The higher education impact agenda, scientific realism and policy change: the case of electoral integrity in Britain

Pressures have increasingly been put upon social scientists to prove their economic, cultural and social value through ‘impact agendas’ in higher education. There has been little conceptual and empirical discussion of the challenges involved in achieving impact and the dangers of evaluating it, however. This article argues that a critical realist approach to social science can help to identify some of these key challenges and the institutional incompatibilities between impact regimes and university research in free societies. These incompatibilities are brought out through an autobiographical ‘insider-account’ of trying to achieve impact in the field of electoral integrity in Britain. The article argues that there is a more complex relationship between research and the real world which means that the nature of knowledge might change as it becomes known by reflexive agents. Secondly, the researchers are joined into social relations with a variety of actors, including those who might be the object of study in their research. Researchers are often weakly positioned in these relations. Some forms of impact, such as achieving policy change, are therefore exceptionally difficult as they are dependent on other actors. Strategies for trying to achieve impact are drawn out such as collaborating with civil society groups and parliamentarians to lobby for policy change

Science, ethics, and politics : convensations and investigations/ Edit.: Kristen Renwick Monroe

ix, 252 hal.: ill.; 23 cm

Science, ethics, and politics : convensations and investigations/ Edit.: Kristen Renwick Monroe

ix, 252 hal.: ill.; 23 cm

Care and the transformative potential of ethics

The final chapter interweaves the volume’s major themes and argues that the political psychology of real or perceived violence in a global world calls for new approaches for understanding the collective experience of diversity, violence, and ethics and the shaping of subjectivity. The chapter calls for the importance of adopting a relational understanding of the self whereby self and identity acquire meaning through constant interactions with others and contexts. It is also argued that globalization enables meetings with previously faraway others, which may lead to questioning one’s own convictions and conceptions of the self. The establishment of transformative dialogues between members of allegedly antagonistic groups, and particular attention to both the psychological underpinnings of closure and antagonistic relations and their structural causes can be conceived of as analytical tools to further our understanding of group closure and conflict. But they can also be important instruments if we are to seriously grasp the promotion of social courage, pro-social behavior, tolerance, care, and altruism

Science, Ethics, and Politics: Conversations and Investigations

Gregory R. Peterson (with Kevin S. Reimer, and Michael Spezio, Warren Brown, James Van Slyke, and Kristen Renwick Monroe) is a contributing author, “Virtuous Courage: New Methods for the Interdisciplinary Study of Virtue. Book description: The relationship between science and ethics has been subject to much debate. This volume demonstrates the mutually beneficial relationship that can take place between ethics and science. It presents work that utilises the tools of science - broadly conceptualised - to elucidate ethical issues, showing that careful scientific analysis of ethical issues can reveal new insights. This is supplemented by conversations with the authors - some of them pre-eminent scientists addressing issues of ethics, including two Nobel laureates - to learn how they came to the study of ethics and ask how they conceptualise and think about ethical issues. Science, Ethics and Politics provides substantive insight into particular ethical issues, ranging from issues of torture during war to parents\u27 obligations to children. This book is designed as a complement to traditional texts on ethics and should appeal to students of ethics as well as to the general public.https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/hppr_book/1012/thumbnail.jp