Dialogue or Duel? A critical reflection on the gendered politics of engaging and impacting

Jocey Quinn, Kim Allen, Sumi Hollingworth, Uvanney Maylor, Jayne Osgood and Anthea Rose

Introduction

This chapter seeks to offer a critical reflection on the politics of engaging stakeholders in research.

Specifically we shed light on the difficulties and tensions encountered delivering a seminar series

on the ‘inter-relationships of education and culture’ that had at its heart a desire to facilitate a

dialogue between academics and policy makers and practitioners. This series of seminars ‘New

Perspectives on Education and Culture’ (http://educationandculture.wordpress.com/) ran from

January 2011 to January 2013 and was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council

(ESRC), one of the key funding bodies for research in the social sciences in the UK.

The seminar series sought to explore the ways in which culture and learning co-produce each-other.

As an academic field, Education is often positioned in rather limited terms as the following typical

outline demonstrates: “Education has been called a field of practice, and the various contexts and

subjects of education-pedagogy, learning, systems, institutional contexts, practitioners and students-

constitute the subjects of education research” (Francis, 2012: 6). In contrast, we wanted to explore

how learning is culturally constructed as an everyday experience from early years to later life and in

formal and informal spaces including popular culture, family cultures, teaching cultures and local

cultures. We wanted to highlight Education as a field of theory where multiple perspectives were

essential to answer our three key questions: How does learning shape culture? How does culture

shape learning and how do gender, ‘race’ and class shape inter-relationships of education and

culture? Consequently, speakers and participants were drawn from a vast array of different

disciplinary locations1 and, importantly, from within and outside of academia. Our ideal vision of

this dialogue between academic and non-academic stakeholders in the fields of education and

culture was that it would be reciprocal, providing opportunities to expand our own knowledge but

also affording opportunities to challenge the paradigms by which social and educational problems

are positioned and to provide fresh conceptualisations which could inform the on-going work of

policymakers and practitioners.

Alongside our own professional desires to engage with and speak to wider communities through our

research, the series took place in a broader landscape where questions of ‘impact’ and ‘public

engagement’ have increasingly come to construct academic labours and identities not only in the

UK but internationally, for example in decisions regarding research funding in Australia (Francis

2012; Taylor and Addison 2011; Williams, 2012). In the UK a key factor is the Research

Excellence Framework (REF), a measure by which UK universities must present their research for

evaluation and, through which academics and institutions are judged and measured on their capacity

to engage and ‘impact’. In addition, funded by the ESRC, the series was implicated in several ways

by the ESRC’s engagement strategy and impact agenda which emphasise at length the need for

research council-funded activities to make a ‘demonstrable contribution… to society and the

economy’ (ESRC website ‘What is research Impact’, 2013).

As we argue through this chapter, such demands to engage with stakeholders outside of our

academic communities and make our work count in ways that judged and evaluated according to

preformed, measureable notions of ‘impact’ and ‘knowledge transfer’ were productive of tensions,

challenges and affects which were not captured in the dominant, celebratory and clean narratives of

impact and engagement. As Williams has recently argued, as academics will increasingly be asked

to perform and package our ‘impact’… we should think critically about the consequences – both

1 including Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology, English, Media Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Geography, Education,

Race and Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies.

intended and unintended – of these performances” (2012: 490). In this chapter we seek to do just

this, exploring how the imperatives to ‘do impact’ are lived among a group of female academics.

As well as open up discussion about the reality of the academic work in the public domain and how

values and principles can be maintained in the face of pragmatic imperatives, this chapter attempts

to call attention to this sometimes hidden and gendered labour of forging dialogues and ‘doing

impact’. While contemporary debates about public sociology and calls on and by academics to take

their work ‘out’ has been dominated and represented by mainly male academics – in so doing,

figuring as the ‘public intellectual’ par excellence – there is a longer but often hidden history of

feminist labour and will to engage beyond academic walls (Taylor and Addison, 2011). As we

show, in practice, the dialogue we sought between academics, policymakers and practitioners,

although in many ways highly productive, was also interrupted, contested, and gendered. In sharing

these disruptions, tensions, elisions, and labour, we support Taylor and Addison’s claim that ‘there

has to be attention to practices that are silenced and knowledges that are subsumed when the impact

of impact agendas have already been determined’ (2011).

Context: ‘Publics’, ‘Dialogue’ ‘Impact’

We entered the seminar series with a view of dialogue as more than simply a conversation. As

Biesta says, it is:

an encounter between two “parties” where the aim is to do justice to both parties. A

dialogue is, in this respect, fundamentally different from a contest, as the orientation of a

contest is for one of the parties to win and hence for the other party or parties to lose. The

difference between a dialogue and a contest also makes clear that whereas a contest at some

point reaches an end, a dialogue is an on-going process and an ongoing challenge, also

because the question whether justice is done to all parties involved poses itself again and

again (2012: 95-6).

Whilst the sense of temporality and challenge evoked in Biesta’s definition rings true for our

experience, what his definition lacks is the acknowledgement that justice can never be done, as

every dialogue is embedded in unequal power relations. Moreover, it also depends on what is

valued as ‘power’ and by whom. It is this tension between the ideal of dialogue and the pragmatic

realities of engendering it that we wish to explore in this chapter.

