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Making Sense of the Debate About Arts and Humanities Research

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The Impact and Future of Arts and Humanities Research

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Abstract

Many humanities scholars have voiced fears regarding the damage that the unfettered adoption of alien practices and norms around research commercialisation could wreak for arts and humanities research. This plays to longer-standing fears of crisis in the humanities arising from its weak coupling to the interests and needs of an increasingly technologically dominated society amplified by the grand challenges of the twenty-first century. We argue that this fear was as a response to this unpalatable choice. We trace the emergence of the discourses of useful knowledge that have emerged in Europe since 2000. Fear and urgency in these debates reflects a mismatch between the way that policy-makers and scholarly perspectives on public value, and the lack of traction of academics’ arguments in those policy debates.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Higher Education Policy Studies, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Paul Benneworth

  2. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Magnus Gulbrandsen

  3. Higher Education Policy Research Unit, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland

    Ellen Hazelkorn

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  1. Paul Benneworth
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  2. Magnus Gulbrandsen
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  3. Ellen Hazelkorn
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Benneworth, P., Gulbrandsen, M., Hazelkorn, E. (2016). Making Sense of the Debate About Arts and Humanities Research. In: The Impact and Future of Arts and Humanities Research. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40899-0_2

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