Choosing individual actions for climate change can take many forms. Drawing on an analysis of elections and their impact on climate policy, offset against other forms of climate action, Seth Wynes argues for the effectiveness of supporting politicians …
Category: Impact
Connecting local knowledge to International Law – How social science changed the course of a landmark trial
Researchers can play important roles bridging and connecting different communities and their knowledge. In this post, Duncan Green talks to Holly Porter about how her anthropological research has helped to inform cross-cultural understandings of sexual…
Putting the collective impact of global development research into perspective – What we learned from six years of the Impact Initiative
Reductions to UK aid have highlighted the need to understand both how international development research has, and can continue to, effect positive change. Here, Pauline Rose and Elizabeth Tofaris reflect on the Impact Initiative programme and what can …
Working with serendipity to produce impact
Impact does not always arise as a primary objective of research. Naomi Pendle, who has been researching South Sudan’s local justice system for a decade, has had a significant impact on the World Food Programme’s warning systems for famine in the countr…
Why don’t you publish your research here?
Justin Gest author of Mass Appeal: Communicating Policy Ideas in Multiple Media asks why not publish your research outside of academic outlets? And, suggests academic institutions need to engage more creatively with an increasingly diverse range of mul…
Causality and complexity in impact statements: Is it time to rethink a one-size-fits-all approach to writing about impact?
As part of the REF assessment researchers across STEM and SSH disciplines are required to write about the impact of their research in essentially the same format. Drawing on a linguistic analysis of REF Impact statements from 2014, Andrea Bonaccorsi, h…
Blocked and thwarted – Public engagement professionals in higher education deserve greater recognition.
Professional service staff specialising in public engagement in higher education institutions often occupy precarious and poorly defined positions. Drawing on a largescale qualitative study of public engagement professionals (PEPs), Richard Watermeyer …
Sustainable Science as a Vocation
What would sustainable research and higher education mean as a vocation? Drawing on the sociologist Max Weber’s famous lecture on science as a vocation, Gorgi Krlev, outlines a vision of sustainable science, arguing that for academic research to effectively contribute to resolving the major challenges facing society it must embrace profound change on four levels. … Continued
Book Review: Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics by Charles Camic
In Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics, Charles Camic challenges the longstanding portayal of economic theorist Thorstein Veblen as a maverick outsider. Tracing the development of Veblen’s intellectual practices and affiliations, Camic instead finds an academic who was distinctly an insider, yet who turned his orthodox training against prevailing opinion. Offering an excellent account of … Continued
Charting the long-term impact of economic ideas – The rise and fall of growth narratives
The ways in which academics and researchers develop narratives to operationalize key concepts in their field can have significant impacts. Taking the example of economic research, Reda Cherif and Fuad Hasanov explore the formation and diffusion of economic growth narratives and discuss what this reveals about the role of ideas in shaping socio-economic change. Narratives … Continued