Before sharing our experiences of these issues in depth, it is necessary to explore the broader

context within which this series took place. In the UK we are experiencing a radical dismantling of

the public university and a repositioning of its roles and duties (see Holmwood, 2012). Whilst

universities are increasingly privatised, one of the imperatives that drive the new agenda is to

engage with publics and to be seen to have an impact on public life. Whilst this might be seen as an

ethical obligation that is long overdue and as a ‘moral imperative; (Francis, 2012) for the researcher

concerned with ‘social justice’, the nature of this engagement and impact remain obscure and

unquantifiable, even as demands for quantification increase. The REF demands ‘impact case

studies’ within which research is measured according to the way it has influenced practice; but the

rules tantalise in their opacity (Williams 2012). Applications for research council funding must

explicitly outline how the research will change policy and practice outside academia. Consequently

proof of impact must be anticipated before any actual research is ever done. Analysing the process

of impact has become a field of academic inquiry in itself, with the government funded project: the

‘Impact of social sciences project’ seeking to demonstrate how academic research influences public

understanding (2012).

Such imperatives to ‘impact’ were carried through the series though not easily realised nor lived.

The series was organised into six key areas and each seminar was held in a venue that reflected that

theme, allowing us to explore how learning and culture were embodied in different practices

including libraries, galleries, cultural institutions, and union headquarters2. The choice of venues

was not only informed by the themes but wider imperatives and desires to impact and engage.

Taking the series outside of academic walls both literally and figuratively, the choice of venues was

part of a desire to take academic work on the theme outside, ‘for a walk’ (Back, 2013; Taylor and

Addison, 2011). This decision to move outside academic walls was commended by the anonymous

reviewers of the application for funding the series:

The innovation and excitement comes from the decision to use different and significant

venues for the seminars. The use of varied venues is a strategy for achieving stakeholder

investment in the series and for optimising participation by taking the seminars to the

people. The venues will also be stimulating and contribute to the border-crossing of

education and culture, different disciplines and different sectors. (Anonymous reviewer)

The choice of venues primarily allowed us to engage actively those practitioners in these venues

involving them in the organisation of the seminars and as speakers. Thus, alongside academics,

other practitioners such as artists, media practitioners, community arts groups, voluntary sector

organisations, teaching assistants, librarians and activists all made important contributions to the

seminars. Less successfully however, we endeavoured to have policy representatives speak at each

seminar, with the aim of encouraging those involved in educational policy to develop a cultural

perspective and those involved in cultural policy to recognise the importance of learning.

Although we did secure speakers from national policy makers from campaigning organisations and

‘think tanks’ with strong links to policy, policy representation was less than hoped. As Williams

notes when discussing her experiences of achieving impact through engaging policymakers and

other stakeholders, “user engagement” is highly contingent on particular personalities, connections

and opportunities’ (2012: 492). Whilst the chapter will focus on some of the difficulties of

engaging with policy makers and practitioners within the seminars, it is worth reflecting on the very

reasons why they often failed to materialise in the first place. Instructive in this regard was the

experience of the one seminar, where eighteen months of pursuing a government policy maker

prepared to talk to the issues of ‘race’ and gender resulted in frustration, each contact passed the

request on to somebody else, as ‘race’ and gender were seen as no-one’s ‘responsibility’.

Such a resistance within these arenas to locate a willing subject to speak to – or take responsibility

for – these issues, draws our attention to the problematics within the impact agenda and celebratory

narratives of a flow and ‘exchange’ of knowledge between academics and users and beneficiaries:

‘Engaging with potential research users from the earliest stage of the research process is a

key factor in helping to ensure the findings are subsequently taken up and exploited…It is

important that researchers and policymakers share a mutual understanding of the relevance

of each other’s interests and activities, helping to deepen understandings of the way in

which academic research can add value and offer insights to key issues of concern for

policymakers. (‘Delivering Impact through Social Sciences’, ESRC Strategic Plan 2009-14,

p 23).

Put simply, whilst it is now an imperative for academics to engage with policy makers, the reverse

appears to be far from the case. In the case of our seminar series, there is no duty or obligation by

which we could call policy makers to account and make them attend. It is only really academics that

are expected to perform ‘boundary crossings’ – both in forming links between themselves and

2 Venues include: ‘Cultural Narratives and Forms of Knowing’ was held in the Whitechapel Gallery; ‘Popular Culture’

in the British Film Institute; ‘Local Cultures’ in Toynbee Hall; ‘Family Cultures’ in the Women’s Library; ‘Teaching

Cultures’ in the National Union of Teachers Headquarters; and ‘Knowledge Cultures’ in the British Library.

different ‘users’ (Williams 2012) and making the object of this research (in our case inequalities of

class, gender and race within educational and cultural spaces) ‘useable’ – even ‘friendly’.

Indeed, even those lucky enough to have jumped through the hoops and ‘engaged’ policymakers in

their research projects have raised the issue that however challenging their findings may be, policy

still has a way of shifting the discussion back to its own terms and paradigms. Feminist and post-

colonial scholars have critically unpicked the colonisation of ‘oppositional’ language by

policymakers and within broader neoliberal discourse. Terms such as ‘diversity’ or ‘social justice’,

in entering the lexicon of policymakers and business, have been emptied of meaning, divorced from

histories of disadvantage and discrimination, ‘used ideologically by the Right to both countermand

and undermine the equalities agenda and by government and policymakers to sanitise and sweeten

neoliberal policies’ (Reay, 2012, p.ix; see also Ahmed 2006; Taylor 2012; Allen et al 2012). Thus,

whilst we – as academics – see class, gender and ‘race’ as centrally important in interrogating the

relationship between education and culture, such factors seem to exist on the periphery of policy

work in the UK. In education policy, they have actually been removed from key documents such as

the revised Teachers Standards ((DfE, 2012) and marginalised within the new Early Years

Foundation curriculum.

