Citizen science – exploitation or engagement

I was in Brussels yesterday at the final meeting of the PERARES project – Public Engagement with Research and Researcher Engagement with Society, a European project that explored how to develop more effective mechanisms for citizen engagement.

An interesting discussion arose about the nature of Citizen Science and whether current practices around Citizen Science are exploitation or engagement. Let me explain.

The PERARES project was formulated around the idea that citizen involvement with research should cover all aspects of the research cycle, from formulating ideas for research questions; developing the research methodology; conducting the research; sharing the results; and making a difference. This is co-production at its best – and clearly is an important part of the engaged research landscape. It challenges notions of research on society, and replaces it with research with society.

The current plethora of citizen science projects, brought about by the increase of digital technology, tend to be more narrowly defined, with citizens participating as data collectors or data analysers. This can be seen in the wonderful examples of Zooniverse, Conker tree science and iSpot. So the question is, are these citizen science projects a good thing?

My view is that these are excellent engagement opportunities – offering members of the public an really interesting opportunity to engage with research – and contribute something of value. When framed correctly, these are good opportunities for people to find out more about the research process. Clearly there are some things that need to be done to ensure that the experience is effective for participants including – a clear understanding of what they are being asked to do and why; an easy way to participate; an opportunity to see the results of the project and how their contribution made a difference and clearly the whole process needs to be transparent! However, when these factors are implemented there are benefits all round – an increasingly research literate public who have been actively engaged in something that has value; more data for the scientists; and a better outcome for the research.

Now I also think that citizen science can be done differently, with participants more involved in setting research questions, however I am not convinced that every engagement opportunity should do this. The participants in Conker Tree Science were motivated by the opportunity to do some real science in the classroom, and to contribute their data to real research. When offered the opportunity to frame their own question, participants chose an area of research that did not then ignite the public imagination, and led to rather less engagement than had been hoped.

I wonder what other people think? Is citizen science a good thing? What are the quality indicators of good practice? To what extent should all citizen involvement cover the full research cycle? Let me know what you think?

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Creating an environment where engagement can flourish

Sophie Duncan, Deputy Director of the NCCPE, shares her thoughts on a fascinating plenary from Engage 2013.

Chad Gaffield invited us to a drink at a firehouse – and he wasn’t kidding. In his 20 minute presentation he covered a huge amount of ground. Chief Executive of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in Canada, Chad was keen to promote the value of public engagement as “..a way to develop talent, gain insight, and make a better future”. He went on to explore the huge changes we were facing in society and, perhaps not surprisingly for a social scientist, celebrated the fact that the 21^st century was the first time that humans took seriously the challenge of understanding people, which is critical to the conceptual challenges that lay ahead.

Whilst a 500 word blog piece could hardly contain his talk (for that you will need to look at the powerpoint or listen to his talk) there were a few specific things that caught my attention.

Funding priorities
SSHRC prioritised three main pillars for their funding:

• Complexity: often people try to break things down in order to recognise their complexity – however the funders wanted to recognise that complexity was common across all things and should be embraced.
• Diversity: not as a problem but as a foundation of strength.
• Creativity: moving away from the idea that creativity was an attribute of the elite, to recognise that everyone has the potential to be creative.

Working together?
SSHRC sought to change how it did its work – including changing the governance structures by ensuring half the positions are held by academics, and half by those representing society in its fullness. They learnt from work with aboriginal communities, that typical academic dissemination for impact approaches (i.e. ‘push’ approaches) did not have any resonance and were not effective. They needed to embrace multiple ways of knowing, and recognising and valuing these. This then changes the nature of how research is done from creating research questions to sharing the outputs.

For SSHRC, collaboration was becoming the norm for research. In a survey of academics exploring how interdisciplinary their research was, SSHRC discovered that very few academics categorised their work as exclusive to their discipline, captured in a quote from one of the participants: “…this way of working just isn’t cool anymore.”

New funding models
SSHRC, along with the other funding councils in Canada came together to try to simplify how they organised their funding for research and develop a common program architecture. From 37 individual programmes, they developed a simple framework underpinned by partnership working. For these partnerships awards they received 153 applications, of which 93% involved partnerships beyond campus. These awards leveraged $1.43 for every $1 invested.

