See Krithika Srinivasan's most recent contributions to Society & Space: Caring for the Collective: Biopower and Agential Subjectification in Wildlife Conservation

The issue of ‘impact’ is increasingly shaping academic agendas in universities across the world. In the United Kingdom, academics expend much energy, time and meeting agendas developing impact strategies for research grant applications and the next REF assessment. In a different part of the world, in India, where applied research has been the norm for a while, recent years have seen an even stronger emphasis by government funding agencies on direct applications of proposed research, and by universities on research that is tailored to the needs of non-academic stakeholders.

The growing emphasis on impact is understandable. Accountability is important, especially in a time of limited resources. Further, modern societies are knowledge societies. Governments and businesses recognize that knowledge production is central to economic success. They look toward academia to produce applied, preferably commercializable, research. The United States has benefited greatly from the close interaction between Stanford University and Silicon Valley, and also the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Highway Route 128 in the Boston area. These successes are increasingly taken as a model for the rest of the world, and for not only the natural sciences, but also the social sciences and humanities.

At one level, the demand for linking academic scholarship more directly to wider social, political and economic concerns is welcome. It does not make sense for scholarship, especially in the social sciences and humanities, to be disconnected from what is going on outside of academia. However, in this commentary we would like to reflect on some concerns about the way in which impact is being conceptualised and pursued in the contemporary academic climate. In doing this, we participate in some emerging debates (e.g., Rogers et al, 2014; Brewer, 2013) on the implications of the impact agenda for social science and humanities scholarship across the globe.

What is academia’s role in society?

Writers such as Nussbaum (2012) and Brewer (2013) highlight the public value of social science research, especially the creation of an informed citizenry, as an important dimension of academia’s societal functions. In this piece, we focus on a related but distinct contribution of academic scholarship – that of challenging and going beyond the status quo; of questioning what is considered acceptable, normal, natural and right, and in putting forward ideas that might be considered utopian or impractical in particular spatialities, but nonetheless might become a reality.

Specifically, our principal concern is that the current operationalization of impact is overly narrow in its emphasis on short-term goals, and therefore increasingly antithetical to one of academia’s most significant societal roles. We argue that academic scholarship in the social sciences and humanities is fundamentally a public resource, and as such, its most important role (apart from education) lies in innovating and critically examining epistemic, ethical and pragmatic frameworks that are in operation at any point in time and space. Feminist scholarship illustrates the playing out of this role.

However, existing conceptions of academic impact treat knowledge as a product akin to software. Unfortunately, unlike software, established ethical, epistemic and pragmatic frameworks change slowly. The cycle starts with critique, activism and innovation in the margins of both academia and civil society, extends to public reasoning, and culminates (or not) in policy and legislative agendas that in turn are subject to scholarly and activist examination. This is a long cycle that can take decades or even centuries and usually involves the coalescing of multiple microscopic academic and civil society interventions – which may not be “transformative” (Pain, 2014: 21) on their own. It is a cycle that is often recognized only with the benefit of hindsight and historical analysis.

These cycles cannot be planned for; it’s impossible to know beforehand whether a fresh perspective or idea will fizzle out or if it will change society as a whole. Strangely, venture capitalists understand this dilemma quite well. They know that most companies they fund will fail, but the ones who make it big pay for the rest. As a result, venture capitalists fund start-up teams, not the actual ideas. They know that a good team is much more likely to succeed. If at all academia is going to act more like business, perhaps it should take a leaf from the venture capitalism book by supporting its people in the understanding that this will make a difference in the long run.

Academia is one of the few social institutions that have the capacity to sustain essential long-drawn and multi-sited conversations about core normative, political and epistemic assumptions. As we shall argue shortly, this is precisely because academic scholarship has not, till recently, been bound by the narrow mandate of demonstrating non-academic impact in the short-term. At a time when some of the greatest challenges facing humankind are global and long-term in scope (economic justice and the destruction of the natural environment), it is incumbent upon academia to nurture long-term agendas. In fact, academia is an ideal location to conduct vigorous debates about competing long-term agendas.

