Measuring the Societal Impacts of Universities’ Research into Arts and the Humanities (HERAVALUE)

HERAVALUE considers the persistent failure amongst government, universities, learned societies and societal stakeholders to develop performance measures which can quantify or capture the impacts that arts and humani- ties research (A&HR) has upon society. HERAVALUE argues that this failure to achieve an explicit agreement – which is very damaging to arts and humanities disci- plines – is underlain by a dissonance in the implicit ways in which these groups regard the value of arts & humani- ties. HERAVALUE therefore begins from these implicit valuations to explore ‘what matters’ to different groups about arts & humanities research, and from that to ex- plore whether there is common ground around which a consensus of this value lies. The research project builds a conceptual framework for A&HR valorization, tests this framework with empirical evidence, and explores the util- ity of methodological approaches for better capturing ‘what matters’ to arts and humanities research..

The consortium brings together experts in the fields of knowledge exchange, university performance manage- ment and institutional management to ask the question “what matters about arts & humanities research”. Three individual projects start by asking how do universities, policy-makers and societal stakeholders value A&HR, and then turn to consider how those values can be expressed through knowledge exchange projects, through perform- ance measures and indicators, and university knowledge transfer infrastructure. Although starting from three sepa- rate points, through the significant overlaps in the theme areas, and with considerable time in the effort devoted to inter-project exchange, these three IPs build into a wider scientific conversation that speaks to critical theoretical and policy questions concerning maximizing the tangible impacts that A&HR is able to deliver.     

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