They also needed new ways to assess grant applications. Chad suggested that peer review was like “…peeing in your own bathwater…”.  Therefore they have launched a merit review panel, involving non-academics in assessing applications. Apparently the research applications assessed by merit review led to more engaging and useful discussions, and the results were recognised as really good research.

Embracing your fear
Finally, I loved Chad’s approach to challenging people to embrace the words they are scared about – like relevance. He helpfully reminded us that very few academics dream of doing irrelevant research. Or impact – to counter this fear, SSHRC launched a story teller challenge where people were given three minutes to tell a story about the impact of their research. In his closing remarks Chad described the results as  ‘exciting, creative and terrific’ – you can find out if you agree by visiting the SSHRC website.

Were you at Engage 2013? What are your thoughts? Share them by leaving a comment below.

For more resources from Engage 2013, visit our website.

Anyone, for a delicious slice of pineapple upside-down cake?

Dr Ornette D Clennon, an NCCPE Public Engagement Ambassador and Visiting Enterprise Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, indulges us with a cake metaphor as he shares his visions of a new academic practice where public and community engagement actually form the embedded backbone of our teaching and research.

How interesting that this retro cake seems to remain a perennial favourite or is it just me? Well, it does bring back childhood memories of Sunday lunches with the whole family with the obligatory chicken and rice’n’peas. For me, the image of the upside-down pineapple cake grows with significance, as it symbolises memories of the weekly coming together of my family; the back bone of my feeling of belonging to my wider community. During the week, this family and community networking would carry on ‘unseen’, rooted in the mundanity of the everyday, a sort of background whirring of connections and community-building activities. Then on Sunday, these family and community connections would ‘suddenly (re-)appear’, where the background whirring of community and familial activity would be foregrounded around our family dining table with the pineapple upside-down cake taking pride of place in the centre of the table: my family and community networks reminding me of the glistening pineapples and cherries embedded within the bottom of the cake suddenly becoming the proud adornments of its top with a nimble flip of the cake tin, expertly executed by my gran.

This nostalgic view of my childhood favourite lulls me into a vision of a new academic practice where public and community engagement actually form the embedded backbone of our teaching and research; if you like, the background “whirring” of unseen activity where long term (non-project focussed) transformational relationships and partnerships are formed and developed as a matter of course. However, in my vision of this new academic practice, these embedded unseen activities are regularly honoured and showcased as essential outputs in future REFs, as bona fide elements of the taxonony of research that are regularly revealed with this nimble flip of re-positioning. I believe that universities are notoriously poor at accessing the quiet and ‘unseen’ back channels of informal community networks. This means that the knowledge we say that we are co-creating with our community partners, is mostly just a result of us working with “official” community fora or representatives, who often do not actually represent the real grassroots groups or individuals we would really want to work with.

To push the upside-down cake metaphor, a little, we often find ourselves working with a model of community engagement where the pineapples and cherries are placed on the top of the cake after the baking, a mere (but still tasty) cake decoration. However, what we still have yet to fully appreciate is that if we, as academics can successfully find ways of (and the time for) accessing the background whirring of connections and community-building activities, it is then we will be able to co-create truly novel, innovative and inherently useful knowledge with embedded long term social agency (er, research, by a more traditional name!). This will take some substantial remodelling of how we currently fund this type of third stream activity so that it does not fall prey to the dreaded time-specific research project that only gathers knowledge and is rarely reciprocal for its subjects but is funded and properly time-allocated as an embedded everyday part of an academic’s workload.  As an aside, even participatory research projects fall prey to time specificity, as we don’t fully appreciate that when our research project has ended and whilst we are waiting for the next funding call, communities carry on evolving and relationship dynamics on the ground carry on changing subtly in ways we don’t fully understand, making us scratch our heads at why we are often unable to create sustained beneficial ‘outcomes’ with our community partners.

As mentioned in an earlier blog, all of this would comprise a renaissance of a “scholarship of engagement” and would be embedded at the bottom of everything we do, as academics across all disciplines. In this way, my vision of a future university would be entirely populated by academics from all disciplines whose interdisciplinary work would mundanely produce social agency, where the co-creation of new and novel knowledge with communities would be an everyday whirring of academic activity instead of the sometimes frantic ‘screeching’ construction of add-on Impact Case studies that we all have to endure.

