Impact Workshop (21): Preparing for Impact: Learning from Experience

Abstract:

This workshop will focus on the speaker’s experience of preparing for ‘impact’ in the 2014 REF, as Head of Department in one of the largest Sociology groupings in the UK, and will also reflect on the results of that assessment exercise. In particular, it will concentrate on preparing impact case studies and how to avoid some of the common pitfalls identified once the results were published. These include not providing the relevant evidence and not carefully distinguishing between the research and the impact claimed for it (relying more on dissemination than providing proof of actual change in practice outside academia). The workshop will also examine some case studies that were highly rated, drawing out the main lessons and general principles that apply in constructing successful case studies that meet the REF criteria.

About the Speaker:

Professor Eamonn Carrabine joined the Department of Sociology of the University of Essex in 1998 and has published broadly in criminology and sociology. He currently serves as an editor on the British Journal of Criminology, and is an international advisory editor on Theoretical Criminology. From 2015 Michele Brown (University of Tennessee) and Eamonn have been editing Crime, Media, Culture. He has been an external examiner for the degree programmes at Goldsmiths College, University of London (Sociology), Roehampton University (Criminology) and the University of Salford (criminology), while he is currently the external examiner for the MA in Criminology at the University of Nottingham. He was also a member of HEFCE’s Sociology sub-panel that assessed the quality of research for the 2014 Research Excellence Framework. Along with Chris Greer (City), Yvonne Jewkes (Leicester) and Tony Kearon (Keele), they were awarded funding from the ESRC [ES/J022381/1] for a Seminar Series led by Ronnie Lippens (Keele), to explore ‘Visual criminology: crime, criminal justice and the image’, involving international speakers from the US, Canada and Australia. The seminars ran from 2013-14, and one event was held at Essex in Wivenhoe House. More recently Eamonn has also been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship to research his project 'The Iconography of Punishment: From Renaissance to Modernity', which will run for three years and began in 2015. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2016.

Background on the Workshops:

Impact beyond the academia is a key element of the University's knowledge exchange (KE) strategy. Furthermore, Impact will become an element of assessment in the UGC RAE 2020, carrying a weighting of 15%. The UK experience in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 indicates that it is important to collect evidence of such impacts.

The Knowledge Exchange Office is organising workshops to be conducted by researchers who have hands-on experience in preparing impact statements and impact case studies for the UK REF 2014 or research councils overseas. The workshops will be of interest not only to colleagues who want to maximise the impact of their research, but also to those who coordinate research developments and research assessment in Faculties.