 Well, good evening. And thank you for joining us at this, the fourth lecture in our special 50th anniversary inaugural lecture series. It's good to be 50, been there and done that myself. We're enjoying ourselves this year. I'm Nicholas Brathwaite. I'm acting as executive dean for the STEM faculty at Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, and it is for the duration of 2019. It's my privilege to be hosting one of the 50th anniversary celebration events, showcasing our research, teaching and knowledge exchange portfolios. Each year the vice chancellor invites some of the newly appointed and promoted professors to give an inaugural lecture. Over the course of the year our inaugural lecture series provides an opportunity to celebrate academic excellence with each lecture representing a significant milestone in an academics career. This evening we will hear from Richard Holliman, or Rick Holliman, as I've always called him, Professor of Engaged Research, who will challenge us to think about how we could engage with the sciences, and this is quite an apt topic because this is at the moment British Science Week. Science has the power to influence our lives and we should care about how it should be governed, how it should be represented and funded. This raises questions like who should have a voice in framing scientific investigations, how should contemporary science research be conducted, who should be involved in shaping how the inputs from scientific investigations impact on society and the economy. So to celebrate the OU at 50, Rick will explore selected examples from the OU's curriculum, research and knowledge exchange activities in this inaugural lecture. So here's the format for the evening. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A session and then we invite you to join us to celebrate downstairs. For anyone in the audience who wants to use Twitter, you can do that. There's a hashtag which should be appearing on screen there, OU Talks. And if you could tag at Open University, that will help us tell the world what's going on. Rick himself is a keen user of Twitter and he has a Twitter handle which is somewhere... Is that being displayed at the moment? I don't see it. What's your Twitter handle? Science underscore engage. Thank you. Right. Now if you're joining us via live stream and we have some people joining us via live stream from around the world, please use the email address that's been provided and keep your comments and questions brief so that we can put them into the Q&A session. They will be collected and forwarded to us when we go to the comfy chairs over there. Before we start, there is a health and safety slide which is appearing for the studio audience right now. Please take note of that. Assembly points 10 and 11, I think follow the crowd is always a good advice on those occasions. There will be people here who know where we should go. Now about Rick, Richard Holliman. He is Professor of Engage Research at the Open University. His academic work examines tensions between theories and practices of knowledge exchange by evaluating examples where researchers and publics have sought to produce or even co-produce impacts derived from research. In combining research and practice through this work, he's developed the concept of engaged research. He will explain what this means and its implication for the sciences and other areas of academic knowledge in his lecture. Through his research, he's developed a strong reputation for engaging collaboratively in interdisciplinary teams, both within and beyond university settings, which gives him an opportunity to inform professional practice, shape debate and frame policy decisions. He was the academic lead in the OU's RC UK funded public engagement with research catalyst and our school university partnership where we collaborated with schools across Milton Keynes. He's worked extensively with the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement for the last 10 years or more, and more recently with the public engagement team of the Science and Technology Facilities Council. It now gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Richard Holliman. I think we're ready to go, yeah? Okay, good evening. I'd like to start by thanking people for coming along today. It's amazing to see so many friendly faces. I'd like to thank Nick for introducing me, the OU communications team, and my family, in particular Jane, Ellen and Fred. Where are they? Can't see them. Hello. How are you doing? For helping me put this event together over the last few months. Thanks also to those who have helped with the displays outside the theatre. You'll see their work represented here on this slide. It's really lovely to be able to showcase some examples of the work. The OU colleagues are undertaking science communication and engagement. As noted by Nick, the audio visual team are live streaming this lecture. I'd therefore like to say hi to family, friends, OU students and colleagues watching this lecture across the four nations of the UK and beyond. G'day Australia, G'dan Arbans, Deutschland, Haig and Bonjour, Canada, Keora, New Zealand. It's a real honour to be part of this celebration. The 50th anniversary of the Open University by happy coincidence. This year also represents a half century for my twin brother and me. A photo was taken last week. It's been a tough week. We are not just twins however, we are twin professors. Which has to be up there with the best buy one get one free deal you can find. Happy birthday to the OU and Professor Peter Holliman. So here I