This creates difficulties for how we communicate research which is committed to challenging and

exposing inequalities located in broader structural processes marginalisation, disadvantage and

injustice rather than in individual pathologies or ‘choice’. For example, reflecting on presenting

findings from ESRC-funded research about ‘marginalised’ young people and ‘school disaffection’

(with Yvonne Robinson) to non-academic delegates at a ‘policy and practice seminar, Val Gillies

describes discursive battles in communicating their research to policymakers, where more radical

perspectives about educational marginalisation, are reordered to fit already fixed ‘ways of seeing’.

It is worth quoting this at length:

the event offered an excellent opportunity to discuss issues around educational

marginalisation. Yet amidst this debate I was struck by just how often the key message from

our research (and the voices of the young people who participated) were obscured and

distorted. The seminar was framed by a collective agreement that education needs to change,

but this apparent consensus made invisible the very different perspectives that were at play

and ensured that the more radical suggestions raised were neutralized and reordered to fit

current policy assumptions. It was a disorientating experience, as if a force of gravity was

containing our dialogue and persistently compelling it back to channel the same old

groove…. despite attempts by many to emphasise wasted potential and the extent to which

some young people are let down by an education system weighted against their interests, the

terms of the debate kept returning to an implicit assumption that change must be located in

the young people themselves. Some participants appeared unable to engage with the very

real structural barriers to learning and stressed instead the need for ‘early intervention’ to

prevent damaged lives. At various points during the day references to broken families, poor

parenting and underdeveloped brains were made in an attempt to scope the problem,

reflecting the routine targeting of solutions towards what Heidi Mirzra terms the ‘soft’

approaches centring on culture, behaviour and the home rather the ‘hard’ structural issues.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised at the way current policy frameworks allow so little space

to think outside of neoliberal narratives of personal responsibility. Still, to have the clear

message of our research so readily defused, misrepresented and translated into anodyne,

policy friendly rhetoric was as breath-taking as it was frustrating. It is difficult not to feel

that the young people taking part in our research have been let down. (2012)

These then are the rules of the terrain across which we attempted our dialogue through the seminar

series. It is also important to note that our particular positioning has its own fractious history. We

are six women academics who identify as feminists and work in the broad field of education and

social justice, but with a wide range of interests and positions. We draw on a history of feminist

praxis where thought and action are indivisible (see, for example, Lock Swarr and Nagar, 2010) and

that the challenge to masculinist paradigms and practices is a daily goal of our life and work. Our

discussion in this chapter can be seen as a part of a long history of feminist debate on such issues as

women’s relationships to academia (for example, Woolf, 1928), how feminist knowledge is

generated and transmitted across boundaries (for example, hooks, 2000) and who is centre and who

periphery when it comes to defining legitimate knowledge (for example Spivak, 1995). We initially

came together to focus thematically on education and culture whilst working in the same research

institute in a ‘widening participation’ university: a university which has historically prioritised the

recruitment of under-represented students. However, this process was not a painless one, nor

straightforward. The thematic group was met with some institutional resistance and seen as

threatening the ‘brand’ of the research institute, which strongly focused on policy and social justice.

Policy and Culture were positioned oppositionally and rather than dialogue, a series of

misinterpretations took place. Thus while this chapter focuses on the difficulties of research

engagement, before the process even began there were struggles over staking a claim to focus on

this field of work.

The chapter was born through a catalytic incident that took place during the ‘Local Cultures’

seminar. This seminar focused on how learning and work were being constructed within specific

local contexts and on critiquing the kinds of messages of ‘raising aspirations’ that were circulating

within policy and practice. In some respects this seminar was the most successful in involving

policy makers and think tanks and so perhaps it is not surprising that it also threw up the most vivid

moments of conflict. A panel presenting perspectives on local cultures of employment and work, in

which the speakers appeared to present a deficit picture of young people in East London as lacking

in culture and needing to be rescued from the terrible fate of attending local ‘widening

participation’ universities, provoked much anger from the academic audience. The hostile

environment generated, left us as organisers with the dilemma of restoring harmony and protecting

our invited ‘guests’, whilst also wanting to challenge and provoke them. After much discussion of

the ethical and practical issues that emerged about engagement and impact we decided to write this

chapter.

In writing the chapter we are again caught between our dialogic drive and the messy reality of

everyday life. We decided that the core of the chapter should be a group discussion to which we

would all contribute. In doing so we hoped to sidestep some of the more sterile conventions of

academic writing and allow ideas and responses to flow with more spontaneity. This approach also

importantly drew on the historical practices of feminist activism where complex ideas are generated

and debated communally, rather than produced in isolation by the lone intellectual. Three of us

were finally able to meet and to have a really stimulating conversation. This was taped and

transcribed and sent to the other three for comment and development. The dialogue was analysed

and excerpts used in an initial draft of the chapter along with some additional quotes from others

from the group. This draft then went through a number of communal iterations. In this way all have

had an opportunity to enter the dialogue, but not on the same terms and the words of some are more

dominant in the discussion than others. For ethical reasons we have decided to anonomyse the

discussion as much as possible, not naming ourselves or other individuals.

