Historians don't set out to change people's lives

Historians don’t set out to change people’s lives’: To what extent are notions

of social justice shared across the academy?

Sharon McCulloch (presenting); Ibrar Bhatt, & Karin Tusting Lancaster University

The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation:

Academics’ writing practices in the contemporary university workplace

Literacy Research Centre, Lancaster UniversityDepartments of Linguistics and of Educational Research

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK

Impact beyond academia

Academics’ views on social justice• Majority of academics support principle of civic/public

engagement • Wide range of such roles undertaken for no reward and

often disincentives • Those who did not engage, cited constraints rather than

antipathy• Institutional commitment was low • Traditional research for an international, academic audience

took priority

Bond & Patterson (2005); Watermeyer (2015)

Social justice as measure of academic success

Q: Societal impact, or the benefit of academic work and research products to society, should be a key measure of research performance for appointment, promotion, or funding proposals.

Wolff et al. (2015) Ithaka S + R/JISC/RLUK UK survey of academics

Percent indicating theysomewhat agree, agree, or strongly agree.

Who is academic research for?

Q: How important is it to you that your research reaches each of the following possible audiences?

Wolff et al. (2015) Ithaka S + R/JISC/RLUK UK survey of academics

What drives academics?

I don’t start off a research project with the thought of, ‘How is it going to affect people today?’ Part of that is because I was trained as a historian. Historians don’t set out to change people’s lives in the same way that a social worker might, even here in the school a marketing person might do.

James (lecturer in Marketing)

Making a difference

A lot of my work is engaged research, so I think I do make a difference to managers’ lives.

Diane (professor of Marketing)

Financial transparency

It’s an accountability thing. If you’re paid through public money than I think part of the duty is then to try to engage with the public about what the money is used for.

Robert (Professor in Mathematics)

Making a difference?

My humble little collection of work, such as it is, the only life I really expect it to affect or alter is mine in a professional sense. You’ve written enough articles, at some point maybe get promoted or do this or do that or you’ll be REF-able, or you won’t be REF-able, this kind of thing.

James (lecturer in Marketing)

Communicating beyond academia

I mean, for mathematicians, hardly anybody can understand what our research is about.

Ian (Lecturer in Mathematics)

Communicating beyond academia

I've been vice president of Institute X and so there's a policy side of what I do as well. I also do popular maths things. I see that all as part of the same job.


Career prioritiesIt's not exactly something that you would encourage a starting lecturer to do because there are just too many things and you've got to establish yourself in various ways. Once you've reached a certain age, it's not a bad thing to be thinking about explaining maths. Also trying to get the next generation of mathematicians engaged and interested.


Practical constraintsThe university is committed to something called social responsibility. Well, I am very happy to sign up to that … I think we are citizens. If we have something worthwhile that we think we can contribute, then I think we should do that. It's just that it is extra and it's quite demanding, and I wouldn't like it to take over my writing life. Colin (Professor of History)

Institutional prioritiesBecause they [his institution] were working to their targets … my topic area had very little interest. So if it was looking at underachieving white males from lower social areas in Area X in England, they would have jumped on that, because there was some funding relating to that.

Mark (Lecturer in Marketing)

To what extent are notions of social justice shared across the academy?

• No universal notion of social justice at individual level

• Range of perceived beneficiaries of research• Some perception of shared understandings at

disciplinary level• Wide acceptance that social justice was

important, but secondary to pursuit of traditional, academic-oriented research

ReferencesBond, D., and L. Patterson. 2005. “Coming Down from the Ivory Tower? Academics’ Civic and Economic Engagement with the Community.” Oxford Review of Education 31: 331–351.

Watermeyer, R. (2015). Lost in the ‘third space’: the impact of public engagement in higher education on academic identity, research practice and career progression, European Journal of Higher Education, 5(3), 331-347.

Wolff, C., Rod, A. B., & Schonfeld, R. C. (2016). Ithaka S + R/JISC/RLUK UK survey of academics 2015. Ithaka S + R, JISC, RLUK.