ENGAGEMENT
TECHNE CONGRESS: ENGAGEMENT
Engagement is one of the contemporary academy’s ‘buzzwords.’ After all, who does not want to feel that their research is engaging for other academics, as well as engaged with the wider community? Engagement is often associated with connection and expansion, the opposite of the lone scholar in the ‘Ivory Tower’ of a disengaged academia. Whether we think about co-production of research with stakeholders; the value of interdisciplinary engagement with other disciplines; collaboration with arts, culture and heritage partners; ensuring we are committed allies for our diverse community; or the many audiences we hope to interest with our research, engagement is something for which we all strive.
Yet, engagement can be a tricky thing. There is a politics to engagement; with whom should we engage, and how? Whose goals matter? What are the ethics of engagement, especially when researching with individuals and communities? How do we engage meaningfully with the nonhuman? Are there certain kinds of spaces, cultures and practices that are conducive to engagement? Over what kinds of temporalities and durations does engagement take place: is slower and longer always better? How do we conceptualise engagement and are some forms valued over others: collaborations, co-production, entanglements, participation, encounters? How does foregrounding engagement within the research process change the form and nature of research, in terms of how we formulate our questions, the methods we might use, and the kinds of outputs we might produce? What about valuing and evaluating engagement; are there things academia and the arts can learn from each other?
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Further, is engagement always a good thing? How has it become fetishised within the contemporary academy? What about the challenges of producing research through engagement, and those of producing engaging research? How might engagement lead to community, stakeholder and researcher fatigue? Is disengagement always bad? Is there a productive politics to disengagement as a temporary ‘turning off’ which facilitates modes of attention not possible in an ‘always on’ culture? Can disengagement be a form of care for oneself and the wider world?
This Congress will gather together Techne students, supervisors, partners and guests from across academia and the arts, culture and heritage sectors to consider and discuss these questions.
This conference is organised by Techne (AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership) in partnership with Royal Holloway, University of London. This is one of our regular Congresses organised for Techne students. The conference is primarily aimed at students within our Doctoral Training Partnership, but we also welcome any other doctoral students to attend sessions. Please direct any queries to techne@rhul.ac.uk.