Hmmmm. All this thinking about cake is making me peckish. I think I’ll ask my gran for her recipe for her pineapple upside-down cake, now!

What is your metaphor for the future engaged university? Share your views by leaving a comment below.

For more information on Engaged Futures, visit our website.

The Human Brain

How do you see the future for engaged universities? Dr Kerry Leslie, Head of Public Engagement with Research for Research Councils UK, imagines the engaged university being as awe-inspiring and engaging as the human brain.

Being an optimistic person I am very positive about the future of the engaged university and I believe that there is lots to celebrate and be positive about. The world has moved on dramatically since the days of the so-called ‘ivory towers’. Previously engagement was limited to popularisation of academic research, industrial collaboration and student recruitment. This evolved and now, from art and science festivals to school workshops and research projects involving local communities, our universities and scientific and cultural institutions have a rich history of engaging the public with research, across all disciplines.

Building on this, initiatives such as the Beacons for Public Engagement, the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement and the more recent Research Councils UK Public Engagement with Research Catalysts have helped to change the culture within HEIs to help embed public engagement with research within university policies, procedures and practices. Successes include universities committing to public engagement within their strategies, creating champions, changes to promotions criteria, job descriptions and appraisals to recognise public engagement, the creation of prizes and provision of training and administrative support to enable researchers to engage.To build on these achievements and other examples of good practice in the research and HE sectors, RCUK then worked with partners to develop the Concordat for Engaging the Public with Research. The Concordat acts as a tool to inspire research organisations, researcher managers and researchers from across the HE sector to better foster public engagement.

So what does the future hold? What will the engaged university look like? I see the engaged university as awe-inspiring and engaging as the human brain. Our brains are unique and perform an incredible number of tasks, compare this to the university which, in the future, will receive information from the world around, accepting the diversity of that information and using the information to problem solve, imagine, reason, dream, experience emotions and empathise. Individuals, communities, businesses, industries, charities, government and researchers will be like the 100 billion neurons in the brain, each communicating with thousands of others with countless engagements taking place every second. The ‘brain’ will learn new things which will help empower people to produce excellent research; using engagement they will refine ideas, gather data and ignite the curiosity of the next generation. For all involved, the engagement will enrich their personal and professional experience, producing new pathways and sparking new ideas, creating knowledge, sharing and translating information which in turn will lead to innovation. The possibilities are endless!

Networks, collaboration and cooperation with our millions of neurons, will create stronger relationships between society and the university. Engaging society and those whose lives are touched by the discoveries of research, will produce productive creativity in the translation of research and its application across the knowledge base affecting the university ‘brain’ to be better able to exploit national investment in research and development to widen research horizons and make a greater difference to society. On its own, a single neuron generates a tiny amount of impact, all neurons engaging and working together can generate maximum impact.

Advances in research mean that we are constantly learning more about the human brain and its untapped potential. I believe this is the case for the engaged universities of the future – an exciting prospect for all involved!

Share your visions of the engaged university, leave your comments below.

For more information on Engaged Futures, visit our website.

Public engagement with research: making sense of the diversity

Sandy Oliver, Professor of Public Policy at the Institute of Education, compares engagement to a thriving cottage industry and proposes a framework to help us to learn from different approaches, and to develop more effective engaged practice.

Assorted approaches to public engagement
Enthusiasm for public engagement with research, held first by individuals and then by organizations, has led to a proliferation of public engagement methods. The history, expectations, and methods of public engagement vary across academic disciplines because ideas have evolved in different settings. Exhibitions, music, books, plays, and films engage people with arts and humanities research. Consultations, collaborations, or public control feature in health and social policy research [1] [2]. Attracting large numbers of volunteers to count birds or record the colour of the sea are examples of crowdsourcing data to advance what we know through environmental science [3] [4]. Crowdsourcing of analytical power engages personal computers and their operators’ creativity to solve problems in the natural sciences [5]. Community engagement benefits humanities research and public health research [6] [7]. Value-focused thinking guides decisions requiring risk analysis in environmental management [8].

Sharing lessons between academic disciplines and policy sectors about these assorted approaches to public engagement has been difficult because we have not had a shared language or shared understanding of public engagement with research in all its variant forms. Although those of us actively involved in public engagement in our own areas understand our own reasons and histories, we do not have a shared understanding of why and how these variant forms have evolved more broadly. Under what circumstances, and using what methods, is it appropriate to ask outsiders to co-direct the focus of our work, to help improve the quality of our work, to share the data collection and analysis, or to interpret its meaning? To answer these questions and to embed public engagement in the core business of universities we need a framework that accommodates this diversity.

