What is the “society” we talk about when we talk about the societal impact of research? What does it entail, what kinds of entities does it consist of, and who does it include? The discourse on societal impact that I have been immersed in as a research management professional has been more or less centered on business collaboration and commercialization of research results, policymaking, and life-long learning for professional and personal development. But in my interviews at the University of Michigan and MIT I have been struck by the prevalence of the level of community and civil society. The Detroit…
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‘Tis the season here in the US that universities make decisions on their tenure-track hires for the coming fall. I am learning this through my Twitter feed where the freshly nominated assistant professors share their exciting news. In my feed, however, these news are interlaced with other kinds of announcements – most of them, too, exhilarated in their tone but also often flavored with a whole range of other kinds of emotions. These are people sharing their stories of leaving academia. This “quit-lit” contains a double narrative. It testifies to the widening cracks in the walls between academic and other…
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I believe you all heard of recent the trouble at Spotify? It started with vaccine misinformation but brought into bright daylight the platform’s tacit endorsement of racism and unfavorable treatment of content by Black artists, the company’s vague attempt to remedy the situation with money, and their stumbling approach to diversity in general. It also made glaringly obvious how badly prepared Spotify was to answer the public outrage that followed. It’s probably not much of a comfort for Spotify to know that they are hardly alone. A global movement for social justice has gradually brought issues of diversity, equity, and…
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If research impact is not so much a case of direct collision but rather a series of ripple effects, it usually happens through other people. A traditional route for academic impact is through publications, and much of societal impact also happens through texts, such as policy briefs and popular media. Another familiar – but too often overlooked – path to impact is created through teaching in different settings. Colleagues, students, and other people interested in your work pick up your ideas and research results and transform them to their own purposes. Their work gets picked up by next group of…
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To many people in humanities and social sciences, “innovation” has come to sound like a dirty word. To some, the dirt stems from the word’s vicinity to managerial insistence on quantifiable impact; to others, from its allusions to techno-evolutionism. Some merely dismiss innovation as the latest buzzword. As a buzzword, innovation is trailed by all kinds of myths that are the topic of Scott Berkun’s bestseller, The Myths of Innovation, originally published in 2007. The book is written to a wide audience. but seems particularly targeted to anyone aspiring to become an innovator themselves, as well as to those trying…
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Not everyone agrees that insisting on the practical aspects of humanities is a good idea. This past week, I have been spending my time reading through some of these counterarguments. One text that keeps popping up in citations is Stefan Collini’s piece in the Times Literary Supplement in 2009.[1] In it, Collini writes about the Research Excellence Framework (REF) when it was first introduced in UK universities. Collini, a Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge, is an ardent critic of the marketization of universities in the UK. He has written extensively on the subject, including two books…
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