{"id":13,"date":"2011-02-20T22:58:04","date_gmt":"2011-02-20T22:58:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/_wordpress\/?p=13"},"modified":"2011-02-28T14:14:57","modified_gmt":"2011-02-28T14:14:57","slug":"why-public-engagement-is-not-research-impact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/why-public-engagement-is-not-research-impact\/","title":{"rendered":"Why public engagement is not &#8220;research impact&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.hefce.ac.uk\/research\/ref\/impact\/\">Measuring the impact of research<\/a>, then. Seems a noble enterprise, at first glance. Nobody likes the idea of taxpayer-funded navel-gazing, so we obviously need to show that what we\u2019re doing is useful, or informative, or at least interesting to a lot of people who aren\u2019t us.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hefce.ac.uk\/research\/ref\/\">REF<\/a> won\u2019t help to do any of that, of course. On current showing, it will probably just expend a titanic level of administrative energy pretending to turn subjective judgments into numbers. The numbers will not particularly represent anything, but will at least be reassuringly numerical. They will therefore be accepted as a substitute for actual insight &#8212; or, indeed, a means of defeating it.<\/p>\n<p>On the general mess, I\u2019ve got nothing to say that hasn\u2019t been said better by <a href=\"http:\/\/entertainment.timesonline.co.uk\/tol\/arts_and_entertainment\/the_tls\/article6915986.ece\">Stefan Collini<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/petitions.number10.gov.uk\/REFandimpact\/\">James<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.csc.liv.ac.uk\/%7Eleslie\/impact\/OxfordMagazine294.pdf\">Ladyman<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/v32\/n04\/ross-mckibbin\/good-for-business\">Ross McKibbin<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/boonery.blogspot.com\/2010\/02\/palaeographer-and-managers-tale-of.html\">Iain Pears<\/a> and others. (One of the problems of voicing concerns as an academic is that the profession necessarily encourages keeping your damned mouth shut if you\u2019ve got nothing original to say. Opponents can thus represent as an Awkward-Squad minority those who are in fact merely the most articulate exponents of a strong consensus. For the record, I don\u2019t believe I know <em>anyone<\/em> in the academic humanities who seriously doubts that the \u201cimpact\u201d principle is wildly incoherent and inherently corrosive. But you try writing to HEFCE or the <em>Times Higher<\/em> saying \u201cI agree with Ladyman, and I\u2019ve got more sensible hair than he has\u201d, and see where that gets you.)<\/p>\n<p>One point which I don\u2019t think has been covered elsewhere, however, is this: <strong>The \u201cresearch impact\u201d agenda is pre-programmed to miss most of the useful work which humanities academics do for public audiences.<\/strong> <strong><!--more--><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If I\u2019m right, this is a serious problem. Check the marvel that is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hefce.ac.uk\/research\/ref\/pubs\/other\/re01_10\/re01_10f.pdf\">Annex J of the REF pilot report<\/a> \u2013 which is the closest thing we\u2019ve had so far to a concrete indication of how on earth this business is supposed to work \u2013 and you&#8217;ll find a heavy focus on two factors. Firstly, trade books (inevitably, as one of the few enterprises where the humanities generate anything you can turn into folding cash money); secondly, public engagement as traditionally defined.<\/p>\n<p>Now then. By the standards of my (mainly research-oriented) group at Manchester, I do <a href=\"..\/..\/publicactivities\/\">quite a lot<\/a> of work for public audiences, directly and as an advisor. I think it\u2019s an essential part of the job, and I rarely turn it down. Here are a few edited highlights of recent activities.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>October 2009. Local tour guide      asks me to fact-check a Darwin-themed walk. This principally entails finding      evidence to nail a few misconceptions on our old friend the      Science-Religion Conflict. These, note, are questions something anyone who      teaches introductory hist of sci should be able to cover with minimal prep,      but are nowhere near my research area.<br \/>\nQuery that pops up during this process: is it true that Darwin\u2019s proposed      knighthood was kyboshed by Church opposition? <a href=\"http:\/\/thedispersalofdarwin.wordpress.com\/2011\/02\/08\/sir-charles\/\">Thereby      hangs<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/whewellsghost.wordpress.com\/2011\/02\/12\/what-more-do-you-want-a-knighthood\/\">a      surprisingly complicated tale<\/a> which I wasn\u2019t able to unravel at the      time, so I sought expert advice from a Serious Darwin Scholar. You      may recall that it was impossible to get a minute alone with a Serious Darwin      Scholar for love or money in 2009, such were the pressures of      anniversary-themed lecturing, interviews and book-signing. In the end I      cobbled together what I guessed was a reasonable historicist account and      emailed it off with an \u201cIs this right?\u201d to the SDS I know best. A few days      later the message came back with the electronic equivalent of a scribbled      \u201cYup!\u201d, which I duly forwarded.<\/li>\n<li>May 2010. Contact at the British      Council asks if I can advise on a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rozhlas.cz\/vltava\/ostatni\/_zprava\/krizem-krazem-cottonopolis--762439\">Czech      radio series<\/a> about Manchester\u2019s history and culture. I suggest various      people who work in this area, one of whom (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mcrh.mmu.ac.uk\/ssr\/terryw.htm\">Terry Wyke<\/a>) they end      up using. However, they still want someone for a broad overview on science      and technology. So I meet the producer and talk through some of the      standard areas. Two topics make it to broadcast: early computers (which I      know mainly via Campbell-Kelly and Lavington), and John Dalton\u2019s atomic      theory (for which, though I\u2019ve skimmed the Greenaway, Cardwell and      Thackray volumes at some point, I\u2019m leaning heavily on the excellent      synopsis in Bill Brock\u2019s Fontana survey).<\/li>\n<li>July 2010. BBC researcher contacts      me about a <em>Horizon<\/em> on \u201cthe      concept of one degree of temperature.