To give an example, one of the authors of this commentary recently published a paper in Society and Space. The paper challenges the dominant assumption in wildlife conservation that the collective – species, population, ecosystem – is the appropriate level of conservationist concern and action. The author had an interesting conversation with an environmental scientist after presenting the paper at a seminar. To the scientist, the paper was an interesting exercise in philosophical reflection. But they also felt – fairly strongly – that the analysis was not of any use to ongoing conservation programmes and also irresponsible in that it could potentially delegitimize conservation work. To them, the conservationist focus on species, populations and other such groupings was based on scientific ‘evidence’. While they agreed that the identification of a unit such as an ecosystem was contingent on the investigating scientist(s), they were insistent that this was the truest way of doing things. To them, those few conservationists who did attend to the individual were being impractical and doing bad science.

In another example, one of the authors attended a presentation where a medical historian observed that Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is very likely a construct linked to the contemporary pressure to excel in formal education regardless of inclination and ability (as opposed to being a medical condition in and of itself that is best treated with medication or behavioural therapy). The historian went on to add that this argument about the structural underpinnings of ADHD is almost always dismissed as being too unviable in terms of offering an immediate solution to current educational problems.

In both these cases, academic scholarship offers the opportunity to critically examine and contest mainstream discourses and interventions relating to significant issues. Whether one is aligned with the dominant position that populations and species are all that matter or whether one has some sympathy for a position that recognizes individual nonhuman animals, we can agree that these are competing views on a topic that is important because it deals with the life and death of the other beings that we share the planet with. Similarly, the alternative explanation of ADHD is valuable because it strikes at what is possibly the root of the problem. More importantly, as the historian noted, the validity of this counter-narrative struck them only when they stepped away from their role as a practitioner and donned an academic hat.

Academia’s relative freedom from having to be ‘practical’ has so far afforded it the privilege – and indeed responsibility – of being able to generate, and more vitally, nurture, such debates even if they don’t lead to visible or immediate impacts. As the classic text ‘The Sociological Imagination’ by C Wright Mills (1959) suggests, the value of the social sciences and humanities lies in the insights made possible by the liberty to step away from the contingencies, routines and restrictions of having to operationalize ideas and arguments in existing social and political contexts. Such insights, by their very nature, are unlikely to garner wide acceptance or even recognition at the beginning; typically, critiques of entrenched norms and practices – both academic and non-academic – gain influence only in the long run.

Impact in academia and social systems

However, impact as conceived and pursued in contemporary academia emphasises short-term goals, perhaps because these are the most concrete and measurable. Typically, impact is recognised when end-users or non-academic stakeholders express some kind of tangible interest in the research and/or its results. Whether in the United Kingdom or India, there is pressure on every research project to generate evidence of impact within its lifespan. Many funding bodies require letters of support from end-users to be provided with grant applications, or at the very least, expect a detailed impact statement. British university departments have to produce impact case studies for each REF cycle. Researchers are required to set aside time and financial resources in their projects to collect impact-related evidence, and increasingly universities ring-fence limited financial resources for the same.

The list of what counts as impact-related evidence can indeed be long – including, for instance, letters of support, requests for expertise, citation in reports and policies, media cover, audience numbers (in the creative fields), patents and more . But we worry that the demand to produce such evidence for researchers/projects/university departments will significantly limit the overall societal role of social science and humanities research because of the necessarily short-term outlook that these impact indicators imply. We fear that the capacity of the social science imagination to engage in ‘the political task of social analysis’ (Mills, 1959: 21) will suffer as a consequence. Why is that?

Generating impact in the short-term almost necessarily involves working with and within existing social systems, and working in terms that are already familiar to these systems. The exceptions are those situations when the system in question is already ripe for change. This ripeness for change could have taken place only through much longer-term activities – whether academic or otherwise – that initially had no immediate, recordable impacts. It is indeed important to work with and withinexisting social systems and it is possible to identify plenty of excellent academic research that does exactly that and thereby creates impact of the kind being currently promoted. But to say that all – or most – academic research has to be aimed at such short-term impact is to severely restrict the scope, contours and role of academic inquiry.

If, in order to get funding, one has to convince non-academic stakeholders of the usefulness of the study, then research questions and objectives will have to be framed in a manner that appeals to these stakeholders. If, in order to generate evidence for impact, one has to translate the results of a study into some kind of speedy non-academic outcome, these results necessarily have to be palatable or be madepalatable to non-academic stakeholders – whether policymakers, NGOs, the lay public or the media. And by palatable, we are not referring to language or presentation style, but to the very substance of the results themselves.