Figure 1: A framework for considering the diversity of public engagement with research

An emerging framework for public engagement
Figure 1 proposes a tentative overarching framework to help us see similarities and differences across public engagement activities. It combines what people bring to research, both researchers and outsiders (left hand column), the purpose of their participation in research (middle column) and the generic activities this entails (right hand column). While as professional researchers we bring to research a body of empirical and theoretical knowledge, together with research methods skills, we can also usefully draw on other people to enhance our work. We can engage people from outside of the research community who hold complementary interests in research, interests in how public funds are spent or in the ethics of research, to enhance research governance by sharing decisions about what research is done, and how. We can work with people whose interests overlap with ours and bring complementary knowledge to help design research, to help engage people we find ‘hard to reach’, and to comment on research findings, share them through their networks, and draw on them when making decisions. We can coordinate volunteers willing to donate their time, computers, and brain-power to collect, translate, or analyse data. We can raise aspirations, inspire enquiring minds and seed new careers through hosting public events or visiting their schools or communities.

These contributions, purposes and activities are not mutually exclusive. Rather one or more may apply simultaneously to public engagement initiatives. Such a framework can be used for three purposes. One purpose is to compare approaches that have evolved in different areas of research in order to share lessons between them. For instance, clear communication of research which has been particularly well developed for engaging enquiring minds with the natural sciences may help health and social researchers invite people with complementary knowledge to actively contribute to research projects. Similarly, medical scientists unconvinced about the ability of the public to enhance research relevance and use may be interested to learn how crowdsourcing analytical power has helped molecular biology and other disciplines. A second purpose is to clarify appropriate public engagement methods. For instance, a large workforce is required for extending the reach of data collection, but not for enhancing research relevance through engaging people in the design of studies and research tools. A third purpose is to present a coherent picture of the value of public engagement across academia.

This framework makes sense of the diversity of public engagement by linking what different publics bring to research with the different purposes of (and approaches for) their engagement with research. It provides an overview to understand the value of public engagement and its role in research and decision-making more broadly, and a point of reference for choosing appropriate approaches.

Looking back – looking forwards
Looking back, each different approach to engaging outsiders with research can be seen as a thriving cottage industry driven by the enthusiasm and skills of individuals bearing in mind the needs and opportunities for their individual projects. The framework proposed here illustrates how this assortment of public engagement activities can be presented in terms better suited both to sharing ideas between these cottage industries to evolve faster, and to the strategic thinking required to maximise research, its  governance, transparency, relevance, efficiency, dissemination,  use and public support. Looking forward, I envisage public engagement with research not only being at the heart of individual research projects, but as an integral part of the core business of universities and at the heart of their strategic planning to help them respond to fast changing external circumstances.

Acknowledgements
These ideas first appeared in Sandy Oliver’s inaugural professorial lecture (Oliver S (2013) Research for All. Institute of Education Press, London. ISBN 9781782770275). Michael Reiss and Rebecca Rees provided helpful comments on earlier versions of the text.

For more information on Engaged Futures, visit our website.

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[1] Arnstein, S.R. (1969) ‘A ladder of citizen participation’. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35 (4), 216–24.

[2] Hayes, H., Buckland, S., and Tarpey, M. (2012) Briefing notes for researchers: Public involvement in NHS, public health and social care research. London: National Institute for Health Research.

[3] Dickinson, J.L., Shirk, J., Bonter, D., Bonney, R., Crain, R.L., Martin, J., Phillips, T., and Purcell, K. (2012) ‘The current state of citizen science as a tool for ecological research and public engagement’. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 10, 291–97.

[4] Wernand, M.R., Ceccaroni, L., Piera, J., and Zielinski, O. (the Citclops consortium) (undated) Crowdsourcing technologies for the monitoring of the colour, transparency and fluorescence of the sea. Online: www.nioz.nl/tl_files/upload/users/941080/Wernand_Ext_Abstract_OOXXI-OO121127.docx

[5] Hand, E. (2010) ‘People power’. Nature, 466, 685–87.

