For some years now, researchers in the United Kingdom have had to consider ways of bringing their scholarship to a wider audience than the narrow world of academia.¹ A concern for what is termed public engagement (or impact in the idiosyncratic, distorted and distorting formulation of the Research Excellence Framework ) is not, however, unique to the UK. Elsewhere, an interest in public humanities and public history represents a similar shift toward a belief that the academy can and should contribute to the cultural and intellectual life of the communities in which it is located and/or about which it writes. This is often allied to economic justifications of value or arguments around transparency in public spending.² If there is, at times, a certain defensiveness in arguments that stress the public value of the humanities , there is also a constructive dimension to those that seek to expose the consequences of devaluing the contribution of the humanities , particularly in contexts where complex social and ethical issues are not easily resolved. As Peter Brooks argues in his exploration of the perceived crisis of the humanities in Anglo-American higher education , the crisis may truly lie elsewhere, in the marginalization of humanistic thought and analysis.³ Nevertheless, Judith Butler has pointed out that it is difficult not to respond to critiques of the irrelevance of the humanities with arguments that rely upon the same instrumentalist approach that is used to denigrate their contribution. She asks pointedly if instrumentality is the only way we have of thinking about what it means to make a difference.⁴

A further problem lies in the fact that defenses of the humanities may appeal to their supposed ethical contribution, which is not always easy to identify or demonstrate. Characterizing humanities approaches as ethical practices—that is, practices of reading, interpretation, and engagement with the other—is Brooks’ answer.⁵ And yet this raises further concerns. If the act of teaching and discussing is taken to be a ventriloquizing of the other’s voice and position, as he suggests, then this act may involve not only the potential usurping of the voice of the other, but at the very least its refraction through the voice and vision of the teacher-as-ventriloquist. The researcher and teacher are both interpreters, and as such cannot be entirely neutral; here, ventriloquism is not mere transfer as if through a loudspeaker, but involves the reshaping of material via its communication to another in a particular context, and perhaps influenced by a particular academic hierarchy or power relationship. This is not to say that intellectual endeavor is inherently and only ideological; but it is to note that the positionality of the researcher affects the engagement with his or her material, and hence its presentation to students or readers. Indeed, if one were to follow the logic of impact as outlined in the UK REF context, researcher positionality and perhaps even potential bias is one problematic dimension. The extent to which research impact, according to this agenda, truly engages with the subjects that it aims to have an impact upon (not to mention those—the likely the subjects of the original study—about whom impact outcomes are gathered and conveyed), rather than using them as instruments in Butler’s sense, ought to be a focus of ethical discussion and not just measurement strategies.⁶

In my experience , researchers engaged in impact as part of the UK REF exercise do not generally resort to strategies to engineer results, and genuinely believe in the value of establishing a dialogue with a wider audience than a purely academic one. One might prefer to call this public engagement, understood as an unquantified, softer version of impact. Furthermore, researchers’ intellectual contribution may well challenge current practice, in which case the policy impact of their research is not only hard to quantify but harder to achieve in the first place. Something of the same muddiness that occurs when intellectual endeavor encounters various readerships and publics lies behind Ralph J. Hexter’s discussion, from the perspective of the university administrator, of the difficulties of what he calls corporate reading, in which a collaborative and consultative approach to the formulation of institutional or corporate policy may lead, unwittingly, to the distortion and concealment of partisan or ethical positions.⁷ There is no more space in UK impact case study narratives for ethical self-reflection than there is in institutional policy statements . But what ought to be at stake, I would argue, is not so much the value of the humanities as their contribution—both as disciplines and as ways of engaging in intellectual endeavor—to current and future societal and cultural scenarios. This at least has the merit of evading consequentialist forms of justification.⁸ A focus on the process of contributing highlights a relationship of engagement and exchange rather than the fabrication of an instrumentally measurable end product. Without wishing to promote mysticism as a means of evading solid analysis, my position is perhaps akin to Paul W. Kahn’s when he outlines the contribution of the humanities as follows:

The making of an interpretation—which can only be answered by another interpretation, in a potentially endless conversation—needs to be judged not only on its product but on how it is carried out. A belief in human dignity must be based not in sympathy for the suffering of others but in the shared mystery of human creativity.⁹

By bringing issues of dignity and of a shared creativity into the discussion, Kahn removes the one-way framing of impact (which measures effects upon certain individuals or groups), as well as the economic discourse underpinning value, while retaining a sense that both researcher and subject may be transformed by an exchange that should be conducted respectfully and reciprocally, with self-awareness of what is at stake in the encounter.

The pressure to engage wider publics with academic research and intellectual debate is not, of course, necessarily detrimental to the humanities . David Cooper notes that the effect of the heavily introverted theorizing of the late twentieth century within cultural studies was to seal off the discipline from outside engagement:

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