The politics of impact. Exploring concepts, practices and devices in the making across academia, museums and industry

Symposium & Workshop

The requirement to achieve and eventually measure ‘impact’ is becoming more and more prominent across different spheres, especially with regard to sustainability transformation. Public institutions like universities or museums as well as industries are expected to contribute in solving pressing local and global challenges through cooperation with multiple stakeholders, and demonstrate their efficacy and success using the language of impact.

On the one hand, we see a flourishment of multi-stakeholder collaborations, participatory and co-creative formats, expected to enable and/or foster the desired changes and transformations. On the other hand, there is a growing interest in finding ways of demonstrating, and measuring, but also in understanding and critically analyzing said impact. As such, there is an urgent need to understand how existing institutional practices, emerging participatory approaches and the concern for ‘impact’ relate to, require and reshape each other.

This symposium brings together interdisciplinary experts with the aim to explore how the political call for ‘impact’ shapes universities, museums and industries in specific ways. Drawing on a wide range of institutional and disciplinary backgrounds, we want to discuss, how impact is approached, enacted and operationalised in different fields? What concepts, practices and devices emerge and circulate to make impact visible and measurable for different publics?

The presentations and discussions will provide insights from reflexive as well as practice-oriented perspectives, covering case-studies of all three contexts (universities, museums, industry). The symposium will be bilingual (English-German). A detailed program will be published soon. Registration is not mandatory, but appreciated: claudia.mendes@uni-hamburg.de