[6] Hale, A. (undated) ‘Linking communities to historic environments: A research review summary’. Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. Online: www.rcahms.gov.uk/rcahms_media/files/survey/lche_report.pdf

[7] O’Mara-Eves, A., Brunton, G., McDaid, D., Oliver, S., Kavanagh, J., Jamal, F., Matosevic, T., Harden, A., and Thomas, J. (in press) ‘Community engagement to reduce inequalities in health: A systematic review, meta-analysis and economic analysis’. NIHR Public Health Research programme journal (working title).

[8] Arvai, J.L., Gregory, R., and McDaniels, T.L. (2001) ‘Testing a structured decision approach: Value-focused thinking for deliberative risk communication’. Risk Analysis, 21 (6), 1065–76.

Grand Challenges of the 21st Century

Paul Benneworth, senior researcher at the University of Twente, explores how new forms of collaboration are essential if we are to find ways of tackling the huge societal challenges that the future will bring.Clearly the greatest issues that engaged universities must address in the future relate to the Grand Challenges of the 21st Century. Society clearly has high expectations that universities will put their knowledge to good use in solving these serious and pressing problems, including climate change, resource scarcity, demographic aging and urban sustainability. What these very different problems all have in common is that their solution requires system-wide responses to change our social structures and infrastructures. A new kind of innovation is demanded, more co-ordinated, system-building and integrative than current market-based approaches encourage. So my metaphor for the future engaged university is playing in a team working together to solve a jigsaw puzzle.

The ‘puzzle’ here refers to these grand societal challenges, where the solution requires putting many kinds of different knowledge into place to drive large-scale social innovations. To take one example, solving urban sustainability problems does not just require addressing a set of technical challenges, developing appropriate transport infrastructures or urban energy generation. It requires social knowledge – what people want from their housing and transport, and behavioural knowledge of how they react to technical changes. It also requires sociological and geographical knowledge – understanding how technological developments in transport and accessibility leads some communities to be included and others to be excluded. And above all, it also requires the capacity to process and bring together these very different kinds of knowledge into comprehensive responses, and getting those different knowledges out into society and the economy in a range of different ways.

We really don’t know very much about that recombination process and how these new kinds of knowledge flow into society. We’ve got used to thinking about ‘Mode 2’ or the ‘Triple Helix’ as ideas that explain how universities interact with society, but these models are becoming increasingly outdated. And with it, the existing paraphernalia for university engagement of technology transfer offices and commercialisation strategies risks falling behind and orienting itself more to the challenges of the last century than this one. That paraphernalia emerged in the 1970s, with universities orienting themselves over time to deal with the ‘supply-side innovation crisis’. This crisis lay in poor productivity and competitiveness of individual firms, leading to falling standards of living, inflation, unemployment and a prevailing sense of crisis. Universities have since then responded to policy demands by making their technologies available to business, promoting commercial innovation and knowledge exchange to encourage industrial recovery.

But the models we have developed for those processes are based on innovation for competition: solving the grand challenges require innovation for collaboration to build resilient and adaptive modern societies. This systemic innovation is nothing like the oft-quoted ‘football match’ in Mode 2 models, where the aim of the knowledge is to score goals and beat against the other team. But the football mentality has apparently infected every aspect of higher education, from the rise of league tables and rankings, the emergence of elite ‘Premier Leagues’, the rise of the ‘World Class University’ and even the ‘academic transfer market’. And whilst the current competitive commercial university can behave like a football player, giving everything for the victory over rivals, well-engaged universities need to get beyond this simplistic, outdated mind-set.

What universities are gaining over their rivals in these competitive pursuits, society as a whole is losing from their reduced capacity to collaborate meaningfully around these shared societal agendas. Dealing with these challenges is much more like solving a jigsaw puzzle, pulling together all the pieces that exist, seeing the linkages, patterns and opportunities, and ultimately constructing something useful and pleasing for society. And this means people working together effectively – if everyone tries to shove in their pieces at once, without thinking of the others, then all you get a messy pile of pieces.

It is not just that universities have some of the pieces of knowledge necessary to solve these puzzling challenges, but they have also got the people to put them together, and work effectively with the other social partners. Recently, a ‘cult of the manager’ has emerged around universities, a sense that it is all about strategies, structures and sanctions. But it is people that will ultimately contribute to solving society’s problems: people in the universities, people who have been to universities, and people working with universities. The future engaged university will be a special place where people from all walks of society come together to solve these grand puzzles and ultimately make a difference.

