Research impact is a collaborative effort, writes Eleonora Belfiore, as she explores the resistance against the impact agenda among arts and humanities academics.
When the impact agenda burst onto the stage of UK Higher Education in the run up to the 2014 new iteration of the regular official process of research quality assessment, then renamed as Research Excellence Framework (REF), it created quite the reaction among the academic community. The arts and humanities community in particular expressed strong resistance against and reservations for the so called ‘impact agenda’.
While the expectation that arts and humanities researchers should now be able to document, measure and demonstrate the impact, either social or economic, of their research was certainly a new requirement – and one that felt alien to many scholars especially in the more traditional corner of the humanities – the ‘justificatory rhetoric’ of impact had already been adopted by research funders for years. Bodies such as UUK were following suit, in the hope of making a convincing argument to defend the higher education sector from cuts in the aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis. The much critiqued 2009 report by the AHRC Leading the World: The Economic Impact of UK Arts and Humanities Research was a clear indication that its main funder had espoused the notion of impact as a proxy for value...Keep reading on The Royal Society of Edinburgh.
When the impact agenda burst onto the stage of UK Higher Education in the run up to the 2014 new iteration of the regular official process of research quality assessment, then renamed as Research Excellence Framework (REF), it created quite the reaction among the academic community. The arts and humanities community in particular expressed strong resistance against and reservations for the so called ‘impact agenda’.
While the expectation that arts and humanities researchers should now be able to document, measure and demonstrate the impact, either social or economic, of their research was certainly a new requirement – and one that felt alien to many scholars especially in the more traditional corner of the humanities – the ‘justificatory rhetoric’ of impact had already been adopted by research funders for years. Bodies such as UUK were following suit, in the hope of making a convincing argument to defend the higher education sector from cuts in the aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis. The much critiqued 2009 report by the AHRC Leading the World: The Economic Impact of UK Arts and Humanities Research was a clear indication that its main funder had espoused the notion of impact as a proxy for value...Keep reading on The Royal Society of Edinburgh.