Back to homepage utwente.nl
MEASURING THE SOCIETAL IMPACTS OF UNIVERSITIES' RESEARCH INTO ARTS AND THE HUMANITIES (HERAVALUE)
Panel Session at the 2011 CHER Conference, Reykjavik, Iceland, 23rd-25th June 2011.
“The Humanities in the European Research Area” Project HERAVALUE (Measuring the societal impacts of universities' research into arts and the humanities) is organising a scientific panel session at the June 2011 Consortium of Higher Education Research (CHER) conference. The session has the same name as the project, and involves four presentations drawn from the first research phase of the project. Further details on the session is available from the Convenor, Dr Paul Benneworth, University of Twente, the Netherlands.
Presentation 1 "The problematic of measuring the value of arts and humanities research”, Professor Ellen Hazelkorn, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland (Session Chair)
This presentation provides an introduction to the panel session by highlighting the problems which confront higher education researchers seeking to understand the value of arts and humanities research as a first step towards finding ways to articulate the value. The paper highlights three main problems, which are addressed separately in the remainder of the panel papers, and seeks to provide conceptual clarity regarding those problems. Profr Hazelkorn argues for a more strictly objective mode of argumentation, and a break from normative disagreements between different societal groups that make it currently impossible to ‘fairly’ measure the impacts of arts & humanities research.
Presentation 2: “Linkages between A&HR and civil society”, Professor Magnus Gulbrandsen, NIFU & University of Oslo, Norway
This presentation seeks to provide a typology of the processes through which arts & humanities research is implemented in society. Transcending traditional science-push models of technology transfer, the paper uses more contemporary understandings of creativity, innovation and enterprise to understand the vectors by which research changes society. The paper seeks to develop a threshold for understanding whether a particular piece of research has ‘made an impact’, and sketches some of the dimensions along which this can take place, including existience of high class research, clearly identified users, a creative moment of transfer and a changed behaviour set of users.
Presentation 3 “Understanding ‘research’ in the arts and humanities”, Dr Elaine Ward, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland
The HERAVALUE project uses the phrase “arts & humanities research” rather glibly as if A&HR had a common set of properties that distinguished it from other disciplines. But the reality is that the differences within arts & humanities research asre in some cases even greater than between some humanities disciplines and the sciences. This paper seeks to explore how arts & humanities research has been defined, and where and why the term is used. The paper notes the highly politicised nature of the term as part of battle between conceptions of the value of sciences, and argues that a more emergent definition of arts and humanities is necessary if one is to understand how their value becomes constructed in particular times and places.
Paper 4: “Arts & humanities research between objective values and normative valuations”, Dr. Adrie Dassen, Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, the Netherlands.
This paper explores the ways in which policy-makers have attempted - and largely failed - to develop valuation and evaluation methods for arts & humanities research. The paper then seeks to understand why that has happened as a first step to understanding the boundary conditions of arts & humanities research’s value. The paper notes that the majority of methodologies internalise a single normative view of A&HR’s value, and develops a typology for the tensions this creates. The paper concludes by setting out a set of dimensions which are necessary for the bridging between these normative perceptions to move from a disagreement about ‘values’ towards a debate about arts & humanities research’s contribution to wider societal development.
The project HERAVALUE is financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme which is co-funded by AHRC, AKA, DASTI, ETF, FNR, FWF, HAZU, IRCHSS, MHEST, NWO, RANNIS, RCN, VR and The European Community FP7 2007-2013, under the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities programme.
|
|