Paul Benneworth, Enschede, the Netherlands

What is your metaphor for the future engaged university? Share your views by leaving a comment below.

For more information on Engaged Futures, visit our website.

No more flares (and I don’t mean trousers or do I?!)

Simon Denegri, Chair of Involve, tells a cautionary parable as he exhorts universities to create cultures supportive of engagement.

The sea rose on its haunches and beckoned them to look aloft. The flare rose, then splintered against the pale expanse of cloud like pencil lead breaking on a blank sheet of paper. The scene remained imprinted on their retinas as they turned their backs in unison and set too, the city lifting easily on its floats as the water rose beneath it. It was as they had planned. No one said it but they all thought it. They owed their futures to that day when the scientists threw open their doors and said: ‘We do not fully know what is happening or what we should do. But we have more chance with your help,’ for at that point the city became the university and the university the city.

Later, much later, a story came their way, reputedly about those last few desperate hours at the hallowed university on the hill. How the waters had swamped the walls it had built around itself within seconds. Of the retreat to the Senate House where the benches had become bunks and the floor was covered with debris; broken chairs and empty food packets and books with pages torn from them. The pathetic decision of those remaining to number themselves ‘1’ or ‘2’ and strap themselves together. The collapse of calm and, with it, rational thought about how they might still save themselves at that moment. For there probably was still time even then. It was then that a young girl climbed the tower to let off the flare.

*           *           *

When asked to write an opinion piece on the ‘engaged university’ the above parable, for all its many faults, was the first thing that came to mind. If it seems a mischievous couple of paragraphs then you would be right. There is lots of mischief in it. But I shall let you figure that out for yourself.

Nor am I am trying to abdicate my responsibility to the given task, when I say that I do not know what an ‘engaged university’ will look like in 25-30 years time as asked. Surely that is what is so exciting about the future, that we can not envisage it? What I do hope is that we will see a steady progression and enlightenment in how we work with citizens, that universities and their people apply themselves assiduously to the task.

Fortunately I meet many academics and researchers who are clearly committed to public engagement. Unfortunately, the institutional cultures which surround them seem set against the notion – and perversely so given higher education’s many travails – that citizens could be partners. They would rather carry out smash and grab raids on the public consciousnesses to tick a box. Or fire off a few desperate efforts that fall to the ground like flares from ship-wrecked passengers.

Leadership will be the critical factor in the development of engaged universities in the future. That means everyone from the Vice-Chancellor, to senior academics, students and the surrounding community embracing public engagement as strategically important to the future health of their organisation, and treating the public with respect as partners in the university mission. But it must come from the top and I am afraid that I hear very few VCs highlight the importance of public engagement in the same way that they might talk about academic freedom or funding.

Whose going to be the first to put their flares away?

Join in the debate by sharing your comments below.

For more information on Engaged Futures, visit our website.

Tackling the ‘Wicked Issues’ – the Future of University/Public Engagement and Social Justice?

What might the engaged university of the future be like? In the latest Engaged Futures blog, Sharon Clancy, Head of Community Partnerships at The University of Nottingham, dreams of Oz but recognises that it may be a long journey with lots of challenges on the way.

“There were no poor people in the Land of Oz, because there was no such thing as money…Each person was given freely by his neighbors whatever he required for his use, which is as much as anyone may reasonably desire…. So each one was proud to do all he could for his friends and neighbors, and was glad when they would accept the things he produced.” (L. Frank Baum, The Emerald City of Oz, Reilly and Briton, 1910, Chapter 3)

I have been Head of Community Partnerships at the University of Nottingham for six years. In that time I have followed the yellow brick road – along with many other fellow travellers – towards a revitalised vision of the University as a space for public good, an Oz-like world where ‘the community’ or ‘the public’ are equally valued neighbours and partners, informing research and debate, sharing a meaningful and positive relationship which results in social benefit, and proud of this co-production.

This has been a central theme in the work of NCCPE and also in the work of the Beacons on this journey, who have pioneered a way forwards, examining the University role in promoting ‘the public good’.

