Getting ‘Out There’ and Impacting: The Problem of Housing and Urban Research and its Anarchist Alternative

Abstract

Housing and Urban Researchers (HURs) are under intensifying pressures to impact on society. Although this orientation towards research impact sits well with “policy oriented” HURs, it has sat less well with some “critical” HURs. It would nevertheless be wrong to paint critical HURs as unconcerned with research impact. Debates about research impact led to the emergence of “critical” Housing and Urban Research (HUR) in the first place. Critical HURs simply seek to ensure that their research impacts in different ways. In fact, this is the problem. Policy and critically oriented HURs both presume social science to be an appropriate vehicle for impacting social change. Yet, such presumptions were questioned in my 'Fallacy paper', which was philosophically hostile to the idea of social scientific HUR which it sought to dethrone. However, it stopped short of outlining an alternative to it. This paper addresses this lacuna by suggesting an anarchist approach to impacting social change that is equally suspicious of social scientific HUR but, unlike the 'Fallacy paper', conciliatory towards it.

Key Words:

• Anarchism
• Impact
• Theory
• Research
• Social science
• Knowledge

Notes

1. The Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala was established in 1994 through a process of research re-organization rather than as an entirely “new” research organization (see Kemeny 1997).

2. A theory group was established in the European Network of Housing Research in the late 1990s.

3. Slater (2006) refers to some HURs that have gone down this route as “Formerly Radical Upwardly Mobile Professors”.

4. Some learned societies are assisting in this respect by publishing booklets advising HURs on how to translate academic research into impact (Slater 2012).

5. The membership of the panel judging “impact” in the field of “Social Policy and Social Work” was composed of Professorial level social scientists that are well known to be “policy oriented”, government research managers, central and local government policy-makers, and a number of influential national charitable organizations such as Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Age UK (see HEFCE, 2010, Appendix B).

6. Although some HURs work in their “own time”, this is a matter of personal choice. HURs would generally maintain that “in principle” a separation of work “in here” and autobiographical life “out there” should be maintained.

7. Chatterton et al. argue that the emphasis in PAR is disappointingly too often on R rather than A, and that an anarchist approach should foreground A.