Research and research impact are often represented and recorded as the product of discrete research projects and individuals. Drawing on their research into the wives of famous sociologists, Rosalind Edwards and Val Gillies suggest how reconsidering the impact of these researchers can nuance our understanding and approaches to public engagement and impact.
‘Plan your engagement and impact from the outset’,
‘Ask yourself what change you’re seeking to make’,
‘Clearly define your impact and you can define it for others’
These pieces of advice are all commonly found on university research impact support pages. Ingrained intent and instrumental planning by academic protagonists seem to dominate our conceptions of research impact. However, this approach obscures the messy reality of serendipity, the unintended chance of opportunity, the contribution of others’ visions, and any sense of ‘impact’ as reconsideration.
Our recent research project exploring the crucial but unacknowledged domestic, social, administrative, research, and writing contributions of sociologists’ wives to their influential husbands’ work and careers reveals this serendipity.
It began as a British Academy/Leverhulme small grant focused on analysis of fieldwork diaries kept by two wives: Phyllis Willmott and Pat Marsden, while their husbands (Peter and Dennis) were engaged in pioneering British studies that set the foundation for post-war sociological understanding of community and social change. We aimed to illustrate how these wives bridged community networks and social sciences for their husbands’ studies and contributed to the development of disciplinary knowledge.
While the husbands appeared to produce insights on their own (the great man illusion), in practice this was propped up by input from their wives. Phyllis Willmott, for example, kept a fieldwork diary of her interactions with Bethnal Green mothers and children which significantly informed her husband and Michael Young’s groundbreaking Family and Kinship in Bethnal Green study (1957). She also conducted interviews, analyses and writing up for a follow up study, The Evolution of a Community (1963). These were highly influential intellectual and empirical contributions to foundational post-war sociology, but there is only a ‘thank you’ mention of Phyllis in the acknowledgement pages of books.
Phyllis is not alone. As we began the project, #thanksfortyping began trending on what was then Twitter. Screenshots of book acknowledgement pages posted under the hashtag overwhelmingly involved male authors thanking their wives for undertaking so much more than the typing contribution; a whole field of wives’ effaced research labour coalesced into visibility. This serendipitous coincidence prompted us to move beyond our two diary-based case studies to consider other wives of influential male sociologists.
We concentrated on public engagement because we wanted our findings to reach beyond academia; we focused on an everyday-interest audience rather than policy levers. We lodged the transcribed, digitised diaries with local history archives for the communities in the original case studies (Tower Hamlets and Salford), and costed in a professionally-produced accompanying 5-minute visual montage of images with audio commentary for context. So, about halfway through our 2-year project we teamed up with Chris Garrington of Research Podcasts to discuss producing the little video.
Given the now broader focus of our work, Chris suggested the company produce a podcast with us instead. We knew that The Sociological Review Foundation had vibrant and far-reaching podcast offerings, so we approached them to host our series, and in turn they encouraged us to host our episodes. As a result, we gained podcast planning and hosting skills, and our 6 bi-weekly episode #thanksfortyping podcast is gaining excellent reach within academia and beyond; two months after launch the series had accrued just under 2500 listens across platforms.
Chris added to the podcast vision for our research impact by introducing us to Catherine McDonald of Popping Orange, who had spotted the potential for a film from our research when Chris told her about it. One of us applied to our university for impact funding to support the film, but we were unsuccessful (what change will it directly bring about?). We managed to piece together the budget from various sources however, including the Churchill Archives Centre. We had no idea what the film would look like. It was Catherine’s directorial vision for a unique angle on the lives and contributions of the wives of three eminent sociologists featuring reflections from their adult children. The Sociologist’s Wife has been viewed thousands of times on You Tube since it first was shown in April at the 2024 British Sociological Association (BSA) annual conference and a subsequent BSA members event. It will be screened at the British Academy’s Summer Showcase, with plans for an autumn event at Churchill College Cambridge.
Quite how this outreach vision by communications partners for our research would feature in an impact case study narrative model moulded around the driving force of the academic researcher protagonist is a moot question. A further, fundamental question is whether such outputs would even be considered to count as having had impact? As others have pointed out, public engagement work has been deprioritised in many applied disciplines. This includes the sociology and social policy fields we move in and how impact case studies for these UoAs are viewed institutionally.
The linear ‘research output stimulus → policy/practice change response’ model of impact does not fit the sort of reconsideration feedback that our public engagement through archive resources, podcast and film has had so far. Aspects of people’s world views have shifted and enlarged.
Academics have let us know that they have reassessed how they think about the past and the discipline:
“This is brilliant – watched just now and really enjoyed it. These studies have been formative in my own work, so thank you for making these women visible.”
The public have also been in contact, stimulated to think about gender and the discipline:
“Just watched the film and thought it was excellent. Got me thinking of my (comprehensive) school in Dagenham and the new male sociology teacher (late 60s/early 70s). How many women trained as sociology teachers then?”
And one of the now-adult children who featured in the Salford diary kept by Pat Marsden has been in touch for further information. Her and her family’s knowledge about their family history has been enriched:
“We are a really close family and often reminisce about our childhood and how hard things were but have happy memories of living on the estate and would love to show our children and grandchildren [more].”
We value these nuanced impacts of rethinking the past and expansion of knowledge horizons that have been stimulated by interaction between our research and the vision of others. But, they do not fit the hero researcher stimulus-response model that results in major shifts in policy. The researcher protagonist is a fantasy that conceals the input of others, just like the disciplinary great man illusion renders wives’ contributions invisible. Often impact is serendipitous, the chance of opportunity of news cycles, policy windows, and so on. The contribution of others’ visions is significant but hidden. And the value of reconsideration as impact is marginalised.
Edwards, R. and Gillies, V. (forthcoming) #ThanksForTyping … and the fieldwork: sociologists’ wives’ role in classic British studies, Serendipities: Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences
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Image Credit: Adapted from Jules a. via Unsplash.