am, basking in the light of the 40 fame film minutes of the academic writer. Tonight I'm going to talk about the changing relationship between publicly funded research and wider society. In part this is because the politics of research has changed in profound ways over the course of my academic career. Public funders for research in the UK at least now require that universities and researchers routinely plan to generate social and or economic impact from research. Other changes have been driven by social technologies. The photo on the right is me at Milkenes Museum, which happens to be a great place to visit. I used a handheld device like this in the 1980s on various military exercises. Try putting that on the end of a selfie stick. In 2019, citizens used technology to participate in research across distance and time in ways that would have been unimaginable 30 years ago. Tonight I want to explore how we are responding to this change in context. I'm going to do that in three parts. First, I'm going to introduce the concept of border crossings. Second, I will review some ideas about fairness and knowing. And third, I will introduce the concept of engaged research. Okay, part one explores ideas about border crossings and I'm doing this from a sociocultural perspective. So what do I mean by border crossings in this context? To be clear, I'm not talking about the types of borders that we cross when we move from country to country. I'm interested in something more subtle. Cultural borders that have the power to shape our identities, world view, ability to act and so on. This is culture as both an enabler and a barrier. We cross borders all the time in our everyday lives from one subculture into another. As Glenn Aikenhead argues here on this slide, as we move from one subculture into another, we intuitively and subconsciously alter certain beliefs, expectations and conventions. In other words, we effortlessly negotiate the cultural border. Aikenhead was interested in how to support border crossings when people move into a different subculture. One where the beliefs, expectations and conventions are partly or wholly new to new people. My argument here is that this will be the case when citizens engage with a new academic subculture for the first time. So for example, some area of the sciences. In part three of the lecture, I will explore how university staff can help to support border crossings. First, I'd like to give you an example of a border crossing that I was involved in. I left school when I was 16 years old. I had no interest in going to university, much less so in becoming an academic. Rather, I decided to join the Army Catering Corps. In Army Slang, I became a cabbage mechanic. The first six weeks or so of my new life involved basic training. It was somewhat of a culture shock. Fellow members of my squad and I had to learn a whole new subculture. To a large degree, we either sank or swam. To illustrate the point, half of my squad had left or been discharged by the end of two years training. This illustration of a subcultural border crossing should, I hope, be obvious from this example. A civilian, me, learnt how to become both a soldier and a chef. That's not the end of my subcultural learning journey, however. Furthermore, subtle border crossings were to follow. Following my training, I was posted roughly every two years to different units. I was an attached member of these units. Each time I was posted, I had to relearn the rules and conventions of that new unit. A cavalry who drove heavy tanks, a light infantry who issued drill commands by a bugle call, and the Scots guards who were often on ceremonial duties. Each unit was part of the British Army, and there were many similarities between them. At times, however, these units also worked in different and sometimes mysterious ways. Okay, so why I'm telling you this. First, I argued the army is both one culture and many subcultures. Each unit has both similarities and differences in how they live and work. Science also is one culture and many subcultures. Biologists, earth scientists, physicists, chemists, astronomers and so on have both shared and distinctive ways of working. Scientists need to be aware of how different and intimidating their academic subculture can look to those engaging from beyond academic subcultures. Like all academics when they are gauged, they should seek to meet people in shared territory. Second, the active border crossings from one culture to another can range from being straightforward to deeply challenging. It can require considerable effort. We should not underestimate the challenges of those making border crossings into and out of academia. Citizens engaging with the sciences require tailored support each time they engage with a new scientific subculture. Third, there are obvious differences between the army and academia. There are also, I argue, similarities. Like many academics working in science communication and engagement, I am effectively an attached member of another academic unit. To work together, I've needed to learn about how earth sciences and ecologists think whilst my departmental colleagues have delighted in occasional sugerns into the social sciences. I use the term delighted, I advise it. To work effectively beyond our own subculture requires a commitment to lifelong learning and engagement. So lots of academics conduct disciplinary based research. Others explore the borders between academic disciplines, solving problems through multidisciplinary work. Both approaches are fine, of course, as long as there is clear thinking to back