One of the issues here is that this is that the discussion we are using is not simply data that we are

interrogating and interpreting: the discussion constitutes our academic thinking and theorising,

albeit in a different form. This poses problems as to how to deal with it. We have consciously tried

to find a way of allowing the vibrancy of these thoughts to flow through, rather than clotting them

with too many layers of further interpretation. Both the seminar series and the chapter can be seen

as forms of what de Lauretis calls “space off” “social spaces carved in the interstices of institutions

and in the chinks and cracks of the power-knowledge apparati” (1987: 25). Nevertheless, as we

shall discuss, carving those spaces is fraught with difficulties.

The necessity and impossibility of dialogue: living with and through impact and engagement

Impact and engagement are words that sit well on paper and have a valedictory quality: who would

not want their work to effect positive change or to communicate with and involve those who might

make those changes possible? The seminar series can be seen as one tactic whereby this virtuous

goal was practically addressed. In this chapter we want to focus on the process of conducting and

being involved in the seminar series and on how living through this threw up many questions and

tensions for us as feminist academics. These questions can be summarised as: How did gender

shape the series in multiple ways? What kinds of epistemological gaps existed between seminar

participants and how possible is it to bridge them and in what ways? How possible is feminist

praxis in the context of the academic impact and engagement agenda?

How did gender shape the seminar series?

In developing the series we occupied multiple positions as initiators, mediators and participants in

the dialogue and this became a question of negotiating responsibilities: to our own principles, to the

institutions we represented, to those we had invited to speak. All of these positions were

necessarily gendered. This means that in organising the seminars and ensuring they ran well,

nothing that we did was neutral, but rather shaped, not by an essential female quality, but by social,

cultural and institutional expectations of how women and men might be expected to behave. More

significantly still, it was shaped by our positions as feminists with particular academic ‘knowledge’

we wanted to share. As suggested earlier the ‘Local Cultures’ seminar brought this into relief when

confrontation broke out between academics and policy makers/think tanks:

Speaker 2 (SP2): I think that for me there was a tension, a sort of ambiguity, between on the one

hand wanting to facilitate, accommodate but on the other hand, I was one of those angry

academics...so in a sense I felt that I was kind of swinging, you know, my positions... I felt that on

the one hand I was responsible as part of the organising collective but at the same time really quite

angry. And then I was also mindful of the objective of the seminar series, which was to, um, enable

and facilitate dialogue, but actually I felt really really very cross at them .. and wanted to enlighten

them.

Speaker 3 (SP3): Yeah, well one of our aims was to challenge policy it wasn’t just to give them a

platform and say ‘everything you’re doing is fine’...

SP3: (when male academics joined in) they seemed to approach it very differently, once they took

the floor, I really felt that it was this male academic thing about ‘I love to confront, I love to ...’

S3 I remember stepping in at a certain point saying ‘it’s all about mutual respect, we must respect

each other’ and felt impelled to do this, to somehow manage the situation so that it ended on a

positive note. But you could see that as kind of dampening down the real discussion …

Speaker1 (SP1): I could feel that as well, and the academic men in particular were just so angry

SP3: So how much were they really angry and how much was it performance. They drew on, very

well worn narratives, which I am sure they have drawn on many many times before when it does

become that kind of performance of rhetoric - how can there be communication? ...

SP3: But then we are thinking about our performances of femininity and yeah age has something

to do with it and also maternalism, someone like myself wanting to bring back harmony, it’s sort of

motherly.

SP2: Well that’s not my kind of construction of motherhood, I don’tembody it and I don’t perform

it, since I’ve been a mother, I am so much less tolerant than I ever was before. I am much less

patient and less inclined to do smoothing, you know, you are not my children, you’re delegates at a

seminar.

As gender shaped our own tactics in the series and those of others, the series also brought us up

against some brutal realities about gendered spaces. Our ‘Family Cultures’ seminar, which explored

how family cultures shape learner identities, was held in the Women’s Library, a wonderful

national archive of women’s history and culture based in a purpose built, accessible building in a

multicultural and multi-classed area of East London and actively involved in community

engagement. By the close of the series the Library had been abandoned by its host (the very

widening participation oriented university where we had all worked) and moved to an elite

institution. Here it is to reside on a corridor many floors up and function simply as an academic

resource with no remit for outreach. It seems spaces for women are “dispensable”.

SP2: I mean the other really interesting thing there’s the fate of the Women’s Library… That also

kind of ties into this argument we are making about gendered spaces, you know, the Women’s

Library is disposable, is dispensable, despite… do you know what I mean?...

SP3: Yes, yes.

SP2: It is such an amazing resource, an amazing space and it is such a vital part of the community,

and serving so many functions, and yet it is readily dismissed.

What kinds of epistemological gaps existed between seminar participants and how possible is

it to bridge them and in what ways?

Our experience in the seminar series called into question how far dialogue can ever be free, when

the very discursive terrain is predetermined and shaped by certain instrumental functions.

SP1: There is something else sometimes people have to talk in a particular language in order to get

funding from government ... who ultimately sets the discursive terrain in which policy makers and

practitioners can engage?

SP3: We, none of us can step outside of that terrain so even those men who are on their soap box,

who are so virtuous, are still implicated in trying to get contract research and trying to do things

within the terms of the research councils and so on. You can’t be innocent in this agenda...

SP1: No, you’re right.

If the discursive terrain is pre-mapped and also policed the concept of ‘free discussion’ is a

misnomer. None of the actors involved in the dialogue can be said to speak with a personal voice,

however much they may strive to appear to do so. This is not simply a matter of policy speak or

instrumentalism but of fundamental assumptions about what it is to be a person who can speak. The

seminar series took place within a Western humanist culture shaped by the notion of the inviolable

individual, a person who is ultimately responsible for themselves and knowable only to themselves.

