I’m almost at the end of John Brewer’s thought provoking book The public value of the Social Sciences. No doubt there will be several related posts over the coming weeks but this quote resonated so much I felt it needed a place of its own:
Social Scientists can sometimes be their own worst enemies for permitting impact and public engagement to be confused, so that in resisting the former they develop reservations about the latter (p.185)
Something to reflect on perhaps?
In Marin Weller’s (@mweller) excellent book The Digital Scholar he quotes HEFCE’s definition of public engagement.
‘Public engagement’ involves specialists in higher education listening to, developing their understanding of, and interacting with non-specialists.
He then goes on to list examples of how engagement is often realised ‘authoring a general interest book’ or ‘ broadcasting, where an academic is used to present a television or radio programme or used as an expert in discussion programmes’ (p.77) before examining what digital practices can add to this.
What I found telling was this discord between HEFCE’s vision of a dialogic interaction in comparison with the monologue of information delivered through broadcast and publication. Elsewhere I have argued that re imagining reality TV and programmes such as the wire could offer useful models but this book has got me really thinking: do any of these really begin to address the need to engagement to actually engage!
Weller makes a good case for how Web 2.0 can make this happen but all of his talk is centred around talk of outputs, of audiences of sharing this things to engage with communities. I read a newspaper, but I engage with the debates surrounding is content in other places, around the dinner table, on Twitter or on Facebook. Maybe if we want to truly engage publics, we need to reconsider the primary concerns. Yes, access and delivery are important considerations in maki academic work availed to wider audiences but maybe the key to engagement is paying closer attention to the mechanisms of hooking them in, of beginning to open up those dialogues.
I propose that for research to be engaging for an individual, it needs three elements:
1) Relevance – to the individual’s life, interests or experiences. Not all research will interest everyone but where it hopes to engage a group of individuals, researchers need to be aware of the “So what?” question. Spell out to that audience why they need to understand what it is you have researched and how it can enrich their view of the world
2) Accessibility– it needs to be available for them to find and written in a way they can understand. This may not be the same for all publics, but the production method shouldn’t just be dictated by disciplinary standards, but by the needs of the audience that is to be engaged with.
3) Dialogue – we shouldn’t be waiting until a project is done and dusted before the engagement starts, it should be an active part of the process. The input of those who engage with the research and their reflections on it should be seen as a useful tool. If engagement is a two way process, it is more likely to become valuable to those who become engaged.
Some researchers already do this well on twitter, and several academic projects are beginning to work to this model. In my mind, the one which has got closest so far is the CelebYouth project on young people’s aspirations and I’d highly recommend checking out their blog or twitter (@CelebYouthUK) to see how they have taken up the challenge.
References
Weller, M. (2011) The Digital Scholar, London, Bloomsbury
Ok, I’ll admit, the title to this post is plagiarised from part of a talk by Les Back on ‘What is Digital Sociology?’ at the recent BSA Digital Sociology event of the same name. I am, however, pulling it into a wider context because I think it is also the answer to what is Visual Sociology? And what is public sociology? My three main areas of exploration at the moment.
At the recent IVSA conference, Michael Guggenheim stated that he felt the goal of Visual Sociology should be to eradicate the discipline and personally, I think this should be the goal of all three of these areas as in each case I think that they are all central to the discipline. I will address the visual and the digital first and then turn to the issue of Public Sociology.
Both Visual Sociology and Digital Sociology are seen as relatively young disciplines within the field of Sociology, moving the boundaries of traditional interview, survey or ethnographic based approaches and introducing new way of representation and analysis to the field. As such, it is right that they are considered as disciplines to enable academics with interest in innovate developments within new ways of imagining and understanding the social. What these disciplines should not become, however, is silos which are viewed as the only legitimate place for the visual or the digital respectively. As Noortje Marres eluded to in her talk, in the modern world the digital is the social. In a world of social networks are social worlds are intrinsically linked with our digital lives. I would also argue that it is the same for the visual, in a world of camera phones, digital photography and visual culture that pervades every moment of our lives, the visual is also a central element to the social. From this perspective, to truly understand any social issue, attention needs to be paid to the visual and the digital.
How Public Sociology fits into this discussion may at first seem questionable but I would argue they are all linked in many ways. Firstly because I feel that all Sociology should be accessible to much wider publics than it currently is but more than that, I think using digital and visual methods is one way to capture the sociological imaginations of those publics. As academics, we are used to reading large volumes of text but this is something that would not be considered by the publics that we are trying to reach. The visual, through moving and still images and the digital are ways in which research can be presented in a form that seems less onerous to access and therefore may engage wider publics. If all research engaged those publics, then wouldn’t the answer to ‘What is Sociology?’ Also be ‘it’s Sociology, stupid?’
