Monthly Focus: Public Engagement & Impact

An established and embedded part of the research landscape, impact and public engagement are about telling the story of your research in a way that can be understood by an audience that is new to your field of study and disseminating that information or knowledge to reach audiences outside of academia. From there, the measure of how far a reach or influence the research then has is broadly what you can consider it’s impact*

This month’s focus is by no stretch an experts’ guide but may start you thinking about ways in which you can communicate your research to a non-specialist audience and how you start to be aware of measuring its impact.

Arts and Humanities researchers can get involved in public engagement is various ways. It can be a live event or exhibition, providing the expert analysis on a news item or documentary or a related term, community engagement – going to schools or running open days. Here’s a few examples:

Performance

Elly Clarke ‘HOW ARE YOU?’ #Sergina’s Live Participatory Soap Opera about Wrestling with Wellbeing in the Digital Age that took place at ONCA in Brighton in October 2019.

Upcoming at ONCA: LOUD + CLEAR | 29 February – 7 March
Artists include:

Ana da Silva
Anna Petrisko
Cristy Road
Elly Clarke (Sergina)
Gina Birch

Curated by Nadia Buyse (DUBAIS)

Film

As mentioned in last month’s blog post, film is an excellent way to reach a wide audience and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) hold their Research in Film Awards which showcase new and emerging talent in filmmaking linked to the arts and humanities and celebrate the best of a growing number of high-quality short films that bring arts and humanities research to a wider public audience.

The call is usually opened up in spring, so you may want to sign up to the AHRC mailing list to be alerted as soon as the call opens.

You can read about past winners here

Community Engagement

Natasha Richards, CHASE funded student at the University of Essex, as part of her placement, delivered in-school workshops with Sexplain UK

CHASE Placement: Sexplain UK Report on My Experience

I knew that I wanted to undertake a placement that related directly to my research into Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in the UK. During discussions with the Sex Education Forum, I was pointed in the direction of Amelia Jenkinson, Director of Sexplain.

By Natasha Richards, CHASE funded student at University of Essex

7 Oct 2019

Elizabeth Lewis-Williams, CHASE funded student at UEA, worked with with secondary schools in the Cambridge area during her placement

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants Educational Outreach Placement: British Antarctic Survey Archives

My placement with the British Antarctic Survey Archives was designed to share some of the fascinating material in the archives with school students, and to raise their awareness of Antarctic science.
Placement blogpost by Elizabeth Lewis Williams, CHASE funded student at UEA.

27 Sep 2019

And providing the expert analysis…

Owen Emmerson (CHASE funded, University of Sussex) exploring the historic objects to be found in Hever Castle.

Roisin Astell (CHASE funded, University of Kent) on Channel Five news discussing the fire at Notre Dame cathedral last year

Olivia Arigho-Styles (CHASE funded, University of Essex), speaking live to teleSUR English about Far-right figure Luis Fernando Camacho

Impact

There are many different definitions of impact and all the above will demonstrate it in some form

Research Councils UK defines impact in the following ways:

Academic impact
The demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to academic advances, across and within disciplines, including significant advances in understanding, methods, theory and application.

Economic and societal impacts
The demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy. Economic and societal impacts embrace all the extremely diverse ways in which research-related knowledge and skills benefit individuals, organisations and nations by:

fostering global economic performance, and specifically the economic competitiveness of the United Kingdom,
increasing the effectiveness of public services and policy,
enhancing quality of life, health and creative output.

Ways to understand the impact of your research can be hard to visualise and narrativise, but here are some ways you can start:

Website analytics (are people reading your article of viewing your video? Most websites will have their own analytic suite but you may want to consider embedding Google Analytics as a standard and most recognised website.
SEO It is important to set up your website so that it can be discovered by search engines, increasing its visibility also increases the likelihood of your research being cited – some useful information here
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.
Twitter Analytics – likes, retweets and impressions – you can get a sense of how far your research is reaching.

Useful links

The National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/ – loads of resources here

Altmetric https://www.altmetric.com/ A data science company that tracks online research and where it is published and presents it in a clear and engaging way

*For the purpose of this blog post we are using the term ‘impact’ in a very general sense. For any official definition of impact that you’d find as part of REF, please refer to your institutional contact as each institution will have its own guidelines and criteria – please refer to your institution’s advice.