the selection. I'm interested in another group, those living and working at the boundaries of subcultures, those who see value in exploring the interface between academia and wider society. Those who spend significant amounts of time engaging beyond the confines of their discipline or their professional practice or their civic life can take on the role of boundary creatures. I am a boundary creature. Boundary creatures straddle the borders between subcultures, between academic knowledge, professional practice and other forms of expertise and experience. I am, and colleagues argue, we can become explorers and bring home to human-computer interaction, that's Anne's base discipline, through boundary crossing, experiences from foreign lands. To do this, however, we have to take on the mantle of being considered both horrific and empowering. The point Anne and colleagues are making is that in acting as boundary creatures, they are, to some degree at least, challenging the conventions in their professional subculture, both in how they work, but also potentially in redefining the outputs from research. Working as a boundary creature can therefore be an unsettling experience at times, particularly when academic professional institutional subcultures don't value engaged practices. The question is, why should we bother? I've done a good deal of training and teaching over the years and those involved have often been interested in different rationales for engagement. Put simply, they want an answer to the question, what's my motivation for this? At times they've been looking to justify their personal commitment to engagement. More often than not, however, they've been looking for arguments they can make to their line manager or PhD supervisor to justify their commitment on a longer term basis. I wrote about this issue recently, describing three broad motivations to engage. So first, you can make a normative case. For example, to address an injustice. A simple example of this would be a desire to engage to increase diversity in the scientific workforce. As an example of a normative justification engagement, I was part of a team that conducted engaged research with young people on a project called Invisible Witnesses. Through this work we explored some of the cultural barriers that discourage young women and girls from studying the sciences. You can make a substantive case for engagement. For example, to improve the quality of research and or its outcomes. I led a team conducting engaged research with science engagement practitioners and scientists on a project called Isotope. Through this action research project we co-developed a community website for sharing best practice and engagement. And third, you can make an instrumental case. For example, what's in it for me or what's in it for us? I've delivered training workshops alongside the geologists with Claire. A filmmaker and various experienced postgraduate researchers to deliver training to those new to science communication engagement. In particular we supported postgraduate researchers in mapping the skills they gained through engagement and communication on to job applications. The point I'm making here is that we can choose to engage for different reasons but we should do it for clearly justified reasons. The people with whom we engage deserve nothing less than clear intentions. OK, so whilst I'm focusing on need to improve fairness and knowing in this lecture in effect a normative justification I argued that it was also a need to consider both instrumental and substantive motivations. Much of my work in recent years has been based on the principle that if you want people to get better at something support them to develop a track record of sustained excellence and then recognise and reward their excellence. This may seem blindingly obvious to many of you. It is important to note therefore that for the first 15 years of my academic career at the OU there was no career pathway for engagement. That changed in 2015. I'm obviously not the first academic to successfully conduct engaged research over a sustained period at the OU. I am however the first professor to be promoted through the knowledge exchange profile. This new profile was partly informed by the OU's public engagement with research catalyst. I know from research university as you can see on the slide there. Funded by Research Council's UK the OU project was one of eight tasks with embedding the principles and practices of engagement within our respective university's research cultures. We drew on work that had been managed by the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement. That's the NCCPE for short. Through an initiative called the Beacons for Public Engagement. That initiative identified a number of drivers for change in universities, including the need to recognise and reward excellence. As the OU's Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research, Scholarship and Quality at the time, Professor Tim Blackman saw the value in exploring a new route for promotion. Sally did led a working group to develop and test a new profile. As the quote on this slide shows, Tim and Sally reflected on the reasons for introducing a new promotion profile in the final report of the Open University project. Part of my role here in developing this inaugural lecture, therefore, is to say thanks to Tim, but also to Paul Manners and Sophie Duncan for their leadership of the NCCPE. They have been tireless in raising the profile of public engagement in higher education in the UK. My role is also to validate knowledge exchange as