Nearly £30 million of UK taxpayer cash has been blown on bizarre, woke academic projects. The Mail has more.
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has been given the staggering amount of funding for a number of overseas projects, which appear to have no clear benefit to British taxpayers.
The funding includes £850,000 for Birmingham City University to delve into the circulation of gay male porn and porn magazines at the end of the Second World War, a Telegraph investigation revealed.
The University of Oxford received more than £350,000 in a bid to preserve the threatened language of Enggano, spoken by just 1,500 people on Enggano Island, in Sumatra, Indonesia.
Meanwhile, £784,000 was given to the University of Exeter to build a historical account of the development of child soldiering in Africa.
It also received £307,000 of funding to revive ancestral territories, including the language and cultures of the K’omox, Pentlatch, and E’iksan in Vancouver Island, Canada, and the Maori of New Zealand.
Edinburgh University were given £123,000 to record “harvesting songs of displaced Syrian refugees living in Middle Eastern countries”, while the University of Warwick received almost £800,000 to study “invisible women in Italian cinema”. …
Another project includes a joint study between the University of Roehampton and Stellenbosch University in South Africa, which was given £2.8 million in funding to research how music could help the mental health of expectant mothers in Africa. …
Roehampton University also received £805,000 to recreate a performance of the 16th-century play Galatea by John Lyly centred around “female, trans, queer, disabled and migrants”.
While, the University of London received £323,000 to make a film-making union to assist the Mursi agro-pastoralists of the Lower Omo Valley of Ethiopia.
Other projects that were given funding included a look into housing rights for marginalised citizens of Lagos and São Paulo. University of Manchester received nearly £250,000 for the study.
Around £300,000 was given to Birmingham University to “promote reproductive justice” for the Pankararu and Xukuru communities in north-east Brazil.
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