Narrating Impact: Adventures in Swamplands

As academics we face increasing pressure and encouragement to develop the impact dimensions of our scholarship. Writing is major aspect of this, yet the challenges of communicating impact are rarely aired and very few outlets exist where we can tell our impact stories. How do we help make sense of the dilemmas embedded in finding a place for our research findings beyond the world of teaching and academic dialogue? How can we share the highs and lows of being out there in the public arena with our colleagues? In short, can we find narrative forms to generate learning? The first half of the paper is a critical discussion of the main form of impact writing we have to draw upon – the impact case studies generated every few years for national research evaluations (a format pioneered in the UK’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF2014) and has since spread). At best, these audit accounts are fairly stale affairs with more than a whiff of having been written by committee. In many ways this banality is a necessary evil; presented with a template of pre-populated fields, set character limits and guidelines with obscure evaluator criteria, we can be forgiven for producing accounts heavy on boilerplate text and low on insights. At their worst however, these case studies mislead. The messy endeavour of engaging non-academics is boiled down to a straightforward linear affair where research drives change in the ‘real world’. This caricature is itself an over-simplification but the fundamental point holds: these writing forms leave no room for many of the things that matter most when we work with non-academics – context, relationship management dilemmas, power dynamics, co-creative discoveries etc. These unsatisfactory narratives have consequences. Distinct political economics are emerging around impact and these case studies are instrumental in institutionalising who gets to write about impact, what organisations are ‘beneficiaries’ of our impact, what sub-fields can claim most relevance and so on (Dunlop 2018). In the second half, I frame writing about impact as an ethnographic form. Here ask how can we craft impact stories differently and in ways designed to reveal not conceal? I draw on my own fieldwork diaries kept over many years of policy engagement (which, inspired by Donald Schön [1983], I call ‘Swamplands’). Using recollections captured in my Swamplands, I try my hand at crafting non-fiction accounts of my work with policymakers in World Bank and UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE). These confessional tales (Van Maanen 1988) meditate on two dimensions of impact – the practice itself but also the institutionalised written versions of them. Contextual details, hurdles, triumphs, biography etc are used to fill in the blanks left in the ‘official’ accounts of the audit case studies and press releases. I conclude with a (tentative) manifesto for writing impact. I address what more we need to reveal and what formats we have to serve that? By engaging our writing imagination, can we inspire our impact imagination?