Impact and memory studies

“Thinking with the Body,” an exhibition at Wellcome Collection in London, 2013, featured a series of interdisciplinary projects organized by Wayne McGregor | Random Dance investigating creativity and dance through the lens of technology and science. McGregor had been collaborating with researchers in computer, cognitive, and social sciences for more than 10 years to find “new ways of understanding choreographic practice and thinking.” The exhibition aimed to “offer visitors the opportunity to deepen their understanding of choreographic practice and to contemplate how mind, brain and body interact in each of us” (http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/2013/WTP053926.htm). Over 6 weeks, 19,000 people visited the exhibition.

Public engagement with research has, in many countries, become part of the selection criteria in the assessment of applications for publicly funded research grants (Ferguson, 2014; Hazelkorn, 2015). Knowledge exchange and public engagement, according to this model, are “pathways to impact” (Research Councils UK Review of Pathways to Impact: Summary, n.d.). Impact from research in the humanities, the arts, and social sciences differs from impact from research in medicine, science, engineering, and technology. In both discipline groups, outcomes from research may be conceptual, cumulative, and lead to new ways of understanding phenomena, systems, or processes. However, in the latter group of disciplines, the process of research is assumed to lead to instruments, solutions, and procedures; outcomes or products are tangible.

In what ways, if any, might explorations in the field of memory studies demonstrate impact? I will first provide a definition of impact and touch on the challenges impact presents. The centrality of the human and the integrative nature of the field of memory studies are sureties for impact. Rather than quell intellectual curiosity, taking a step along a pathway to impact may fuel new ideas, connections, and collaborations.

Impact has been defined as “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia” (UK Research Excellence Framework, 2011). Ferguson (2014) traces the origins of the “impact agenda” to a 1993 UK White Paper “Reaching our Potential” (Office of Science and Technology, 1993) which recommended that research contribute directly to economic growth and be planned for end users. The ideas are utilitarian, based on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and privileging research that produces commercializable and patentable innovation and service (Ferguson, 2014). An inherent assumption is that “knowledge gains legitimacy and value through its utility” (Hazelkorn, 2015).

Impact is realized in the up-take of ideas into policy or professional, public or health services. Such an outcome seems tangible but not necessarily visible even to researchers. For example, a number of my colleagues conduct basic science into speech perception and language acquisition. At a recent forum, a leading educator and practitioner sketched the way such basic science had been essential for use by practitioners to lobby the government for the mandatory testing of new born infants’ hearing. Research demonstrating neonates’ auditory perceptual attunement and the way such attunement bootstraps interpersonal communication, language acquisition, and learning underscored the imperative for early detection of hearing impairment. The practitioner’s comments highlight three points: (1) that researchers are not necessarily aware of the impact of their work, (2) that impact is cumulative, and (3) that impact takes time.

The visibility of idea up-take presents a challenge because ways in which research has been used or applied may not be discoverable by web, library, or government document searches and because the researcher conducting basic social science or humanities research is unlikely to be the person who applies or uses the work. Talking about our research with members of the community, in professional association newsletters, and with government and non-government organizations can reveal potential impact. Researchers who are visible and accessible can help build awareness and cross-pollinate discussions. Whereas “outreach” implies a one-way street, engagement suggests dialogue, conversation, and exchanges with many potential beneficiaries. Over time, discussions may spur new research questions and fresh theoretical approaches.

What is the lead-time for knowledge building? A single project in engineering, IT, science, and medicine may lead to a solution or to a series of subsequent events that lead to a breakthrough. However, most often in science breakthroughs and translation are slow and cumulative processes. Ferguson (2014) argues that the social sciences achieve impacts by influencing people to think about things in a different, reasoned, informed way. Bastow et al. (2014) argue for outputs from the social sciences as cumulative, diffuse, and conceptual. Impact demands appraisal over years and across a program of projects, writings, or books.

