•  What do policy-makers needs?

    •  What do the humanities and social sciences offer policy-makers?

    •  What are the challenges of providing better evidence for public policy-making?

 

We can perhaps already guess the answers and the language in which these answers are cast.  We find the following fragments in the opening paragraphs:  “...greater effectiveness; the full value [...] of which has yet to be realised; policy-makers are not exploiting all that HSS research offers; opportunities are being missed; Government is not leveraging the academic research base as effectively as it could and should.”  In short, the Humanities and Social Sciences are not ‘punching their weight.’

 

The report is glossy.  It seems rich, crisp, new.  On the front, the seal of the Academy...  The language is violent, drawn from military discourse – ‘punching our weight,’ ‘impact’ – and from an unashamed language of exploitation writ large, economically, socially, culturally.  Everywhere is the unquestioned assumption that the Humanities are somehow to be plundered for their goods, are currently not contributing enough to whatever it is in a ‘target-driven’ world they are meant to contribute to, and that they don’t know how to present themselves against the ‘big boys’ of science.

 

...Humanities methodologies begin from the point of view that criticality and questioning are the default position...  What I am told about these authors and their paymasters horrifies me, when I read this language.  It tells me violence is sanctioned in pursuit of spurious economic gains.  It tells me that there is no place left for questioning the marketization of university research, it tells me that the universities and their academic researchers are to surrender their critical identities in pursuit of pipe dreams such as knowledge transfer, effectiveness, targets... It tells me I’m not good enough, that I need to be colonized and exploited (as if patriarchy wasn’t enough to contend with); that I have things that are to be taken from me and used for economic gain.  It tells me so in a language which, if used by my parents to me as a child, would be rightly termed abusive...

 

So here is our challenge to readers and researchers in the Arts and Humanities.  Help us tackle the discursive violence and the common-sense assumptions that are inherent in these reports and in what Bourdieu and Wacquant (2001) called ‘newliberalspeak.’  We of all people can do better things with language than this, and surely we do not want just to accept the performativity in this language and the saturation of arts and humanities with violent management discourses.