an academic career profile and to offer some insight into how I think we can work together to support further excellence in engaged research. There is still work to do. I therefore want to highlight that the university sector needs to ensure that professional staff working in university engagement also have aspirational career profiles. A recent paper in the journal Research for All, hi Sandy, highlights some of the challenges facing publicly engaged research managers. That's a very important issue to resolve, and I'm here to demonstrate to academics who will come after me that if you can demonstrate sustained excellence in engagement at the OU, your work will be celebrated. Like Mark Brandon and Leslie Huggert, both recently promoted knowledge exchange professors, I'm here to act as a source of advice for and as a potential collaborator with OU research and teaching focused colleagues. Continuing the theme of recognizing excellence, I want to celebrate the social justice mission of the OU. The OU clearly has a long tradition of boundary crossing, opening up engagement opportunities without fear or favour. Three inaugural lectures precede mine that exemplify this tradition. They're recorded and archived online, go and have a look. I hope by now that it will be clear that my focus is slightly different. I want to explore how we embed a culture of engaged research at the OU, but simply my recent work has sought to both explore the requirements not just of boundary creatures, but also of boundary organizations. When the OU was founded, our founders demonstrated remarkable foresight as a boundary organization by establishing a mission for social justice that still informs everything we do. We are open first as to people, we are open as to places, we are open as to methods, we are open finally as to ideas. My argument here today is that the OU was invented to deliver fairness in knowing as a boundary organization, both to improve the life chances of our students through our formal curriculum, but also citizens through opportunities for informal learning. That work clearly continues. The issue I want to focus on here is how a program of organizational and cultural change can be used to create the conditions where engaged research can also thrive. For me, that involves a commitment to fairness in knowing. We seamlessly moved to part two. In part two of the lecture, I will briefly introduce the concept of fairness in knowing and offer an example to demonstrate why I think it's important. Academia thrives on the free movement of people and ideas, and I've met lots of amazing people in this way. It's through these networks that I met Fabian Medvedecchi, who introduced me to the concept of fairness in knowing. On this slide, he argues that whether science communicators acknowledge it or not, they get to decide both which knowledge is shared by choosing which topic is communicated and who gets access to the knowledge by choosing which audience it is presented to. As a result, the decisions of science communicators have important implications for epistemic justice, how knowledge is distributed fairly and equitably. The implication of Fabian's work is that the decisions academics make shape and frame the possibilities, both for who has a voice in research, but also how those voices are enabled to be heard. What happens then when we limit those choices? And should we leave those choices solely to academics? I mentioned the isotope project earlier in the lecture. When I introduced substantive motivations for engaging, that's when we're looking to improve quality. Isotope, like almost all the projects I've laid, was underpinned by Action Research, which is represented by the graphic on the right. At the beginning of the isotope project, we drew on early research to identify an initial set of questions. See the arrow. We were looking to create ways of sharing best practice in engagement. To start this process, we sought views and perspectives from those who we thought might want to actually share best practice. We used the information we gathered to help put our planning into action. We observed the results of those actions made relevant revisions following reflection, planned new interventions and so on. As you can see from the circle and the arrows, it's an iterative cyclical process. As part of the planning stage, we invited scientists and professional science communicators to plan an engagement activity. What follows are some of the key results which are published in the book shown on the left. The book cover on the left is why someone greeted me at an event with, you're the pig man! To which, of course, the only reasonable reply was, point. Back to isotope. We found that the scientists in particular were constrained by a series of default settings. One, in how they selected people to engage with. Two, the purposes for conducting these activities. And three, the methods for engaging. Given the time constraints, I'm going to focus on the selection of people. The scientists knew exactly who they wanted to be involved. They wanted to engage with gifted and talented secondary school students. Now I'm not going to dwell here on whether it's a good idea to label children as gifted and talented, other than to note that many teachers disagree with this policy requirement. I've scheduled a tweet. It includes a link to a paper that goes into more detail. Rather I want to illustrate here what this meant in practice for planning engagement when we conducted our research in support of isotope. That was in 2007 to 2008. To do this, I selected at random a football stadium. This is the measure of my sporting dreams. Lutentown Football Club. Kenny is just over 10,000. Let's call it 10,000 for this exercise. I want you to imagine that the stadium is filled with a representative sample of the UK population. Let's apply the decision making used by the scientists in the isotope project. First, we'll focus on secondary school children. 