Impacted Or Impactful? The Research Impact Agenda as A Project in Cultural Transition

Presenter

Dr Justyna Bandola-Gill, Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham), and Associate of the Centre for Higher Education Transformations at the School of Education, University of Bristol.

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Location

This is a hybrid event.

Introduction

This paper explores the rise of the so-called impact agenda in the UK as a project in cultural transition. The research impact agenda is often (and rightly so) discussed as a top-down political project driven by the changes to the UK’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF). However, the rapid and large-scale implementation and institutionalisation of ‘impact’ across the sector would not be possible without an already existing movement advocating for impact-adjacent practices such as evidence-based policymaking, co-production or public engagement. This paper explores how REF’s top-down incentivisation of these practices has shaped these movements by enabling them (by legitimising their existence and creating a ‘market’ for impact advice) and limiting their activities (by narrowing down the scope of ‘acceptable impact’). Thus, this presentation will explore how the top-down and bottom-up movements for impact have transformed each other and the new professions and forms of expertise that consequently emerged. It will do so by drawing on two datasets of interviews with people working at the ‘forefront’ of the impact agenda, including translational researchers, knowledge brokers, impact trainers and advisers. The interviews were collected at different stages of institutionalisation of research impact, in 2015-2016 and 2023-2014. Such longitudinal analysis allows tracking the evolving perspectives on impact within this community and the interplay between the informal and formal agents of science policy.

About the presenter

Justyna Bandola-Gill is an Assistant Professor in Social Policy at the University of Birmingham where she leads the Science, Technology and Culture research cluster. She is a research-on-research scholar working at the intersection of science policy and research evaluation. Her areas of interest are research impact, research culture, and measurement and evaluation of academic work. Justyna is particularly interested in transformative change—how and why institutions, cultures, and ideas evolve over time and the types of epistemic infrastructures that underpin and embed these changes. She is currently leading a project on the emergence of research culture as a governable object in UK higher education.