This means that dialogue in our seminars, as Gillies (2012) also found inexorably returned to

themes of personal change, even when the ostensible focus was structural issues of class or race.

The seminar series exposed deep divides that dialogue is somehow expected to cross. There was

probably an epistemological gulf between ourselves, coming from predominantly feminist

poststructuralist positions where there is no one ‘right’ answer, and many policy makers who,

whilst in person might have more fluid ways of thinking, also have a vested interest in arguing that

there is a right way of approaching a problem. As one of our group says:” if we can’t even agree on

that, how are we ever going to begin to agree about what the ‘answer’ is?!” This question becomes

more vexed when we acknowledge that we ourselves do have certain values and ‘fixed’ positions

which we are unlikely to forgo, such as a belief in feminism. As we think across the seminar series

it becomes obvious that another epistemological challenge is coming to any kind of agreement

about worthwhile knowledge. In the Teaching Cultures seminar for example, which explored how

teachers cultures and professional identities vary across contexts, one of our group noted that there

was much discussion of how in the policy pronouncements/research commissioned about teachers

and their practice/professionalism: “everyday teacher experience was often missing in favour of

quantitative number crunching which is mantra if academic researchers want their research to be

valued, recognised and referenced by the government and also if they are to have meaningful

discussions about research impact”. This seems to be borne out in the high-profile and government

funded ‘Impact of social sciences project ’where the goal is developing quantitative metrics of

impact, such as numbers of citations, rather than qualitative approaches.

Francis argues that policy makers “enjoy both access and recourse to ‘catchy’ and ‘innovative’

theoretical ideas (2012:11) and encourages educational researchers to improve their communication

skills and not concede the ground to the think tanks private and voluntary sector organisations that

are “owning the policy-practice space in educational researchers stead” (15) This raises the issue:

do we want this ground and what do we have to give up to take it? To make our ideas ‘catchy’ will

we forfeit what makes them significant and thoughtful? As Gillies (2012) suggests, is it anything to

celebrate if our ideas become “defused, misrepresented and translated into anodyne policy friendly

rhetoric.” Should we instead use opportunities like the seminars to engage policy makers with ideas

that are resonant and capable of eliciting real intellectual and emotional engagement? It seems from

our experience that at moments such thinking is able to forge powerful connections.

SP3: one of the questions is how far the policymakers are willing to take on our discourses and

paradigms and our insights … one thing that was quite interesting was the policy maker said he was

going to go and meet with one of our academic speakers.

SP1: …yeah and he had a conversation about his father’s narrative as growing up in a former coal

mining community … I think he did want to engage, but there was something about his own

capacity and space to engage and where that can happen, can it happen in your job when you’ve got

your policy hat on, or does it have to be a private dialogue that you have outside of that space?

SP3: Her speech (one of the seminar keynote speakers) you would say that wouldn’t appeal to

policy makers - it’s very intellectual, it’s very, emotional, you know it’s quite deep and they would

just think it’s silly, but he obviously did respond to it, so it’s something about the quality of the

intellectual argument that can, um, engage the policy makers.

In organising the series we had paid attention to the best ways of expressing ideas and engaging

people with them so that the dialogue can begin, without giving up our academic tools of analysis.

One of the interests of the seminar series initiated in the first seminar, ‘Cultural Narratives and

Forms of Knowing’, was understanding how cultural narratives found in multiple contexts shape

our understandings of knowledge and learning. Throughout the series we included many different

forms of non-academic knowledge production through art, photography, digital media, and music

and so on. However, in framing the questions that shaped each seminar the academic language we

were using was not always communicating to our desired audience. A teacher who spoke at the

‘Teaching Cultures’ seminar tweeted his colleagues beforehand and sent out our three questions:

How do teachers cultures and professional identities vary across contexts; How can teachers resist

and subvert the dominant discourses of professionalism; How are dominant discourses of

professionalism gendered and raced?” the result was incomprehension. One of the speakers at the

ensuing seminar spoke about white teacher racism and expected questions or a reaction from the

audience – some dialogue – but she did not receive any. In conversation following the event she

revealed to one of our group that she was left pondering how her talk had ‘silenced’ a

predominantly White audience. As our group member reflected “Is this a case of saying that ‘race’

talk in having the opposite effect to that desired and needs thinking about if we are to nurture wider

dialogue across communities?”

Our initial discussion focused on our perceived lack of power in relation to policy makers, but we

subsequently reflected on how others such as practitioners positioned us as powerful because of our

academic capital. Invited speakers with powerful roles, for example in national unions, declined to

speak because they felt they were not academic enough. Practitioners such as teachers or librarians

worried about their style of presentation constantly checking and rechecking with the seminar

organisers. The fears they expressed suggest that academic spaces are not always considered safe or

comfortable; perhaps in part because such contributors also experienced gendered and racialised

inequality. Since such users are from the type of groups academics are expected to engage with, this

lack of comfort is a serious issue.

SP1: No, the other thing I just remembered, (from the ‘Popular Cultures’, seminar which explored

how learner identities are shaped by popular culture) is talking to the guy from the BBC, who said

that he had read the blurb and passed it around colleagues - but other colleagues didn’t want to do it

because it had the word identity in it.

SP3: And what was the objection to the word identity?

SP1: He just said it sounded too academic.

