The Violence of Impact: Unpacking Relations Between Gender, Media and Politics
| Author | Heather Savigny |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929918819212 |
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Special Section: Impact |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929918819212
Political Studies Review
2020, Vol. 18(2) 277 –293
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929918819212
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The Violence of Impact:
Unpacking Relations Between
Gender, Media and Politics
Heather Savigny
Abstract
Engaging in public discussion and debate are crucial aspects of the impact agenda, but what are the
politics of this engagement? What happens when female academics engage with, or are reported
by, media in disseminating their research? Does negative impact ‘count’ as impact? Adopting a
poststructuralist intersectional feminist analysis, this article uses the REF policy agenda as a case
study in order to explore these questions. Drawing on extensive qualitative interview data, I
operationalize the concept ‘cultural sexism’ as a mechanism to connect micro and macro analysis,
using cumulative individual experiences to render visible wider social and political power structures.
This article argues that while women may seek to actively build impact and public engagement in
to their research agendas, we need to be cognizant that the site of interaction between media
and academia is gendered and raced. I argue that we therefore need to reflect upon the ethics
of pursuing a policy which (1) disproportionately exposes a diversity of women to structural and
symbolic violence (2) has the potential to silence women’s contribution to knowledge and (3)
conversely may serve to simply privilege masculinised assumptions as to what does and does not
count as knowledge.
Keywords
academia, intersectionality, gender, cultural sexism, impact
Accepted: 23 November 2018
Introduction
Impact now forms 25% of the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) agenda. Its
current definition has been broadly taken to mean a positive interpretation of the role of
academia in public life. But is this engagement always positive? What happens when
responses to this engagement are negative? And what happens if the impact of this
engagement on academics themselves is negative? The building of impact requires aca-
demics to engage in public dissemination activities, and media are often a key mechanism
through which this is achieved. Media do not operate in a vacuum, nor does the academic
De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
Corresponding author:
Heather Savigny, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH, UK.
Email: Heather.savigny@dmu.ac.uk
819212PSW0010.1177/1478929918819212Political Studies ReviewSavigny
research-article2019
Special Issue Article
278 Political Studies Review 18(2)
construction and dissemination of knowledge. While we may think these spaces are gen-
der neutral, they are far from gender blind (cf. Fraser, 1985). The argument here is that the
current impact agenda fails to account for existing gendered divisions within the acad-
emy, which are reinforced and co-constituted by public engagement via a gendered media
structure.
In this mediated public sphere, women are more likely to have negative experi-
ences. Women are more likely to be trolled and subject to gender-specific forms of
abuse (such as rape and threats of other forms of sexual violence Mantilla, 2015).
Mary Beard is perhaps the most high-profile female academic to have been subjected
to this type of online abuse. Following her appearance on Question Time, she describes
how on social media ‘They discussed whether I needed rogering, and how I was an
“ignorant ****” and a disgrace to Cambridge University and woman-kind’ (in Fryer,
2013). Beard’s response was to take on the trolls and to ‘fight back’. While the agency
she displayed is powerful, underlying this experience however, are questions about
the wider cultural political context through which sexism is culturally legitimated and
normalized (Savigny, 2017). The active role media play in this process is crucial to
our understanding of politics: the ways in which media frame discourses can shape
public understanding and influence public policy (Barnett, 2016; Entman, 1993).
Impact, that we are encouraged to pursue through public engagement, is lived out and
experienced, in part, through media platforms of dissemination. In this sense, media
and academia co-exist as iterative and co-constitutive sites of interaction. These two
contexts are neither race nor gender neutral. The consequences of this public engage-
ment can be negative and I argue here, this interactive space can therefore serve to
inflict ‘symbolic violence’ upon a diversity of women, by reinforcing their silencing
and marginalization.
As academics in UK Universities are aware, the Impact agenda plays an increasingly
important role in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and by extension in our
daily working lives. Following widespread criticism of REF 2014, an independent con-
sultative process headed by Lord Stern led a review of REF policy. While a series of
recommendations were made in respect of the broader conduct of the REF, the particular
focus of this paper is the Impact component of the REF agenda. Introduced in 2014, the
Impact agenda was weighted as 20% of all submissions, which has increased to 25% for
REF2021. The Stern report produced as a result of this review, informed the development
of current guidelines (REF2021, 2017) and recommended a broadening of understand-
ings of impact to include public engagement and cultural life. Impact was defined as ‘an
effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services,
health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’ (HEFCE, 2018). This defini-
tion suggests, and has been widely interpreted to mean, that cultural impact and public
engagement requires measurement. This contains positivistic assumptions that impact is
only that which can be quantifiably measured. But as Collini (2017) observes, this tells us
nothing about the actual quality of research.
Inconsistently, despite the recognition of the importance of culture (which by defini-
tion is fluid (cf. Williams, 1983)), the Impact agenda in REF policy is underpinned by the
positivistic assumption that the value of, and to, culture can still only be established
through its measurement. These assumptions are reinforced where we are encouraged by
our institutions to engage in imaginative attempts to generate impact. Indeed, we have
seen a proliferation of blogs (such as the well-informed LSE blog; and the Conversation)
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