Research-based festivals are the perfect way for academics to take control of the impact agenda, according to Michael Eades, an early-career researcher at the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.
“One of the good things about festivals is that academics are taking possession of the Research Excellence Framework and saying it’s not just about economic impact; it’s about social engagement and other things,” says Eades, a cultural contexts research fellow. Many academics realise they already engage with members of the public and can now get brownie points for it through their involvement in festivals, he says.
This is happening on a large scale: the British Science Festival alone includes about 250 events every September. But festival activity is not a novel concept; academics have been involved in organising arts events or in curating science exhibitions for decades. If there’s been a shift, it has been in junior academics seeing this less as a spin-off and more as integral to their research.
Eades’s PhD at the University of Nottingham explored countercultural responses to the valorisation of community, and he did some complimentary work with communities through Nottinghamshire arts charities and the local council. Much of this work was done after submitting his thesis. “There was a horrible hinterland,” he remembers. “I was teaching and not making enough money to live off.”
Then last year he spotted that the School of Advanced Study was looking for a postdoctoral fellow to coordinate the school’s contribution to the Bloomsbury Festival, a one-week arts festival held in central London. Eades got the job and later won a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to roll some aspects of the festival into the homes of dementia patients and collect data as part of the AHRC Cultural Value Project.
“What I find interesting about festivals in the thematic, abstract sense is the idea that they offer an insight into a different world,” says Eades, who is continuing his research into and involvement with festivals. He is part of Being Human, a humanities festival organised by the AHRC and the British Academy, due to take place across the UK in November. “Festivals imagine the world from a carnivalesque aspect. They’re a different perspective on the way the world could be.”