2017 demographic data from the Office of National Statistics tells us that those between the ages of 10 to 19 are 11.25% of the UK population. 11.25% of the stadium equates to 1,125 secondary school students. Let's apply the second filter. Those of gifted and talented children. In 2008, the government policy required schools to identify between 5% and 10% of the secondary school students they talked as gifted and talented. Let's use the more generous figure. That's 10% of 1,125 rather than split that student in half. I'm going to take the liberty of rounding this up to 113 students. I think we can all agree that's a good idea. Hence, if we have a football stadium filled with 10,000 people who represent the UK population, 113 people will be selected to engage. That's just over 1% of the UK population. However, if teachers use the lower threshold of 5%, a number of gifted and talented students selected to engage could be as few as 57 out of 10,000. That's just over half a percent of the UK population. Now, I imagine that scientists repeat this decision-making process again and again and again and again. Almost all of the stadium is excluded. So, it seems reasonable to ask why the scientists we interviewed consistently limited their selection. One of the key reasons is that they've been told repeatedly by successive Governments and senior scientists that they should really be concerned about the STEM skills gap, where STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. The STEM skills gap is identified as the shortfall in the number of skilled workers required by their economy. This gap is caused, at least in part, by leaky pipeline. See the schematic on the slide. What the schematic shows is people moving through the formal education system and beyond. People, in particular women, leak out of the pipeline when they use either to study or work in STEM or not. This is a serious issue, I get it. Through the Invisible Witnesses project I mentioned earlier, we sought to highlight the cultural barriers that inhibit self-efficacy among girls and women in relation to the sciences. But even with this caveat, I argued that there is still a problem. If we consistently use the need to reduce the STEM skills gap as the only rationale for engagement, huge sways of the public will be excluded. And here's why. My dad was a heating engineer for 51 years, and he really likes to talk about plumbing. Hi dad. As a result, I know more than is strictly healthy about pipe work. So in spite of the fact that I've never so much has changed the washer on a tap, sorry dad, I know that you need to check the whole pipeline for leaks before you try and plug any of them. So the point is that if scientists use the default settings to plan for engagement by routinely selecting gifted secondary school learners as their preferred audience, 99% of the population are going to be excluded. Put simply, there's a much bigger leak in the pipe. OK, so my argument here is that academics need a better strategy to inform their planning for engagement. One that delivers a fairer way of selecting publics. My work over the past 10 years has focused on this with the aim of promoting fairness and knowing through forms of engaged research. I want to note therefore that since I've worked on isotope, I've encountered some amazing activities that seek to promote fairness and knowing beyond gifted secondary school learners. However, I've also encountered plenty of examples where this type of default thinking still dominates. There is still a job to be done to promote engaged ways of working that promote fairness and knowing which brings me to part three of the lecture. OK, first I want to acknowledge that university staff can't engage with everybody. I still think we should promote fairness and knowing and to do that we need to be strategic. My strategy for promoting fairness and knowing is through engaged research. To illustrate key aspects of this work I want to introduce the idea of engagement club. What is the first rule of engagement club? The first rule is that we do talk about engagement club. Share the love people. What about the second rule? I propose that the second rule should be that we think strategically about who is encouraged to join the club. To do this we need to accept there is no one public. This is we need to acknowledge subcultures with different values, expectations, beliefs, reasons for engaging and so on. Colleagues and I did this when we explored academics understanding of public engagement research. One of the key findings was that academics had different conceptualisations of the term public. This lack of shared terminology has knock-on effects for who has a voice in research. Two key interventions resulted from this research. First, we co-developed a principle definition of engaged research. We argued, as you can see on the slide, that engaged research encompasses the different ways that researchers meaningfully interact with various stakeholders over any or all stages of a research process, from issue formulation, co-production or co-creation of new knowledge to knowledge dissemination and evaluation. Crucially, we added the clarification that stakeholders may include user communities