One of the ways we have achieved this connection at community level at the University of Nottingham has been through our work with the third sector (or voluntary and community sector – VCS), which is at the nexus of civil society, that space between state and individuals which focuses on the most vulnerable people in society, and the most intractable social issues – because we do not live in a fair or equal world.

Our work with the sector has given us privileged access to communities, enabled us to learn about their research interests, to create bespoke student and staff skills-sharing placements and research partnerships. We have found willing and active partners in the sector, keen to innovate with us, generous with their time and ideas. We have seen that real partnership can support social change, albeit incrementally.

However, there are winged monkeys on the horizon, which hamper progress and engender uncertainty. Increasingly now, what cannot be ignored is that the world of the third sector is changing – potentially irrevocably. According to the Big Society Audit, ‘the voluntary sector is now facing an estimated cut in statutory funding of £3.3 billion between 2010-16, a gap which is unlikely to be filled by increased donations.’ (Big Society Audit, 2012, Civil Exchange, p.4).

The Audit finds, too, that there is a growing ‘Big Society gap’, in terms of how well society functions, ‘between younger and older people, affluent and disadvantaged communities, rural and urban areas and white and ethnic minority people…..Targeted support to reduce this gap is needed but voluntary sector capacity in key communities is likely to have been undermined by cuts in public funding, which have fallen particularly heavily in disadvantaged areas’ (ibid, p. 4).

The difficulty with any community engagement is that it cannot be parcelled up and labelled neatly – it is inherently messy, and not always palatable. The groups of people most likely to require support – and also the groups where public funding is in most jeopardy – include offenders; people with mental health needs; people with learning difficulties; homeless people and asylum seekers, which are not always issues which are immediately appealing, neutral or apolitical.

Whilst corporate volunteering is one response to social responsibility which the current government favours and in which the University can of course play a role, given its skills-sharing capacity, we have arguably moved on from this. Though there is a noble and long-standing University tradition in areas such as community-based student volunteering, for instance, and growing interest in philanthropic activity and public engagement amongst staff, my concern is that this approach will attract people to certain types of organisations where money and donations are channelled already. This includes medical causes, children’s charities and schools – which will only partially address current inequalities. The higher education sector itself is the most popular cause for money coming from charitable foundations but many of the VCS bodies tackling the most acute disadvantage are dependent on statutory funding.

So my vision for the engaged University of the future is one in which we are genuine about social responsibility and ‘public good’, and are engaged with the world around us. Programmes such as the Catalysts, born out of the Beacons, which look to foster public engagement with research and to develop innovative and creative pathways into communities, are perhaps just the mechanism we need to raise the issue of social justice high on the agenda, to target activity where it is most needed and to stimulate debate and discussion about precisely these ‘wicked issues’, which remain at the heart of our society.

How would you describe the engaged university of the future? Share your comments.

For more information on Engaged Futures, visit our website.

Whose ‘public good’ does engaged research serve?

Keri Facer, Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol, explores how universities need to address inequalities in society through a more holistic approach, if the promise of engagement is to be realised.

The last two decades have seen researchers, activists, and professionals with an interest in engagement push for ever closer collaboration with communities in the research process. Arnstein’s ladder of participation is rolled out regularly to point out the evident power imbalances between researchers and communities, and to make the case that tokenistic consultation doesn’t equate to meaningful participation. The demand for ‘co-production’ is appearing more frequently in funding calls across the full range of research councils. And underpinning all of this is the argument that these engaged research processes are necessary to increase democratic accountability to the public.

What all of this seems to imply is that there are certain methods of public participation in the research process that are, in themselves, ‘A Good Thing’; and that the closer we get to co-production (in which organisations and individuals outside universities share power with researchers in determining research designs), the more research programmes will contribute to the wider public good.

Is this necessarily the case?

Despite the fact that I co-lead a research programme [1] that is committed to ‘researching community with communities’, and despite the fact that I see powerful evidence that communities beyond the walls of the university are hugely important resources of insight and expertise on any number of issues, I am increasingly uncomfortable with this growing orthodoxy that co-produced research methods necessarily serve the elusive ‘public good’ better than others.

My concern centres on two simple observations:
– Observation 1: there were 181,385 academics in the UK in 2011/2012 [2] (compare this with the NHS which employs 1.7m people) and around 62million people in the population.
– Observation 2: to those who already have, more tends to be given (unless people fight really hard against it).

