Sunday, June 30, 2019

Qian Zhang: Week Two Readings for ASA 002

The given research explores the working conditions in the academic institutional culture and presents Asian American women as the most oppresses group in academic circles. The article gives an extensive explanation of reasons why Asian American women suffer from stress and die earlier than their white male and female colleagues. The article has a humorous nature but provides many reasons to attract the public's attention to the situation with working conditions in academic circles.              
The humorous nature of the article becomes visible when focusing on certain details: there are no personal names of scholars used, and the provided statistics lack accuracy and reliability. The examples of discrimination are too extreme to happen in the 21st century United States, taking into account the work against discrimination and laws prohibiting it. For example, the article states that students “consequently have begun to treat professors more as service providers instead of educators; this is particularly true for those professors who are already perceived by their race and gender to be of the servant class." This statement has been included in the paper as a personal opinion of some person, which is not a valid source for research because it cannot reflect the real situation objectively and with relevant proofs. However, the paper does a wonderful job attracting attention to the working conditions of scholars, since academic work is indeed stressful not only for Asian American women but generally for all workers due to the great workload, stress, burnouts, and financial vulnerability.     
The given paper is a wonderful piece of reading that at first sight looks like serious research, but soon, the provided arguments start to look suspicious. The paper is a perfect example that it is necessary to check the validity of a source and not treat all scholarly papers as reliable sources of information. This is a rather ironic text about current difficulties among academic staff that attracts attention to their indeed stressful working conditions. 


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