The Impact Market

Abstract

With the new responsibility to account for impact, UK universities and the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) are territorializing social and political practices, which were once beyond the bounds of scholarly labour. In Hannah Arendt's terms, an academic's vita activa, their active life beyond university, is now part of the professional work for which they are contracted. Through the professionalization of making impact for university workers, everyday political action and social change, which were exterior to the academy, have become colonized by production and need to be demonstrated. This is both closely in line with Paolo Virno's (2004) argument around the dissolving of boundaries between poiesis and praxis, and with what Stephano Harney and Fred Moten suggest about 'the spread of the university beyond the university' (2013).

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) measures lecturers' performance in the public sphere against criteria for excellence, commodifying our social acts and their affects. No longer common, felt impacts and community change are claimed as outputs belonging to the university, institutional property or assets, which can be capitalized upon and attract future funding. Just as 'public space has been privatized to such an extent' – as Hardt & Negri argue (2001) – that the 'dialectic between private and public space' no longer makes sense as a way to 'understand social organization', it now makes little sense to speak of an inside or outside of the university.

The job of producing impact case studies for the 2014 REF fell to practitioner-researchers in many institutions, whose professional practices already engaged publics beyond the academy. As a practitioner working within the university, this essay explores my role in the discursive enclosure of embodied know-how within the institution's resource of knowledge, the appropriation and professionalization of performance as practice-as-research, along with my complicity in the capture, measurement and commodification of sociocultural impact.

Notes

1 The REF ‘is the new system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions’, conducted ‘by … the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)’ (REF 2014).

2 I am included in the University of Bristol's ‘Directory of Experts’, a searchable database that enterprisingly markets our expertise and makes explicit the notion of scholars as human resources or capital. I have become an ‘entrepreneur of myself’ (Foucault 2008: 226), listing my skill set in the database, including performance practice.

3 Over the last year my impact has been monitored on a Staff Research Review form, Potential Impact Case Study Audit, in an online and face-to-face MyReview, in a Research Snapshot meeting and in my university CV.

4 Including agencies like Arts Council England (ACE) which acts as an independent body at arm's length from government, investing public money in supporting the arts and managing and evaluating this investment.

5 Regularly Funded Organizations (RFOs) received ongoing, yearly funding as part of an agreement negotiated with Arts Council England. Organizations were reviewed annually, monitored for ‘artistic quality, management, finance, … public engagement [and] risk’ (Arts Council England 2012). Since 2012 arts organizations have applied to the National Portfolio Funding Programme, which offers a three-year grant before re-application.

6 The REF 2014 Environment Template provides an account of the university department, or unit of assessment's research strategy, people and staff development, income, statistical data, infrastructure and facilities, collaboration with other institutions or industries and contribution to the discipline or research base (see REF 2012).