SP2 It was the link between identity and inequalities class, gender and race, and maybe there is

something there about how that language can be perhaps seen as distasteful.

SP3: Yeah, or is it that they find it too abstract - the words gender, race, class, perhaps if it was put

in a different way...

SP1: Yeah but it’s so funny because part of what he said he did that showcase of different clips of

television programmes and you can see what they wanted to do there was ‘oh how we represent

young people from all backgrounds’ and, you know, it was really funny how they draw on that as

part of showing the value of the BBC…

SP3: But you could also have another argument that policy makers and practitioners might say

‘well, don’t talk to me about gender, race and class, talk to me about somebody or something that

might have happened to someone - a real “person”

We had anticipated that the space where the dialogue takes place may make a difference, opening

up new possibilities. In taking our seminars outside of universities and into other settings we had

hoped to break down boundaries. The non-academic spaces may have provided locations for

dialogue but we took academia with us just the same. As one group member reflected:”Do

practitioners perceive us as “reaching down” or condescending just using the venue for our own

purposes so they were their physical spaces but not their intellectual ones?” It should also be said

that just because a venue is outside the university does not mean it is less intimidating. Crossing the

long brick built expanse of the forecourt of the British Library for example, as we did for the

‘Knowledge Cultures’ seminar, is a forbidding experience for most people as it presents a

seemingly monolithic building set apart from everyday life. The kinds of roles different practitioner

participants played in the dialogue interested us. If part of the aim was to bring together different

domains, how far were people there simply to protect them? Who could we claim as allies and what

are the problems in that?

SP1: I think there is something about our desires to take it outside of the university space and how

successful that might have been. I think maybe it was in terms of perhaps creating a different sense

of dialogue, um, and people, being introduced to the Women’s Library, you know, or even

Toynbee Hall, and becoming aware of the work that they did. But I don’t know how...

SP3 I don’t think we fully achieved what we wanted to do by having it in those spaces because we

wanted the users of those spaces to be involved in the seminars, and for example I think we worked

really hard to ask their volunteer groups or young people they work with to come along but it didn’t

happen. Um, so that’s a big issue really, isn’t it, in terms of what we wanted to do and what we

were able to do. But I think that having them in those spaces has made the series come alive in a

way that a lot of them don’t and I think that’s really added a lot of value to them because it’s

contextualised what we’re talking about

It is tempting to look for allies in these scenarios and to cast some practitioners/ participants as

heroes (and villains). For example, in the ‘Knowledge Cultures’ seminar which explored ‘what

constitutes valid knowledge and where can it be found’? representatives from the Occupy protest

movement gave an inspiring presentation about the Tent University, which was an informal

university set up as part of the protest in London next to St Paul’s Cathedral, where academic

speakers offered public talks and informal thematic workshops were conducted by the protesters

themselves. However, as they themselves acknowledged, the Tent University was dominated by

white males, and would not have provided a comfortable shelter for us. Nevertheless, the seminar

series provided an opportunity to learn from practitioners how to do dialogue well. One of the most

successful presentations came in the Family Cultures seminar from a community arts organisation

involved in a cross cultural intergenerational project. One of us reflected on how moving this had

been for her: “It was brought to life through dialogue and understanding of each other that took time

and found common ground. Maybe that’s what it’s about, it’s not an instant fix, it will take time to

move beyond dialogue to full engagement and it takes effort on both sides, there has to be a will to

engage”

How possible is feminist praxis within the academic context of impact and engagement?

As feminist researchers we pondered our particular responsibility within the dialogue and how far it

was our role to be assertive or responsive. In doing so we drew upon the history of feminist thinking

alluded to in the Introduction, which has grappled with women’s ambiguous relationship with

academia: the desire to claim a space but also to transform; the imperative to assert that

transformative knowledge can be found not in the pronouncements of the elite individual, but

within communal and often disregarded spaces of everyday thinking.

SP3: I always took the position that it was our job to set the agenda, not follow the agenda, or do

what the policy makers want. They need to be able to see things in a different light and raise

different kinds of questions. Um, sometimes now I think maybe that was extremely arroganT I

would have stated it with complete confidence a few years ago, that it was totally incontrovertible

that that was the job of the intellectual, and I’m starting to wonder whether… is there more to it?

SP2: Are you becoming a neoliberal subject?!

SP3: No! I just think is there something arrogant about that that doesn’t take into account how you

communicate those ideas, um, to other people. .

SP2: But the ESRC funded project, the seminar series, which is about independence and about

academic, critical space, um… surely if there is any safe space then it’s there? The ESRC is

funding, um, research that’s independent and academically rigorous.

SP3: I think that’s quite a naïve way of thinking about it really, because when you think about all of

the submissions to the ESRC, how do they choose amongst them? In things that they find difficult

to accommodate there is obviously some… politics… everything is political and the ESRC is

political just like everyone else...

We knew that impact was important but we struggled to understand what it meant or how it worked.

As Williams suggests the impact agenda seems to be shaped by a simplistic understanding of

research-led policy ‘as a linear progression from research, through dissemination of evidence to

policy change…a cause for serious concern, given that policy formation rarely works in this way’

(Williams: 490).

SP2: Isn’t there something though about the very notion of impact and what on earth does that mean

- how do you evaluate it, how do you measure it, instant impact, or lasting impact... It may not

happen today, it may not happen the day of the seminar, or it may have had a profound impact then

but none thereafter. It’s all a bit of a kind of nebulous nonsense term isn’t it

SP3: There is another question about the social benefits of research and is there an argument that

you know we aren’t thinking enough, about what benefit our beloved research is having to those

people in society who need the most change - that’s a real question. Social research, why should we

have education research, what is the point?

