Unsettling impact : responding to cultural complexity

Australian academic research is currently in the midst of a flurry of reporting activity regarding 'impact', building on the articulation of impact as a university research metric in the UK. Looming large is the Australian Research Council's roll-out of its Research Engagement and Impact (REI) framework, itself a response to the current federal government's directive to universities to demonstrate usefulness to society more broadly (Australian Research Council 2017a). Australia's universities will increasingly have to prove the impact of their research, with measures on engagement, and case studies of impactful projects submitted to be independently assessed via a process akin to the pre-existing Excellence for Research in Australia (ERA) benchmarking exercise. This Thinking Space piece emerges from within that flurry. In recent weeks I have been involved in the creation of "” and experience as the subject of "” a research impact 'case study' for the ARC's REI Assessment Pilot (see Australian Research Council 2017b). A sample of disciplines across Australian universities was invited to submit pilot case studies of impactful research, using the ARC's draft guidelines. Geography was not one of them. (Our discipline's turn will come in 2018, when the REI assessment is rolled out to all disciplines.) But, as geographers well know, our research is interdisciplinary in nature, meaning that our projects potentially qualify in multiple discplinary field codes. In my case, a suite of team-based projects that I led in partnership with Aboriginal community organisations was selected by my university to be piloted as an impact case study in 'Indigenous research' . My thoughts here arise from this early experience of how the impact agenda appears to be unfurling, set against considerable debate within and beyond geography about what 'impact' means, refracted through concerns with complexity, politics, and ethics.