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Allegra editors Agathe Mora and Jon Schubert write about... Impact
 
As many anthropologists have written, it’s easy to dismiss impact as yet another tool of managerialism. Of course, impact is a very double-edged sword, as it is often wielded by university management and funding agencies to impose their metrics on our academic work.
Yet the impact we have in the world as anthropologists should not be so readily separated from the substance of our academic work. A major impact we can have is by teaching anthropology. We both teach on MA courses where we introduce anthropological concepts and ideas – alternative ways of seeing and being in the world, really – to MA students who seldom have an undergraduate anthropology degree. And we regularly see how their minds are blown and their preconceived ideas are being unsettled, leading them to critically re-evaluate what is very often already their professional field of practice (human rights and architecture/urban planning, respectively). In the current political and social climate, the humanities and social sciences are often under attack for not being ‘useful’ degrees. But learning to critically read and analyse official policy for example in asylum and immigration affairs, or a city zoning plan, is an essential skill by which we contribute to the formation of critical and engaged citizens of the world.
But our research can have an impact, too. Not only in the direct sense of policy-relevant recommendations (though some insights might filter through), or by collaborating on legal cases, or helping think about new infrastructure, but also by the practice of engaged research itself. In Agathe’s case, for example, by using anthropology’s ethical standards to offer an avenue for staffers at the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights to talk about the agency’s ‘organisational culture’. In Jon’s case, by currently collecting stories with local anthropology students in the Mozambican city of Beira about the ‘new normal’ of living in a 1.5° warmer world, just days after the province of Zambézia to the north (and neighbouring Malawi) were battered by tropical cyclone Freddy. And these conversations, we think (hope), can have an impact on how people see themselves within broader social and organizational contexts. |