To go back to one of the examples discussed earlier, the research that the paper on wildlife conservation emerges from could not have been carried out if it had been dependent on funding that required letters of support at the proposal stage or if it had been collaboratively designed with environmental activists working in the region; the analysis presented in the paper – which goes against the grain of existing conservation thought and practice – would have probably never seen the light of day if the research had to focus on impact-oriented results and activities. If a project on the same issue had been conceived, funded and carried out in today’s impact-oriented climate, it would have probably looked at how conservation activities could be made more effective or whether interventions such as sustainable harvesting are successful in gaining public support for conservation. It is unlikely that there would have been the time or conceptual bandwidth required for a more fundamental critique of the manner in which nonhuman wellbeing is conventionally conceptualised and addressed.

While ‘the questioning of conventional wisdom’ is recognized as impact in British academia, getting evidence for the same is likely to be a thankless and probably impossible task. As the conversation with the environmental scientist revealed, analyses that depart from existing truths and ways of thinking are most likely to be dismissed as useless by those working in the field, including activists. This is completely understandable – practitioners, whether in government, the third sector or industry, have to regularly deal with complex and conflict-ridden situations that do not allow for much utopian or radically out-of-the-box thinking. At best, drastically differing perspectives can be given a hearing at a seminar or a conference.

Engaged research

The main issue here is to do with the different roles played by academics and practitioners when it comes to matters of public concern. If academia becomes primarily directed toward applied work or work with short-term tangible outcomes, then wouldn’t we be just replicating what any research consultancy, NGO or policy think-tank can do? Wouldn’t we be at least partly closing the door on the possibility of analyses that deviate from what is accepted as appropriate and feasible at any point in time and space?

One of the authors of this commentary faced this question as a member of the research council of Azim Premji University in India (APU). As part of a new university with substantial funding and an explicit social mandate, APU researchers were asked to adapt their work to the needs of the ‘field’. However, over a year of monitoring, it became clear that this kind of research suffered from a lack of critical reflection on the values and norms guiding field interventions. After much discussion, APU’s research council decided to broaden the university’s research agenda in order to support research that sets aside short-term impact and instead interrogates and modifies both existing practice and applied research. This, it was felt, would facilitate scholarship directed at building a more open-endedly inclusive society.

None of this denies the importance of academic research that engages carefully with non-academic concerns. But the question of engaged research is quite different from that of research that is focused only on short-term and measurable impact. Engaged research requires that it is made accessible beyond academia. Engaged scholarship can be facilitated by writing in simple language for lay audiences, and by providing resources to enable public discussion of academic work. Engaged research can be fundamentally impactful when it, over time and as a corpus, steadily challenges the terms and norms that govern not only practice but also the knowledge formations that are co-constitutive with such practice. This is not the same as research that is shaped by end-users or by the pressure to produce instant non-academic applications. A useful example here lies in the scholarship of philosopher Peter Singer which has, over time, significantly moulded contemporary discourse and practice on animal welfare, but which nonetheless was produced quite independently of the influence of any end-users or the need to have ‘impact’ as is currently conceived. Put another way, academic work can have tremendous impact if it engages with problems of relevance to society, but does so in a manner that isn’t overly concerned with its immediate applicability or usefulness.

The imagination of a yet-to-be-seen future is one of the most worthwhile functions of academia. It is inevitable that the single-minded pursuit of short-term impact will negatively affect the overall contours of the social sciences by binding us to the demands and limits of existing social systems. Without the advantage of research that becomes pertinent in the long term and as part of a collective endeavour, academia will lose one of the pillars of its legitimacy and will become unable to fulfil one of its key roles in society. 

References

Brewer JD (2013) The Public Value of the Social Sciences. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Mills CW (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nussbaum MC (2012) Not for Profit: Why democracy needs the humanities. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Pain R (2014) Impact: striking a blow or walking together? ACME: An international E-Journal for Critical Geographies 13(1): 19-23.

Rogers A, C Bear, M Hunt, S Mills, and R Sandover (2014) The impact agenda and human geography in UK higher education. ACME: An international E-Journal for Critical Geographies 13(1): 1-72.

Srinivasan K (2014) Caring for the collective: biopower and agential subjectification in wildlife conservation. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(3): 501 – 517.