We hosted our first roundtable event on February 4th which critically engaged with the knowledge exchange and impact (KEI) landscape within the UK Higher Education Institutions. The event was an opportunity for HEI colleagues to explore and address structural issues impacting KEI and research cultures.
After PIs Dr Hephzibah Israel, Dr Stanislava Dikova and Dr Annie Sorbie welcomed all guests and speakers, they presented a brief overview of our project aims, its stages, and future outputs. They summarised how the project developed in response to long-standing concerns about what “impact” means, and the systemic and structural issues related to KEI. Within the project, decolonial approaches play a key role in addressing and challenging the effects of historic colonial structures in contemporary impact agendas such as the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF). The project asks whether alternative definitions of impact and benefit are possible, and looks at ways to influence institutional practices at the University of Edinburgh.
For the event, we invited three guest speakers from different disciplinary backgrounds and institutions to share their knowledge and experience of doing KEI work.
Dr Jessica Hope was our first guest speaker. Jess is a critical human geographer and interdisciplinary researcher in the field of Political Ecology at the University of St Andrews. She introduced us to one of her recent projects “Roads to Sustainability”. The project team comprisedJess, two post-doctoral associates, and 16 Indigenous researchers, investigates road building in the Western Amazon and the emancipatory possibilities of alternative infrastructures. As it tackles the clash between profit-driven corporation plans and the constitutional land rights of Indigenous people, the project applies decolonial concepts for the development of equitable collaborative practices.
Thinking about KEI, Jess pointed out, the impact agenda can seem quite de-politicised: their project contested the distinctions between nature and politics. To combat extractive research methods, Jess argued that we need to re-define expertise and include opportunities for local collaborators to co-produce projects’ aims and being able to use research findings in their own campaigns. While impact, at the moment, is mostly understood as “making a change outside of academia”, Jess argued that it is equally crucial to feed back into our own institutions and advocate for easier and more equitable administrative practices (e.g. fair reimbursement for external collaborators) and co-authorship practices.
Our second speaker, Dr Katucha Bento, is the founder of the Free Afro-Brazilian University and lecturer on Race and Decolonial Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Katucha described the event as an important opportunity to foster conversations around disobedient practices and creative approaches to understand what makes colonial, racist, and inaccessible practices of knowledge exchange.
Through discussing her project “R-Existence and Healing in Brazilian rural community: Weaving solidarity during the pandemic”, Katucha challenged the concept of benefit and its roots in colonial structures which continue to define what counts as knowledge and perpetuate competitive models of research. In her projects, communities determine what benefit meant for them, co-designing the project aims and defining what impact looks like in their own terms. This encompassed philosophical reflections on addressing racism, moving beyond historical violence and nurture present-day healing through spiritual practices, especially in contexts with limited access to food and healthcare.
Katucha helped us reflect on how researchers are still complicit in perpetuating colonial extraction, and how we can support meaningful exchanges that lead to concrete benefits for Indigenous communities. KEI, she emphasised, needs to be re-imagined through decolonial, ethical, and community-centred frameworks.
Our third guest speaker, Dr Giovanna Vitelli, is Head of Collections and Curation at the Hunterian Museum of the University of Glasgow. As a practice-based researcher who does community participatory work on a daily basis, she pointed out the limitations imposed by the language of REF. While inclusivity and collaboration have become part of academic culture on paper, their current use still fails to meaningfully tackle the historical hierarchies of power around expertise and knowledge production. Truly collaborative and inclusive research, she argued, needs to devolving such power.
As REF language revolves around issues of “robustness”, “high quality standards” and “expendable academic outputs”, it builds competition into the research funding process, which fundamentally goes against the values of inclusivity and collaboration. In recent participatory projects, Giovanna discussed the language of funding applications and institutional policies directly with the participant communities. Taking their critiques on board, she worked towards changing the Hunterian Museum’s policy language.
She pointed out how essential it is to re-define expertise. “Lived experience”, while important, should not be the only thing researchers and institutions seek from communities: they have professional expertise and academic knowledge in their own fields. Recognising the professional and academic expertise that grows outside of our own academic environment presents us with opportunities for profound growth.
To conclude the event, we opened the floor to questions from all participants, who provided us with rich food for thought. From the recognition that we still very much operate in colonial hierarchies which affect how we think and do research, to how to tackle the practical barriers imposed by our reliance on funding, and funding bodies’ colonial structures. Participants’ questions prompted us to think about our own project, its potential legacies, and the challenges of bringing forth change, especially within the limitations of short-term research projects.
While these discussions can be difficult, they also create space for solidarity, and we are grateful to all our participants for such an open and meaningful discussion.
Written by Gaia Duberti, Gaia.Duberti@ed.ac.uk.
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