We wanted to draw attention to how engagement was an embodied experience. As Ahmed (2004)

would describe it, affect was circulating, flowing and also blocking.

SP1: Yeah and there is something about whether or not that sense of antagonism and tension and

the really knotty, difficult, quite emotional landscape - does that actually factor in that idea of

impact... all of those things, which are really actually quite productive. I mean, the fact that we are

having this discussion, or writing this, or even that perhaps it unsettled people…

SP3: Yeah I mean I suppose the language of impact is all very neutral isn’t it - it doesn’t take into

account the kind of emotional and affective domain that is the actual experience of doing it so

maybe that is something that we need to think more about.

SP2: Because I suppose that is precisely what was happening in the ‘Local Cultures’ seminar when

the room bristled, you know, that was impact.

SP1: Yeah, you felt it. What would happen to those uncomfortable feelings, that affective kind of

milieu if we just say ‘well that’s impact happening, let’s just sit back and...’.

Lynch (2010:61) argues that “through our interdependencies and vulnerabilities we exercise

judgments, judgments that are deeply affectively driven”, but that there is little space within the

academy to analyse how this shapes social action. She suggests that the affective does not belong in

what she calls the ‘care-less’ academy. Certainly there is a sense in which we mobilized speakers

without necessarily caring enough what it might feel like for them to be exposed to a new and

complex audience. In one of the seminars a speaker who was also our PhD student broke down as

she recounted her experiences of racism. As one of our group reflected “ The emotional guilt for me

was also that in doing something for academic gain, as a feminist, I brought pain to another woman,

That guilt still lingers with me”-. However, we could argue that the call for engaging with publics

depends on mobilizing and extending care. We must not only care for our ideas and our students but

potentially for everyone. Lynch presents what is an essentialised view of the emotions which is very

common in feminist writings on education. We need a more sophisticated reading which

acknowledges that: ”emotions are negotiated states which come into being informed and regulated

by culture and that are both formed by and perceived through layer upon layer of cultural

accretions”( Quinn, 2010:39). “Bristling” and “tension”, tears and anger and how able we are to

express them are constituted by cultural factors, they are not purely ‘natural’, and this makes it even

more important to take note of them as signposts of impact. Having assumed the mantle of care in

entering into dialogue with others outside of academe and this having been necessarily complicated

by affect we pondered whether it is ever worth the effort.

SP2: Dialogue, the word dialogue and its meaning…, is dialogue in the true sense of the word, um,

ever attainable in these spaces? I mean, ok, it can bring these people together, and you can construct

it and manage it in particular ways but ultimately that dialogue is always going to be so utterly

regulated by these kind of unspoken, invisible, um, forces that each of us bring with us, but then

become complicated further by what happens in that room, in that space - and, not just that, but

what we think the ultimate repercussions are of the dialogue that takes place…, we’re representing

ourselves, we’re representing our institution, we’re representing our sector, we’re representing our

politics

SP3: So what happens once you get past the point of, you know, pretending that you have this pure,

constructive space? Does that mean that it’s not worth doing it..?

SP2: No, but I think it is less predictable, you know, what we set out to achieve, how we went about

doing it, the impact that was felt in the room in that affective sense and what people have taken

away from it, ourselves included, um, means that it is worthwhile doing but whether or not it’s that

kind of linear ‘we do this, this happens, we do that, that happens’...

SP3: If we also should think about the pleasurable aspect, shouldn’t we? There were moments in all

of the seminars, which to me were deeply pleasurable and the environment and the speakers and the

people that were there and the art, you know, there was something in it that was, for us all, a drive...

SP2: Also, I mean yes, it’s a pleasure, yes the anxiety, but if we’re also if we’re looking at the

labour, the kind of, the gendered, you know, the amount of preparation, anticipation, you know, the

juggling that we each had to do, You know, all of that stuff, the behind the scenes stuff that goes on,

um, and how that’s all then parked, you know it’s like ‘right, ok, we’re here and now we’re

professional and we are delivering

One of the fertile aspects of our discussion was exploring metaphors that helped convey the hopes

and the complexities of living engagement as feminist academics.

SP3: I was just thinking about the metaphors, because I always go back to this discussion I had

quite a few years ago, we all wanted to be professors and someone said ‘you know, they don’t want

people like us, they want hard hitters’, and I said ‘I don’t want to be a hard hitter, I want to be a

creative weaver’ and I’ve stuck to that, you know, and I think it is important because there is this

dominant image of what an academic leader should be and it is all about getting the ball out of the

park so that no-one can follow you and is there a way you can be more creative and bring things

together, but, as you say, be self-critical as well and not be this idealiser or romanticiser.

SP2: But maybe that arrogance, um, the male academic kind of arrogance of being the hard hitter

and positioning yourself as kind of aloof, beyond untouchable is a form of self-preservation because

you are not laying yourself open to the same sorts of judgements as if you are trying to work with

people and be accommodating and creative and respectful and collegiate and all those things, and

actually at each stage to achieve that you are laying yourself open to having done it badly or piss

somebody off or, you know, not involve somebody enough or involved other people too much, do

you know what I mean, so in a sense that kind of, um, the creative weaver is always going to have a

tougher job of it than the hard hitter who just kind of thinks, ‘well, fuck you all, I’m great’...

