing as praxis invites participants to work across historical periods, disciplinary boundaries, and cultural traditions, to produce new ways of thinking, making and imagining futures. In its most expansive form, remixing is not merely a technical process: the rearrangement or recombination of source materials, but a political and philosophical gesture. It challenges inherited hierarchies of knowledge, interrogates the power structures that have shaped archives, disciplines, and canons, and opens up space for voices, methodologies, and epistemologies that have been marginalised or excluded in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
 
Approaching the humanities through remixing allows participants to revisit history, philosophy, media, music, literature, languages and cultures not as fixed or closed narratives, disciplines or practices but as dynamic sets of traces and counter-narratives that can be recomposed to reveal suppressed perspectives, alternative genealogies, original grooves. Remixing in music and media provides a lens through which to understand circulation, appropriation, hybridity, and resistance: the ways cultural forms travel, transform, and accumulate political charge. In philosophy, remixing can mean bringing together disparate traditions, from Indigenous, African, or Asian philosophical lineages to continental and analytic thought, to unsettle universalist claims and expose the colonial assumptions embedded in dominant frameworks. In English, languages, and literature, remixing offers opportunities to reimagine texts through translation, adaptation, multilingual experimentation, and decolonial reading practices that foreground intersectional identities and experiences.

As a theme and method for our summer school, remixing encourages participants to work collaboratively and experimentally, drawing connections between past and present, theory and practice, the embodied and the textual. It emphasises process over perfection, dialogue over monologue, and creative inquiry over disciplinary closure. Crucially, it makes space for the emergence of intersectional futures, asking how collaborative remixing might contribute to repairing epistemic harm, redistributing authority, and generating new forms of storytelling, pedagogy, and cultural production. The summer school becomes a site where critical humanities scholarship meets artistic practice, where remixing is an opportunity not simply to reassemble what already exists, but to imagine otherwise. 

Attendees will have the opportunity to engage in collaborative learning environments, where they can critically interrogate dominant narratives and reimagine new possibilities for a more inclusive and equitable future. Through lectures, discussions of texts, and hands-on workshops, participants are invited to engage in deep reflection on the practical applications of intersectional thinking to fields like literature, history, media and cultural studies. The Intersectional Humanities Summer School at Maynooth University marks a significant step forward in creating spaces where the humanities can more meaningfully intersect with global struggles for justice, equity, and representation. 

With a focus on fostering inclusive, interdisciplinary dialogue, this immersive event features an exceptional lineup of distinguished guest appearances. These expert voices contribute to the rich landscape of discussions and practice-based workshops that address key themes of race, gender, identity, coloniality and the socio-political dynamics influencing the humanities today....

I wonder if "re-mixing", which is given the seal of approval by intersectionality academics, extends to allowing authors of any racial or ethnic mix write fiction or make music or art in a form originally generated by other races or ethnicities?  Because some writers a few years ago were being booed at writer's festivals for saying it was indeed OK.       

Anyway, I suppose it keeps some people off the streets.  But I would be much happier if their jobs were paid for by private funding, not public.