May 2004
Links:
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:
-
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. -
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. -
Among our main concerns are the following:
-
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. -
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. -
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.
-
-
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. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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.