Impact as Odyssey

Within the context of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), academic labor is being tagged to ‘impact’: to demonstrable outputs that go beyond academia and benefit “the wider economy and society” (HEFCE, 2009, 13; see also Rogers et al., this issue). This move is certainly not new, nor is it unique to institutions of higher education in the UK. ‘Impact statements’ have been standard in funding proposals for quite a while, grant funded projects have long required evidence of application within the communities where research occurs and, in the US, ‘service’ to institutional, professional, and broader communities is well established as one of the metrics used in governing promotion and tenure processes. In this intervention, we reflect on our experience working on an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project where questions of impact – understood as efforts to engage participants and to produce applied results – were an ongoing concern. We offer a vision that recognizes that producing impact in research is a complicated process where alternatives to what some describe as the “wholesale neoliberalization of knowledge production” (Jazeel, 2010, np) might potentially be realized. More specifically, we offer an allegorical rendering of impact as odyssey.