Do people in the social sciences and humanities (esp. history) ever get bored by doing PhDs/research on the 'race/gender/colonial' aspects of x or y? I certainly get bored of hearing about it. You'd think that the only thing that ever happened before the 21st century was empire

I'm not saying 'don't study such things'. But it seems nowadays that to get funding or jobs, these are practically the only topics allowed. This must surely lead to a huge volume of narrowly conceived research, most of it much of a muchness. Yawn

It means that even what most would think of left-leaning research perspectives are now squeezed out. Old school women's studies is erased in favour of gender theorising (which erases womanhood) and class is only allowed if seen through the lens of empire/race

I note, for example, that Chartism is a pretty unfashionable topic nowadays: difficult to come up with a race/colonial/artsy fartsy 'gender' angle on a political and social movement made up overwhelmingly of working class white people. So it gets neglected.

This is partly because, of course, people study things that reflect their own identity and interest, and there are basically no British working class people doing PhDs nowadays because there is no funding for them (and they got screwed over educationally from the age of about 4)

But academia is crammed with middle class white people obsessed with gender and privileged foreigners who can make themselves out as victims because of Empire, even if their Daddy was an ANC power-broker or a powerful Indian politician or whatever

Because class. Because that is what it always boils down to before anything else, but hundreds of posing wealthy so-called leftists are totally invested in denying it or paying lip service to it because it's not in their self-interest.