For one of our group, who was not part of the initial discussion, focusing on the specific metaphor

of dissemination became a way to explore the gendering of engagement and impact:

“What does dissemination mean -scattering seeds one way? But academics don’t disseminate now

we share exchange, dialogue, collaborate. As the language has shifted to a more feminized language

of sharing how is that reflected in who has impact? Perhaps men disseminate and brief and have

‘deep impact’; and women dialogue and exchange and worry about impact. Impact, flies, hits and

stops. These flows of knowledge are not so flowing but jutting jarring sticking blocking. But this is

impact, impact doesn’t flow. Perhaps it’s masculine knowledge the right and wrong answer the

truth which has impact which can be reached through dialectical duel ‘may the best man win’.

Impact flies, hits and stops. Feminine/ist knowledge listens positions contextualises, deconstructs

and reconstructs is by contrast impotent, disposable and dispensable. Have we sown the seeds of

our own downfall, shared the seeds out? Multiple truths can only pitter patter and flutter, they

cannot hit hard.”

However, as previously discussed, there are things we want to assert and speak out about. The

problem is that these are uncomfortable truths that are not welcomed. By speaking them, we, as the

feminist ‘killjoys’ disrupt any illusion of harmony (Ahmed, 2010). White teacher racism gets stuck

in the wind pipe of the impact machine. We also put ourselves in vulnerable positions both

professionally and personally.

SP2: I mean, there is something really, um tricky, actually about being a kind of feminist academic

and speaking out,

SP3: I mean I quite enjoy the rush of feeling really annoyed, I can’t deny that I really enjoy that

feeling, um, but then the anxiety afterwards about what you’ve exposed, or said, or where you’ve

placed yourself…

Given these problematic and contradictory positions, what is it that makes us want to continue both

attempting dialogue with others in a constructive way and also claim our right to anger to

“backlash, inseminate, and ram down the throat.”, as one of our group put it? In the individualised

world of Higher Education we seek some space for common goals and for a collective feminist

praxis. We want to collaborate but not to claim virtue or position ourselves as ‘other’ in academia.

SP3: Yeah and there’s another aspect that we haven’t talked about and that’s our administrator that

she’s doing so much of the labour, but we’re still not talking about her labour

SP1: I think there is something also about valuing that collaborative approach as a group of us

coming together and she being part of this, which, you know, in this entrepreneurial university, this

idea of the male, single intellectual that is producing outputs on their own and with what is going on

in HE, is that mitigating against those possibilities for collaboration,

SP3: I think it must be in the sense that there is this endless competition and it’s all about

differentiation and what you’ve got, somebody else hasn’t got...

SP2: Something I feel, to resist, is romanticisation of collaboration if you start talking about

gendered labour and invisible labour and the privileging of the male, that somehow we get

positioned as or re-inscribed as ‘other’, as the female academic who is always left wanting There is

something about celebrating what we’ve done; not positioning it within those discourses of deficit...

SP3: Doesn’t that come back to us being a group of people trying to negotiate and work together for

a sort of common programme, in which each person has been allowed to have a leadership...

SP2: But it’s not been straightforward so there is something about the messiness I suppose, it’s just

not claiming that we are the virtuous feminist academics. I mean I don’t want to diss what we’re

doing and how much we have achieved, but there is something about, you know...

SP3: Being reflexive about our own limitations, or the limitations of the...

SP2: Of the feminist project within the entrepreneurial university, academic context I suppose...

Conclusion

As Williams, (2012:494) argues, when faced by the pressures of the impact agenda “we may

discipline ourselves into collapsing whatever space we currently have for independent academic

reflection”. It is important to remember that the goal of our seminar series was to help map and

develop an emerging academic field at the intersection of education and culture. Ultimately that

goal is more important to us than having an impact on policy and practice. In castigating ourselves

for our multiple failures to impact, we may neglect the flowering of ideas that the series

engendered. The dialogue we were able to have was shaped by power relations, and those relations

shifted according to the positionings of participants. The lonely duel between two noble (male)

figures could never be a model for our multiple and messy encounters. In self -critical mode we

might accept that the series was what Lynch (2010) calls an “alienated performance” where we

displayed our “academic self-worth”, certainly they performed an instrumental function in the on-

going pursuit of our academic careers. Nevertheless, the experience seems more nuanced and less

purely self-interested than her account allows. We acted in certain ways because we cared about

protecting the feelings of others and in other ways because we enjoyed the flow of knowledge.

Sometimes we experienced moments of excitement and even triumph. Are we supposed to disavow

this? The seminar series as lived was not a neutral experience and it is not desirable or possible to

be objective about it.

In Biesta’s terms the aim of a dialogue is to do justice to all parties (2012). As previously argued,

we contend that justice can never really be done, as the dialogue is shaped by power relations. Our

reflection on the seminar series confirms this: language, context, space, metaphor are all

constructed in such a way that dominant masculinist notions of what is important prevail. Even

when the debate is explicitly set in opposition to these paradigms, they provide a shaping power.

However, perhaps the seminar series was also at times what Teresa de Lauretis calls a “space off”:

“It is the elsewhere of discourse here and now, the blind spots, or the space-off, of its

representations. I think of it as spaces in the margins of hegemonic discourses, social spaces carved

in the interstices of institutions and in the chinks and cracks of the power-knowledge apparati”

(1987: 25). Whilst the seminar series did not and could not exist outside of the walls of the

academic engagement edifice, if it sometimes functioned as such a ‘space off’, it was more than

worthwhile.

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