\u201d I suggest <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hps.cam.ac.uk\/people\/chang\/\">Hasok Chang<\/a>: they\u2019ve      already got him. I also stress the brewery angle, suggesting my own      eighteenth-century Boerhaavians and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.idehist.uu.se\/vethist\/index.php\/staff\/description\/h.-otto-sibum\/\">Otto      Sibum<\/a>\u2019s work on James Joule, the latter of which ends up in the running      order. They\u2019re looking for someone to interview on camera: I doubt there\u2019s      much chance of their getting Otto, but tell them to try him first. It ends      up being me. I accordingly swot up from the Cardwell biog before talking      through it in detail with the producer. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/iplayer\/episode\/b00xhz90\/Horizon_20102011_What_is_One_Degree\/\">finished      product<\/a> runs through Otto\u2019s insight briefly in the narration, and has me      in vision giving some very general background.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now, what do we notice? Correct! <strong>It\u2019s not my research. <\/strong>It\u2019s not even my institution\u2019s research, in most cases; and it may be ten, twenty or thirty years old (though it is, on every single occasion, new and interesting to the people I\u2019m delivering it to). Any \u201cimpact statement\u201d I\u2019m obliged to write about my research is going to miss most of the PE element of the general argument for keeping me on the payroll.<\/p>\n<p>Isn\u2019t this merely an indication that that I should switch my research attention to fields that resonate better? No: that\u2019s a recipe for fossilising the field. The world is fascinated by Darwin, yet it\u2019s also glutted with Darwin scholarship (and believe me, some of the Serious Darwin Scholars find this more frustrating than anyone). The ideal researcher knows how to take those pre-existing interests, and use them to lead audiences on into areas they didn\u2019t know they\u2019d be interested in. We are very much in the hands of the mediators, here: usually, we don\u2019t get to do this. Sometimes we do.<\/p>\n<p>So why can\u2019t we all just agree to focus on promoting our own particular research? Because the researchers responsible for a lot of important work tend to be busy, or thousands of miles away, or at least moderately dead. (The other scenario that often crops up is the one where a decent overview of the field must acknowledge the work of seven different authors who each revile each of the others with a homicidal passion. In this case, it\u2019s often best to seek an integrated view from someone <em>positively too junior<\/em> to be on any of their radars.)<\/p>\n<p>But do we need to take up an active scholarly researcher\u2019s time on describing other people\u2019s research? Yes! Otherwise the TV producers and schoolteachers and so forth will go off and find someone to talk to who will convince them that Thomas Henry Huxley invented the Breville sandwich toaster. (I exaggerate. Faintly.) What they need is someone who <em>knows the literature<\/em>: its shape, its direction, its controversies, its holes. And you can only know the literature to that level if you are, yourself, writing bits of it. Funding research in the history of science certainly <em>does<\/em> foster useful public work in the history of science \u2013 but usually not in the atomistic, linear fashion which the whole \u201cimpact\u201d agenda insists is the only way anything ever gets done.<\/p>\n<p>I should clarify that, while I was doing all the stuff above, I was <em>also<\/em> developing PE work specifically out of my own research, chiefly through <a href=\"http:\/\/www.drinkinguptime.co.uk\/\">Drinking Up Time<\/a>. This work has not, as I write this, picked up anything like the audience levels of the examples above. Perhaps some of it will. Perhaps in sixteen years\u2019 time (Otto\u2019s Joule paper is from 1995). You certainly can\u2019t <em>plan<\/em> this stuff, except at the broad aggregate level.<\/p>\n<p>The problem goes deeper. Anyone concerned with \u201ceconomic\u201d as well as \u201csocial\u201d \u201cimpact\u201d should note that, if anything, the work we\u2019re competent to do gains in measurable earning potential <em>the further away it gets<\/em> from useful new scholarship. Textbook example: textbooks. How much cutting-edge research do you think we can smuggle into a work <em>whose very purpose is to introduce the established field<\/em>? (Probably up to about 10%, if the author is mightily, mightily ingenious.) Bonus literary example: consider the standard thought-experiment for hard-headed application of soft scholars\u2019 skills, namely the industrial signage text consultancy proposed (in passing) in <em><a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.co.uk\/books?id=wDBU99_2DO4C&amp;pg=PA92\">Nice Work<\/a><\/em>. The scholars in question could, arguably, have turned out superior signs through being researchers in English. This would in no sense have been an \u201cimpact\u201d of the research they were doing when they weren\u2019t signwriting.<\/p>\n<p>The public role of conscientious humanities researchers is to disseminate, not the outcomes of atomised, cost-coded research projects, but the insights due to the whole of their professional experience and to that of the people they work with (most of whom, in my case, know more than I do). NB: this is not a plea for the right to be exceptionally woolly and floaty and expressive. It is a plea against randomly bashing bits of approaches to auditing together to produce a process that will &#8220;work&#8221; only in the tangible but unhelpful sense of reliably using up time and money.<\/p>\n<h3>So what would you do instead then, eh?<\/h3>\n<p>Well, on this issue, obviously, I\u2019d target any attempt at auditing public engagement to the contribution of the research group, rather than the research. More generally, I\u2019d bin the whole proposed edifice in favour of a national light-touch peer review system mapped to much smaller discipline areas and their overlaps, with measures to acknowledge and document the inherent subjectivity of the whole process as far as possible (minority reports, institution response statements). Why? What would <em>you<\/em> do?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Measuring the impact of research, then. Seems a noble enterprise, at first glance. Nobody likes the idea of taxpayer-funded navel-gazing, so we obviously need to show that what we\u2019re doing is useful, or informative, or at least interesting to a &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/why-public-engagement-is-not-research-impact\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21,"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}