Epistemic responsibility as an edifying force in academic research: investigating the moral challenges and opportunities of an impact agenda in the UK and Australia

Abstract

The requirement to anticipate, articulate and evaluate the impact of research is a growing part of academic labor. A research impact agenda in the UK and Australia reflects a drive from Governments to see a return on the public investment of research. Some view this as symptomatic of a marketised higher education system, in which knowledge is a commodity as opposed to an object of intrinsic value and dismiss the latter view as nostalgic and unrealistic. Within a research context where knowledge continues to be politicized, longstanding philosophical concerns concerning the value of knowledge and its purpose are rerehearsed and revisited. Discourse concerning the preservation of freedom in an age of increased accountability can be seen to give rise to increased moral and emotional dissonance amongst pockets of the academic community. At the same time, the academic community can be largely seen to possess a strong moral sense of epistemic responsibility toward the societal contribution of useful knowledge. This piece, based upon research that examined the philosophical challenges with respect to an impact agenda facing academics in the UK and Australia, will serve to provoke further discussion about the challenges posed by an impact agenda whilst also acting as a provocation for academics to locate and harness a sense of epistemic responsibility in order to respond to the impact agenda. This may enable a departure away from narrow conceptions of knowledge and its instrumentalism, thus supporting the academic community and its actors in forming a more holistic view of the value of knowledge within this context.

Building university-based boundary organisations that facilitate impacts on environmental policy and practice

“…Study participants also outlined a range of ways in which working in the Baltic Eye Project has impacted them as individuals, for example, via increased job satisfaction. Interestingly, this result contrasts recent perception studies of academics from diverse disciplines that found growing scepticism towards the impact agenda [ 53 , 54 ]. The sense of job satisfaction reported by participants arose from the learning opportunities associated with working in a diverse team, as well as a sense of personal achievement from observing tangible impacts of science on policy and practice.…”

Extending the Reach of Research: Introducing Open Accessible Summaries at Language Learning

“…Acknowledging that making science more accessible is difficult, Language Learning aims to help researchers fulfill a sense of epistemological duty to share the knowledge they establish (Chubb & Reed, ). We also hope that this initiative partially addresses our ethical, moral, and social responsibilities to the research participants who provide data and who, directly or indirectly, fund our work.…”

A conducive environment? The role of need support in the higher education workplace and its effect on academics' experiences of research assessment in the UK

“…Indeed, the importance of need satisfaction at work was elegantly demonstrated by Olafsen, Halvari, Forest, and Deci (2015), who found that workplace psychological need satisfaction related to more internal, or personally driven, motivations to work, whereas merely incentivising employees with money did not. Overall, these findings highlight the role of need satisfaction in the workplace context, but they have rarely been extended to understand the experiences of those working in HE (for an exception, see Chubb & Reed, 2017).…”

“…In light of this, many commentators also note the positive aspects of the REF. Here, the REF provides a necessary accountability mechanism for the annual allocation of around £1.6 billion of flexible public funding, can inspire positive changes in the UK's academic culture (such as encouraging more impactful work that benefits society) and effectively harnesses academic epistemic responsibilities (Chubb & Reed, 2017; Hill, 2016; Oancea, 2019).…”