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Preliminary response to HEFCE Consultation Paper: RAE 02/2004 – panel configuration and recruitment

May 2004

Links:

• HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England)
• RAE 02/2004

This Association represents teachers, researchers, and students in its fields within UK Higher Education. Its predecessor body was instrumental in arguing for the formation of a panel within the Research Assessment Exercise that could properly recognise and assess research in our fields. This panel (65) was created for the first time in the 1996 Exercise.

Our comments on the present Consultation Paper are as follows:

1. Prior to 1996 the field had been inadequately assessed as a division of work within a broader category of research including librarianship, information science and other, rather disparate, research areas. Its growth and distinctiveness, despite an inherent multi-disciplinary approach to research, led to the decision, for both 1996 and 2001, to create a separate panel composed in ways that reflected and arose from the growth and significance of the field, and its straddling of both vocational and academic, social science and humanities elements.

2. The proposed structure retains this panel as a distinctive ‘sub-panel’ (UoA 40). We are, however, concerned by its location within a grouping (panel J) which also includes Library and Information Management, English Language and Literature, and Linguistics. This seems to return to earlier misunderstandings about the character of the field, broad and cross-disciplinary though it is. These are odd bed-fellows with few common characteristics as research fields.

3. Among our main concerns are the following:

   1. The association with library and information management returns to a pre-1996 misunderstanding of communication and media studies. The fields are wholly unlike in character and intellectual foundations.

   2. The group places the many social and human science researchers in our fields at the margins and away from the centre of gravity of this grouping.

   3. The grouping would seem naturally to have a dominant member in English language and literature. If this field were to provide the parent panel chair and its leading intellectual direction, many groups or departments in the field would consider themselves inappropriately judged and might have some difficulty returning all their researchers to this single UoA.

4. Our members have indicated to us an additional concern, registered in our earlier response to the Joint Funding Bodies’ Consultation on the RAE (November 2002), about the assessment of practice work. This is an issue which afforded much discussion in 2001 for panels concerned with a range of performance, art, design, and practice subjects. In that respect it is an issue which some of our members will be addressing in common with researchers in fields such as those found in panel O (including art and design and performing arts). The question of the precise meaning of research as “original investigation leading to new knowledge or understanding”, and its relation to creative or production work, some of which is and some of which is not research, will need to be discussed in relation to draft published assessment criteria. However, in relation to the current proposals, we note that much production work within our field is collaborative rather than the work of a single creative voice as is more common in either English or art. There are very distinct positions taken as to the research basis for analysis of forms of cultural production and expression, and these might well not be the same across practice work and more social science or analytical disciplines. But all would feel at some distance from the criteria and conventions of key subjects within panel J.

5. For these reasons we are disappointed at the proposal (para 11) not to allow UoAs to have sub-panels as they did in 2001. This enabled panels, as they were then termed, to deal with specialised areas, for example practice work construed as research, in response to the criteria published by panel 65, or film and television work in relation to the 2008 proposed UoA 65. It also enables submitting departments to judge where most appropriately to target their submission, and avoids the need they may feel to split submissions from what are institutionally single research units.

6. The danger of the current proposal is of a very substantial amount of cross-referral of work from UoA 40 to UoAs located in entirely different panels (notably I, K, and O). This will both complicate the work of the assessors and introduce a risk of variable assessment criteria, and thus excessive attention to ‘tactics’, or simply uncertainty among submitting institutions.

7. It is plain that any field has its distinctive approaches and intellectual culture, and we recognise that ours is not alone in itself being variegated, and indeed beset with continuing debate as to the criteria of intellectual and empirical excellence – that is what gives it much of its vitality. However we do feel the suggested groupings of UoA’s could seriously disadvantage or deeply concern many working in our fields.

8. We recognise that any grouping will be to some extent a matter of convenience and very rough and loose association. For that reason, rather than suggest a particular alternative grouping (though one or two might suggest themselves from the above comments), we would rather seek assurance about the autonomy of UoA’s and the need to limit the role of the proposed main panels, especially to dilute any potential imposition of an inappropriate frame of assessment on fields which are significantly distinct.

9. We have a further reservation about the role of Additional Members to main panels. Experience in 2001 suggests that non-academic members frequently played a very limited role in the work of panels, because of alternative demands on their time and for other reasons. The suggestion (para 25) that such members might, even though in exceptional cases, be acceptable as members on the basis of limited commitment and a limited number of meetings, seems wholly unacceptable given the importance of panel discussion and of the outcomes of the assessment for the research community. It would seem additionally odd that such members would be at the behest of the main panel chairs not at the suggestion of the UoA chairs.

We would welcome any opportunity to discuss these matters further with the Councils if it could be helpful.

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