This post is an edited interview transcript of our discussion with the wonderful Tamika Heiden for the 2024 Research Impact Summit 

Tamika Heiden: 

People can feel like research engagement is an add-on. I think it should be starting to feel like business-as-usual, but the piece that isn’t business-as-usual would be the fact they have to track it ongoing. That is an add-on. That’s a tricky thing for people.

Tseen Khoo: 

For many, it does feel like an extra thing to do. And I have to say this boils down to the way that academic workloads have historically been done. A lot of engagement work, a lot of outreach work, is not counted. It is not counted in a way that makes a difference to everyday academic lives.

Is there time afforded for it? Are you valued for it? Can you actually see career outcomes from investing in this kind of work?

Some people will do it regardless, absolutely no matter what. They will just do the work, and many researchers do that. And if you add the incentive of having it recognised, having it articulated in promotion documents, that will create a much more aligned workflow for researchers who prioritise engagement. Many universities have awards around engagement. But to actually change that cultural face of how this kind of work is accepted, considered normal, part of what an engaged researcher does and for institutions and leadership to have an understanding of why that is actually a valuable thing to do – all of that, I think, sits around trying to erode the idea that it’s just an extra thing to do because, as we know, it shouldn’t be something that’s retrofitted.

It should not be something that’s at the tail-end of a project. It should be something that is considered from the start, nicely conceptualised and planned. Not in a rigid way but with a view to getting good outcomes or putting yourself in a position to get as much value as possible from doing the work for the stakeholders and for the ultimate purpose of your work. Having that better embedded within our academic systems and having the culture recognise it, I think is a huge part of making sure that it actually stays as a consistent and valuable part of what an academic or researcher does.

Jonathan O’Donnell: 

We have more than enough trouble just recognising that different disciplines have different academic norms, right? Much less the different norms around different pathways to impact and ways of engaging. If you’re doing research with Indigenous groups, for example, around something like policy change, it takes particular care and sensitivity to get to the point where you engage with the group and there’s necessary time spent on finding good, collaborative ways of working that will take projects forward. And things will slip, you know? It’ll go forward, and then it’ll go back. You just have to be there for the long haul. And academics are great at the long haul – some are lucky enough to work on a research program over a 20 to 30-year period. But universities are terrible at the long haul – “We’re going to measure you every 3, 6, 9, 12 months. Can you please deliver something as quick?”

Please understand that this takes time, and it takes effort. It’s so hard.

Tamika:

A large proportion of our audience focus on supporting research and supporting academics. I’d like to ask both of you to speak to how institutions can kind of support and foster that confidence and that engagement piece or / and the strategies and processes you think that could be useful to help in these areas of engagement, communication, impact.

Tseen:

Well, I mean, as I was mentioning before, I think that research culture has a lot to do with the embrace of these kinds of activities and whether it’s valued, whether researchers, in their diversification of engagement activities, are also valued. Because you need to find your comfort level in terms of the engagement and it could be in many modes. As we know, there are so many modes that you could choose to actually do your engagement through. There could be multiple ones, there could be layers, or different stages of the project.

I think there’s been a bit of a bias towards people who can pop up and do a good presentation or be in front of cameras or do that kind of stuff but there are some people who hate that kind of thing and will never go near a camera. I am one of them! So, actually being able to recognise there are very effective ways that academics can engage without being on camera, without being heard in terms of voice, through writing, through all sorts of things – actually recognising there are very different ways you can do it as effectively as each other.

Having that culture within departments, schools and the broader university itself to support and recognise various kinds of activity and to see it as part of what they would like their researchers to do in structurally supported ways is crucial. As I said earlier, having these activities recognised in workloads so that everything is in alignment is very important. Because then you’re not asking people to do extra work that is not actually counted within what their normal workload might be. So it is really treated as a part of their job and not as something they should do if they want a little bit of extra exposure or something like that, which I think devalues what the work can actually be about.

Jonathan: 

In addition to that, consider supporting people when things go wrong. And that’s both from a legal point of view (“Someone has sued me”), but also just in terms of engagement (“I’m in the middle of a pile-on on Twitter, please provide some support.”) But also supporting in terms of just recognising a plurality of voices and a plurality of approaches.

Some of this can be team-based – not everyone is born to do this. Not everyone became an academic because they wanted to engage with the public. A lot of people became academics because they didn’t want to talk to people. Let’s recognise that. If you’re in a research team, it doesn’t have to be everyone trying to get the message out. You can have that as the role of one or two people in the team who like and have the skills for doing that.

I’ve got a big problem with the bias that’s inherent in panels that are meant to represent “Here’s what we want you to do”, and the speakers that you have are all really successful at doing that thing. I’d really like to be able to bring in a voice of someone who’s tried this thing and it hasn’t been successful. This recognises that actually there are different ways to do this, and it doesn’t always work, and that it’s hard work.

It’s not a case of just, “Okay, here is the recipe” because that is not the way academia works. I just bought a t-shirt recently that says, ‘The answer is… it depends’, and that’s because that’s what academia is. There are no simple ways to do this stuff. You’ve got to get down and dirty and try.