Assembling the Impact Agenda

• In Event: STS and Universities - I

Abstract

In recent years, governments and research funding agencies across numerous advanced capitalist countries have shown a heightened interest in promoting and assessing the societal impact of academic research. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research conducted across a British University and its associated biomedical research infrastructure to explore how this ‘impact agenda’ is being assembled and enacted. I demonstrate how the diverse elements that the impact agenda brings together (e.g. different discourses, values, technologies, actors and institutions) are assembled in such a way that logics associated with the neoliberal audit culture and the global knowledge economy are reproduced and reinscribed. At the same time, I show how the impact agenda opens up possibilities for ways of thinking and acting that rework and disrupt these dominant logics. I conclude by considering what these ambiguities reveal about the opportunities to rethink dominant approaches to research assessment and accountability.

Author

• Jonathan Paylor, King's College London