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When you can& #39;t sleep so you end up trying to read academic texts to work out if your concept of public engagement is more akin to "Participatory Action Research (PAR)" than it is to the majority of projects/initiatives which use the term public engagement to describe themselves.
For those asking: Behold, the tweet thread written at 4am... If public engagement within higher education is mostly controlled by higher education, it ends up prioritising things that sector values - promotion, prestige, advantage in the marketplace...(1/?)
...that is the UK university system, and supporting income generation (via supporting grant applications, generating REF Impact case studies, attracting philanthropy and Industry collaboration, and student recruitment). It needs to do this in order to survive. (2/?)
I& #39;ve never met a public engagement professional working in the UK who was confident their university would continue to invest in embedding structures to allow public engagement to be possible within the research, and sometimes teaching done at that institution in perpetuity.(3/?)
We debate the term "public engagement" forever, and (in my experience) not always in good faith - but the super broad definition really is a problem. Or... is it? Is everyone else happy with using the term public engagement within higher education to refer to a cycle... (4/?)
...of communications activities, interactive events, and occasional consultation - with aims raising from "It& #39;s fun and morale is so bad we need this" to "this will make a fine REF Impact case study"? And if so, is that OK? (5/?)
That& #39;s what the university wants, and you can make a career out of supporting that. My career to date has been driven by the idea: "Let& #39;s change research so it& #39;s more inclusive, so that researchers across all disciplines aren& #39;t actively penalised (in career terms) for... (6/?)
...working with experts from beyond the Ivory Tower - for listening to, responding to, and collaborating with people who are too often the subject of research rather than collaborators". (7/?)
I& #39;m painfully aware that the colleagues and people I looked up to who taught me this vision - have mostly left the sector feeling disheartened. I& #39;ve wanted to make practical changes to how research organisations operate to facilitate what I think of as "engagement"... (8/?)
Because often it& #39;s a statement in a vision document and impossible in practice. You hit 2 big hurdles. 1. This means needing to redistribute power, recognition and resources, which I don& #39;t believe any university will do willingly at scale, let alone a whole sector. (9/?)
2. While this varies hugely across different disciplines, this way of working challenges the idea that "good" research separates researcher, and what or who is being researched. These are not hurdles one jumps easily. (10/?)
Especially while working in a precarious feeling professional services role, often looked down upon, with a measly budget and hardly any staff. But we carry on! It& #39;s too important to stop! Even small change is huge in the grand scheme of things! (11/?)
We can make it easier for people to work this way! .....Right? It IS too important to give up. It shouldn& #39;t be OK to exploit people, or to put them in a vulnerable position out of intellectual curiosity. (12/?)
...and you shouldn& #39;t have to be a researcher working in academia to have your voice included in research which is about you, or directly affects you. So... am I looking in the wrong place? (13/?)
Should I be looking at research methods which promote recognition of lived experiences and collaboration and co-creation instead? I am not an academic, and having seen that world up close I do not want to follow that career path. (14/?)
Is there no place for a non-academic* (*I love being defined by what I& #39;m not, thanks higher education public engagement jargon) in supporting this change? That WOULD explain how uncomfortable I have always felt... (15/?)
Would a focus on more participatory methods of research address some of the ethical concerns we see in STEM subjects? Would "PAR" make it impossible for a researcher in a lab somewhere in Cambridge to apply for funding to see if they can work out how to eradicate... (16/?)
...a particular medical condition from future populations, without ever talking to or understanding the lived experiences of people who live with that condition now? (17/?)
Is what I want "public engagement" work to be actually creating systems and ways of working inside academia so that "PAR" is easier to do? And finding ways to extend that ideology to other disciplines where that methodology isn& #39;t used, or necessarily appropriate? (18/?)
Plus, public engagement (in my mind) is often about creating change - not necessarily via research outputs. So you can& #39;t conflate it with a research methodology - even if I do think of it as a way of working... (19/?)
Welcome to my 4am existential crisis: "Do I see my job as something different to what everyone else sees it as?" The perennial favourite "I& #39;m the wrong person for my job"," and the Depression classic "You should quit, everything is better without you." (20/20).
Is it a scale issue? PAR is a methodology for one research endeavour - While public engagement support work is trying to change the whole academic sector, to promote the ideology contained within PAR... Yes? No? I need sleep.
