Speaker:

Andrew G. Gibson is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Aarhus University where he works on the Sapere Aude project ‘Research for impact: Integrating research and societal impact in the humanities PhD’, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. He is also a Research Associate of the Culture, Academic Values in Education (CAVE) research centre, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, where he completed his PhD with a study of the forms of resistance enacted by Irish military officers in higher education. He has a book The Affective Researcher due to be published in July. 

Chair: Dr Søren S.E. Bengtsen, Co-Director of CHEF, Aarhus University, Denmark

Time: June 20th, 2022, at 15.00-16.00 Central European Summer Time (CEST) (UTC+2)

Place: A Zoom-link will be shared with the participants closer to the event

Abstract:

Discussion of the societal impact of research has become prominent in higher education recent years. This is also the case in Denmark, though perhaps unusually this is not in response to the introduction of a formal research evaluation process, such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK, or the Netherlands' Standard Evaluation Protocol. As a consequence of this, Danish discussions of ‘societal impact’ are an interesting frame through which to understand the variety of ways this can be understood prior to the inevitable narrowing that takes place when a formal policy is introduced. This talk takes a ‘nomadological’ approach to policy, using institutional policies, national policies, and interviews with heads of humanities graduate schools. It will outline both some aspects of how societal impact is understood, and also what this tells us about power in the governance of Danish higher education.