Let’s imagine, therefore, that every research project in the UK were required to be co-produced – from undergraduate dissertations to large research council funding programmes. Given these numbers, even the wholescale transition of university research to co-produced methods would lead to only a limited number of people in the population actually being involved in setting research agendas, defining research questions and shaping research projects. As Nick Mahony and his colleagues at the OU remind us, the ‘engaged’ university does not simply make visible a pre-existent public, rather, it actively brings particular ideas of ‘the public’ into being through processes of selection, exclusion and representation.

The key question we need to ask ourselves, therefore, is ‘who is this ‘public’ with whom researchers should co-produce research?’ And to what extent do these created publics constitute a step towards a research culture that produces ‘the public good’?

Too often, however, and for entirely understandable reasons relating to the pressures of academic life, difficulties of forming new relationships and the challenges of negotiating research designs, the answer to this question is that co-production tends to involve collaboration with anyone who academics and universities find it easy or financially viable to work with.  In other words, those people and groups who have the cash and time to spare; those people in companies, organisations and civil society groups who are not too unlike the researchers themselves; those people with whom researchers have friendships or out of work collaborations; or those who are equally exercised by the same problems as the academics.

One risk around co-production, therefore, is that rather than diversifying research agendas, it both erodes the principle of academic autonomy (including the autonomy that has historically allowed some academics the freedom to fight on behalf of and alongside those groups who were historically exploited) while further consolidating research knowledge in the hands of the middle classes, intelligentsia and elites who have the time and resources to participate.

The consequence of this is that co-produced research that extends only to a limited pool of collaborators may contribute neither novel insights and democratic accountability (the rationale for co-production) nor high quality blue skies research (the rationale for continued public expenditure on university-based rather than industrial research). It may also militate against the sort of large scale, deeply traditional empirical research that can serve as powerful resources for social movements and civil society groups.

We can’t, however, simply try to turn back the clock and make the argument that the safe thing to do in these circumstances is for universities to claim to ‘speak for’ the people. We have seen the costs of that approach – whether in under-representation of patients’ actual concerns in medical research or the sort of exploitative hit and run anthropology that created stellar careers and damaged communities. No, the lessons have been learned from that sort of disregard for both the needs and expertise of people ‘beyond the university walls’.

Instead, it seems that we should broadly welcome the focus on co-production in so far as it represents an impetus to engaging with and diversifying the insights that drive research agendas. To ensure that this impetus is further developed, however, we might want to do two things:

First, we might want to banish all use of terms such as ‘community partners’ and ‘beneficiaries’ in funding calls, research council proclamations and researchers’ proposals. These generalising terms risk obscuring the origins and identities of research collaborators and therefore obscuring the economic, political and cultural nature of the co-produced research. Instead, a more nuanced and fine-grained discussion of who is being involved in engaged research might open up debate about where priorities and funding should be directed. This might be quantified and visualised – just how many research collaborators on funded projects actually came from minority ethnic groups, how many came from communities with multiple-levels of deprivation, how many were known to researchers before submitting the funding?

Second, if the aspiration is to create a more democratically accountable research culture, then it may not be the research arena that ultimately matters. Instead, we may want to create the conditions – funding structures, scholarly infrastructure, public (dare we say it, continuing?) education – that would enable individuals of all ages from historically marginalised groups to become leaders of research in future. The challenge here is not to work out how the university might ‘engage’ with the public, but to create ways in which myriad excluded groups might ‘become the university’ [3] themselves.

Of course, there’s also a case for saying that we should stop treating a particular approach to research (co-production) as a panacea for a much more fundamental problem; namely, that our contemporary research cultures and institutions are no match, at present, for the radical and increasing inequalities beyond university walls. If these inequalities are truly our concern, we might do better to start from naming and analysing the causes of and strategies to address those inequalities. This, of course, researchers would need to do in collaboration with both elite and excluded communities – but the co-produced research that would necessarily follow would be driven not by the inane desire to pursue a particular research method to fulfil an agenda of spurious accountability, but instead by the powerful awareness that these are problems that cannot be solved by academics alone.

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[1] The AHRC Connected Communities Research Programme
[2] The Higher Education Statistics Agency
[3] Thanks to Tom Sperlinger for this way of framing the issue