Acknowledgements
I owe much of the argument in this post to the provocation by Michael Guggenheim at the IVSA conference at Goldsmiths on 9th July 2013 and to Les Back for his paper on Real-time research at the BSA ‘What is Digital Sociology?’ Event on 16th July 2013.
There has been much speculation regarding the impact agenda and the REF. This weeks Times Higher has fleshed out more details as to how impact will be assessed within the 2014 REF. One of the ways this is mooted to happen is by increasing the panel memberships from outside Academia. This weeks Times Higher states that:
People from businesses and the public sector will be represented, according to a statement issued by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, as well as figures from charities, thinktanks, the media, libraries, galleries and polling organisations.
Hefce says there will be “significantly more” research users on panels compared with the final RAE.
The users “will help to assess the impact that universities’ research has had on the economy, society and culture”, it adds.
No doubt there is value in creating impact within these other institutions and organisations but to my mind, this isn’t the impact that matters and the one that needs encouragement and promotion. After all, it is not charities, libraries and galleries that fund academia! Whilst the way in which higher education is funded has changed dramatically, directly and indirectly, much of the money is coming from the public.
I believe that a radical reappraisal of impact is needed, especially within Social Sciences. This is needed in order to move away from one based in neoliberal principles to a more egalitarian one that encourages academics to ensure that the findings of their work are available and accessible to those who are the subjects of their study. I blogged last week about accessibility and how best to make research accessible so will avoid a repetition of that argument, however I strongly believe that it is the duty of the sociologist is to educate publics about the social world they exist within and to enable them to better understand the world around them. To only offer this knowledge to a select few who can access academic journals or who can penetrate complex technical language and rhetoric is, in my mind abusing their skills and those who they research. Not that I blame the current lack of public engagement wholly on those academics, after all it is not the impact being measured so they are not given the time and the space to do it. The system needs to encourage it if it is to happen on a meaningful scale across the board (this is not to dismiss those projects that already successfully do this, but not every project has the resources to be able to do this and my argument is that they should).
We are in an age where information can be shared in a multitude of ways at minimal costs and with relative ease. No longer is the only way to distribute text through printed books and journals, no longer do we have to rely on a small number of state broadcast and regulated channels to distribute video. Surely it is the duty of those measuring academic impact to ensure that academics are sharing their findings with the widest publics possible in a meaningful way, not limiting the definition of impact to one which privileges the impact of their work to industry, quangos and other institutions.
In order to provide this resource and space for academics to better engage with publics and create meaningful impact, I argue that a reassessment of the central tenets of what impact actually has meaningful value to society needs to take place. This reassessment of impact cannot happen without pressure; after all there is monetary value in the current definition of impact. On this basis, it is in the government’s interest to encourage it as it can help universities to be of greater economic value. The increasing commoditisation and marketisation of education needs to be continually opposed by academics and in my mind one important way of doing this is by subsuming the impact agenda and turning it on itself, creating a parallel discourse of a more meaningful impact, one that brings the value of the research back to those whom are the subject of the research by educating and working with them to inform and induce change in ways which improve their lives.
A tweet caught my eye yesterday:
‘Interesting academics on Twitter who have thousands of followers but only follow 50 people, must like the sound of their own tweets.’ Les Back (@academicdiary)
This got me thinking about how more academics are joining twitter by the day yet using twitter and engaging through twitter are two different things. I know this and some academics who have been using social media for a while know this, but all academics need to understand the difference between the two and why it is the conversation that is key to twitters value. You see, there is lots of information out there, more information than anyone can process. If your time is already limited then more information, if not directly relevant at the time, is likely to be ignored. However, if someone poses a question on which you may have a response, then you often feel obligated to make your view heard and engage with the person posing that question. Surely though, as a busy academic you may be thinking “Do I have time to engage with all of these people?”. I would question, however if you can afford not to. After all, if people are interested enough to follow you on twitter, they are probably sufficiently interested in your work to read it, consider it, and possibly offer a perspective on your work that may not have entered your consciousness. Is this not one of the reasons why presenting papers at conference is so valuable, the ability to start conversations and enter into debates about your work.
Lets take this a step further then, think about the questions you get asked at a conference. For each of those questions, I’m sure there are another half a dozen people who wanted to ask a question but either didn’t have time in the allocated slot or, were too nervous to ask it within that context. I know I certainly have been guilty of not asking questions at times for both those reasons and yet, I would not hesitate to tweet those questions. So maybe now is the time to reconsider twitter. Think of it as the coffee break at a conference that never ends, the off the cuff comment that provides the kindling for the next flame of an idea. Unlike a coffee break of a conference, you have the chance to explore the perspectives of a far wider audience, those who you may never have been able to reach with your research in the past.
Now tell me that you can afford not to engage in the conversation?
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