Professor Mark Reed

Introduction to Creative Public Engagement Thursday 5 March, 11am - 12pm

Free online course - Introduction to Creative Public Engagement (part of Being Human Festival) Thursday 5 March 2026, 11.00-12.00 www.beinghumanfestival.org/introduction...

Impact, intersections and interlacing: a reflexive account of navigating REF at a creative university This article offers a reflexive exploration of impact in creative universities through the lens of a central facilitator navigating the collection of REF case studies across disciplines and faculti...

Read the paper (open access): doi.org/10.1080/2574...

#ResearchImpact #REF2029 #KnowledgeExchange #PracticeResearch #ResearchCulture

- Use form intelligently: alongside metrics, capture process, digital traces, testimonies, and repeat engagements to show credible pathways of influence.

- Expect distributed authorship. Impact is commonly a chorus across partners, participants and publics, with ethical choices about representation.

- Support the facilitator role (impact leads, KE staff, project managers) as methodological bilinguals: translating without stripping out context.

- Make room for “subtle impact” and long timeframes by building evidence that captures shifts in perception, capacity, and relationships, not only headline outcomes.

Useful lessons from us all from this work:
- Treat the impact narrative as a crafted account, not a neutral record. Choices about framing, causality, and voice shape what counts.

REF can legitimise creative research, reward interdisciplinarity, and increase visibility. The risk is that “demonstrable” and “traceable” expectations push impact narratives towards simplification, favouring what is easiest to evidence over what is most meaningful.

This article about experience coordinating REF impact case studies with creative academics shows how they navigated the tensions between bureaucratic templates and socially embedded practice.

REF impact writing often assumes a neat chain: research → engagement → outcome → impact. Creative practice rarely behaves that way.

Why this matters: If impact is treated as “extra-curricular”, it will be done by those who can afford the time, networks, and security. That is an equality issue as much as an impact issue.

Read the paper (open access)

doi.org/10.17356/iee...

#ResearchImpact #ECRs

Women more frequently raised practical barriers such as limited support, limited funding, low energy, and difficulties communicating to non-academic audiences. Men more often highlighted politics and the weak rewards for impact within career progression.

Women and men described impact in similar ways, but women more often framed impact as social engagement and social change. Both groups described impact work as additional, often unrecognised labour, competing with publishing, teaching, and precarious contracts.

Based on survey responses from 31 European countries plus South Africa, the authors found that definitions of impact are broadly shared between genders, but the conditions for producing it are not.

New paper by Karolina Lendák-Kabók et al. looks at how early career researchers in the social sciences understand research impact and what changes when gender is taken seriously.

The future of research impact: reflections and directions YouTube video by Fast Track Impact

We're leading what we hope will be an agenda-setting paper, based on these insights and the discussion we had. Listen into the discussion and share your own thoughts here! I'd love to continue this discussion with you all... www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHDJ...

The future of research impact: reflections and directions YouTube video by Fast Track Impact

Watch leading experts discuss the future of the impact agenda, as I celebrate the launch of the Third Edition of The Research Impact Handbook - fascinating insights from Steven Hill, Emanuela Reale and Gemma Derrick, alongside my own thinking and perspectives from Eric Jensen.

Conditional visibility: Intersectional inequities marginalize local scholarship in conservation science Structural inequities in conservation science, rooted in center-periphery dynamics, funding asymmetries, and systemic gender disparities, marginalize …

The solution: we need to focus as much on building capacity in the local institutions and people with access to this knowledge as much as we need to challenge the hierarchies that privilege certain voices (like mine and others like me) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This systematic review by Ronald Maliao et al provides new empirical evidence of the "disappearing effect" of gender and geography that hides traditional/Indigenous knowledge from sight in citation networks.

Finding diverse, context-specific solutions to global problems requires multiple voices, including the knowledge of marginalised groups alongside evidence from research.

Social Sciences Impact Conference 2026

Book now for this year's Social Sciences Impact Conference in Oxford this March - the theme is on navigating uncertainty to create change www.socsci.ox.ac.uk/impact-confe...

Useful tool to help researchers manage power in engagement processes (developed for conservation, but relevant across contexts) agritrop.cirad.fr/616368/1/Pow...

Thanks to such inspiring speakers and everyone who contributed to the discussion today! Here are the slides from the event www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3l99e...

Free training on participatory methods relevant to engagement and impact from EU-funded REINFORCING Project (3 Feb) - book here: reinforcing.eu/news/reinfor...

Last chance to book your place to hear from thought leaders in research impact and co-author a paper with us on the future of the impact agenda. This will be my last message to promote this, as we already have >200 booked, which is a lot of co-authors if you all want to write!

Get 20% off the new 3rd edition of The Research Impact Handbook www.routledge.com/The-Research...

This is the most comprehensive, up-to-date and evidence-based book I've seen on social media for research impact and it's free via Routledge Books here scholar.google.co.uk/scholar_url?...

Evaluating ChatGPT for research impact assessment: comparative insights from the UK REF - Scientometrics This study assesses the capacity of a custom research evaluation tool built on OpenAI’s GPT-4, implemented through the ChatGPT interface, to replicate the qualitative depth and structure of the United...

Lots of us have tried this and reached the same conclusion, but now someone has written a paper about the fact that ChatGPT can't write impact case studies for REF link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Read it here: www.fasttrackimpact.com/post/we-are-...

#researchimpact #impactculture #methods #participatoryresearch

The blog suggests a step-by-step way to run photovoice in practice and argues that impact here is what lasts: the quieter shifts in what people notice, how they move through places and what they talk about afterwards, whether or not this fits standard metrics.