Discussing ideas outside traditional academic settings and presenting material in different forums and accessible formats are all pathways to impact (Busl, 2015). Authors from this issue of Memory Studies who have a presence on YouTube, for example, include Berthold Molden and Martins Kaprans. On the low-tech side, face-to-face forums work too. A collaborative arts-social science project that I’ve been leading commenced with two round table discussions that brought artistic directors, artists, and researchers from anthropology, psychology, and dance together. These sessions, facilitated by a colleague with the experience, capacity, and language to connect the “subjects” of the research—the artists—with the researchers, were invaluable. The sessions enabled the entire interdisciplinary team to grasp a wide range of questions, interests, and approaches. The “subjects” were encouraged to contribute questions finding a role as researchers. At most subsequent data collection points, we’ve begun with discussion and have benefited from the artistic directors and artists helping to refine, clarify, and make relevant the research questions and methods. Twelve months later, we held a community research forum where researchers and artists came together to present and discuss the project with members of the public and the arts community. The audience numbering 70 was keen to hear about the research questions and the art–science collaboration, albeit in the early stages. There was no shortage of questions from the floor and an eagerness to hear more.

Forums for research participants are not new in the humanities. Researchers conducting fieldwork have long engaged with communities and shared documentation of language, music, and so on. Phenomenological and participant–observation techniques also help to dissolve barriers and enhance democracy between subjects and observers. In the digital, creative and performing arts, the performer–audience boundary has become more permeable through active participation and interaction. Audience reaction, memory, and interaction as contemporary topics of research and exploration (e.g. Burland and Pitts, 2014; Reynolds and Reason, 2012) offer spectacular opportunities for public engagement.

As the field of memory studies has the human condition at its core, there can be little question of the field’s potential for engagement and impact—events, institutions, behavior, and phenomena, associated with remembering, forgetting, valorizing, obliterating, misremembering, and reacting, situated in contexts of conflict, fear, anger, hunger, the political, economic, cultural, and social. Examples from this volume include Marschall’s content analysis of travel reports by German expellees and refugees visiting former homes in Poland. Traveling, Marschall argues, is an extension of the process of remembering, it affects autobiographical memory and ultimately influences cultural memory. Plate analyzes forgetting—amnesiology—as produced and reproduced rather than being a failure of memory. Kovacs discusses war remembrance and the formative tradition of not selecting but commemorating all victims of war. Marselis examines collective and national memories that were discussed intensely on-line in the context of a train hijacking in 1977 at De Punt in The Netherlands. Kaprans draws our attention to social networking sites, YouTube and Wikipedia, as crucial to contemporary meaning-making and the way social media can both reinforce and liberate recollections and representations of the controversial past. The papers abound with questions, complexities, and implications. Impact, in the form of thinking in a different, sometimes uncomfortable, informed, reasoned way, is palpable.

We are all reporters, journalists, and commentators in this era of interpersonal and global connectivity. Technology is an enabler to engage, enliven, and provoke. Rather than “selling out” to an imposed impact agenda, we have the chance to extend our audience, to engage, and to lead discussion. What if … from each issue a couple of authors wrote a short article for a web-based forum such as “The Conversation” (n.d.). At worst, a few may read. At best, many read, share, comment, build on, debate, disagree, and synthesize, adding to a culture of openness, informed decision making, and a diversity of views on cultural and human concerns. There are spinoffs too for individuals along the pathway to impact by raising profiles and citations and seeding new collaborations and ideas. Imagine that more applied work is underpinned by cogent theory, and practitioners and advisors in health, the arts, technology, and education are increasingly aware of complexities and disparate views.

The “wicked” problems we face cry out for interdisciplinary and collaborative solutions that cross social, technological, political, and cultural boundaries (Bastow et al., 2014; Ferguson, 2014). Topics in the field of memory studies are a model of disciplinary integration and collaboration, and the technology for large-scale debate from multiple perspectives is in our hands. In what ways might memory studies make a difference?