29th April 2010, 09:38 PM
(This post was last modified: 29th April 2010, 09:39 PM by trainedchimp.)
I'm struggling with this one a bit. The title is all about the RAE, which no longer exists, and is now the research excellence framework (REF). This basically relate to University teaching and research, which means that they are utterly irrelevnat to non-university based units, whether they are in local governmnet or not. Even within the university units, if the department doesn't want to enter the work of that unit for the REF, which it probabaly wouldn't as by definition most commercial work is only on sites of local or regional importance, and international is about the only level of significance that the REF will look at unless you're a classicist (but that's a different whinge), then it doesn't matter. As we've seen with GUARD, it seems to be too easy to see a commercial unit as a revenue-generating arm (and is often how these things are sold to archaeology departments IME, no names etc), and not as something that can actually have an impact on the research life of the department.
True, you could argue that community archaeology has an 'impact', which is true, but most of the commentators (Overy in the latest THE) are looking at influence on public policy, industry standards or professional (in this context, academic) practice. In the way of the blairite university world some of us move in, engaging the public probably isn't going to count for much unless you've got a pretty exceptional project that's run in an 'big' way and 'impacts' beyond the local community (thinking of Hungate, but not much else in the UK springs to mind), or you make such a success of a project locally it becomes an exemplar for wider practice. Even then, it doesn't count unless you're doing it for a university. This isn't to say that community archaeology isn't worthwhile - it is and it's something we should be doing a lot more, it's all being done in the name of the British public, so they deserve to see some benefit from it- just that most of it probably won't count for all that much as 'impact' in the REF, and that the REF for most of us (me with my plastic hat on) is a total irrelevance.
What I suppose is important is that those of us who work in commercial practice get on and start doing stuff that's genuinely innnovative and allows us to drive research- for the last 20-30 years at least, all of the interesting 'new' discoveries in my field have come from professional fieldwork, not academic research excavations, so we need to make the most of the opportunities we get, to start impacting on the academic world, and not being patronised over the use of 'grey' literature, lack of publication,production of bad TV series etc...
Apologies for the incoherent rant
:o)
True, you could argue that community archaeology has an 'impact', which is true, but most of the commentators (Overy in the latest THE) are looking at influence on public policy, industry standards or professional (in this context, academic) practice. In the way of the blairite university world some of us move in, engaging the public probably isn't going to count for much unless you've got a pretty exceptional project that's run in an 'big' way and 'impacts' beyond the local community (thinking of Hungate, but not much else in the UK springs to mind), or you make such a success of a project locally it becomes an exemplar for wider practice. Even then, it doesn't count unless you're doing it for a university. This isn't to say that community archaeology isn't worthwhile - it is and it's something we should be doing a lot more, it's all being done in the name of the British public, so they deserve to see some benefit from it- just that most of it probably won't count for all that much as 'impact' in the REF, and that the REF for most of us (me with my plastic hat on) is a total irrelevance.
What I suppose is important is that those of us who work in commercial practice get on and start doing stuff that's genuinely innnovative and allows us to drive research- for the last 20-30 years at least, all of the interesting 'new' discoveries in my field have come from professional fieldwork, not academic research excavations, so we need to make the most of the opportunities we get, to start impacting on the academic world, and not being patronised over the use of 'grey' literature, lack of publication,production of bad TV series etc...
Apologies for the incoherent rant
:o)