Helen Pluckrose

Helen Pluckrose is a British author, writer and academic. She is primarily known for her role in the 2017-18 'Grievance studies affair', a project Pluckrose conducted alongside James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, that involved the formulation of bogus academic papers for submission to journals in order to test the veracity and intellectual rigour of academic journals specialising in gender and critical race theory.

Career

Pluckrose has an academic background as a literature and history researcher, particularly focusing on "the ways in which mediavel women negotiated the Christian narrative".

She is currently the editor-in-chief of the online webzine Areo. She has used this platform to criticise what she sees as the self-censorship of women (albeit more broadly students and academics also) on university campuses, which she sees as often stemming from a disagreement about the use of intersectional feminism in academic literature.

Grievance Studies Affair

Alongside James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, Pluckrose was a key figure in the 2017-18 'grievance studies affair', an exposé that involved the submission of bogus academic papers to journals in cultural, gender, queer and race studies (among others).

Despite criticism of the expose as a "hoax" and "coordinated attack from the right", Pluckrose and her colleagues are self-described "left-leaning liberals". They maintain that their intentions behind conducting the affair was to highlight two key problems in social sciences - the "low standards of pay-to-publish journals" and the "meaningless nonsense" that can be published in humanities journals, so long as then-popular ideas about gender and sexuality are espoused.