and members of the public or groups who come into assistance or develop an identity in relationship to the research process. In other words, all the members of the public are equally valid. Engage research at the OU is open to all 10,000 people in the stadium. What we need then is a strategy for selecting publics. I'll come to that in a moment. For now I want to note that we gain support from senior OU research leadership for this definition. Why is this important? To drive change, I argue, we need shared understanding of key terms. Once you can agree a definition, you can explore what's in and out of scope. You also have a definition against which you can explore questions of excellence and so on. The point is that to drive sustainable change requires not just that we change individual practices and develop more boundary creatures. We also need to develop boundary organisations by influencing the culture of research in universities. What then was the second key intervention that resulted from this research? As part of the same culture change project, we drew on the research expertise of two social scientists to develop a strategy for creating publics for engagement. One of them, Nick Mahoney, produced the open access pamphlet shown on this slide. In the pamphlet, Nick introduces the three dimensions of creating publics that are listed on the slide. In demonstrating what the dimensions mean in practice, I'm going to use the OU's inclusion definition of publics to include stakeholders, user communities and so on. First, let's consider questions of representation. Addressing this dimension requires us to consider who should have a voice in research, who is excluded and why. I'm part of a team led by Jane Seill, co-supervising Jess Carr's PhD research. Jess is working with people with learning disabilities and the self-advocacy charity My Life, My Choice to co-produce advice and support in capacity building for citizen science. These are citizens who have been routinely excluded from making decisions about research. In the past, these are people who have been objects of research. Jess' research is informed by the principles of inclusive research. In practice, this means that Jess' approach is not just about selecting who should have a voice in research as Jane's quote shows. Her work requires considerable foresight to explore the different possibilities for how research could be conducted. The research process then needs to be flexible and adaptable to offer participants with different needs and capacities to have genuine opportunities to contribute in ways that work for them. The second dimension focuses on the types of expertise and experience that can enhance the engaged research process. This dimension requires us to recognise that intelligence is not preserved of academics. Knowledge, too, comes in different forms. Academic papers are not the sole repository of useful and relevant knowledge. Helen Brown, assistant head teacher at Denby School in Milton Keynes, shows in her quote on this slide how we applied this dimension when we collaborated in the co-design of the Engaging Opportunities project. The teaching expertise of Helen, alongside Andy Squires, Anthony Steed and Mark Russell was crucial to the success of this school university partnership. In putting this project together, we sought to implement ideas from influential work published by the Think Tank demos in the early 2000s. Key among these ideas is the concept of upstream engagement. As examples, we conceptualised and wrote the grant proposal collaboratively. We then worked as a team across subcultural borders over four years to plan, implement and evaluate the relative success of different types of activity. The third dimension invites us to consider how we provide opportunities for public self-organisation. As an example, I co-supervised Vicki Curtis' PhD research that resulted in the book shown on this slide. Vicki's research explored motivations to join and then maintain active participation in three online citizen science projects. She found that people joined these projects for many reasons, the dominant one to be to make a contribution to science. Their motivations to continue participation shifted over time, however, with the social aspects of participation becoming more prominent. In effect, at least some of these citizen science volunteers saw the value in forms of self-organisation and self-governance. They were increasingly seeking a voice in how these projects were shaped and organised. As the quote on this slide from Vicki shows, it falls to those who originally organised these initiatives to ensure that volunteers can take greater control over aspects of the projects. Ideally, of course, citizens should be involved in co-designing these projects in the first place. OK, so we've covered quite a bit of ground. I want to finish by reviewing the key themes of my talk. At the individual level, I argue that effective planning, involving relevant people, is key if we want to support excellence in engaged research. Academics should not be the only voice in planning for these types of activities. We need to plan upstream on shared terms and in tailored ways with representatives from relevant subcultures. We then need to work collaboratively and co-operatively to achieve shared or complementary goals. A good number of researchers already do this through forms of engaged research. Can we extend the practices of engagement to further enrich aspects of our research culture? I argue both that we can and that we should. At the institutional level, support needs to be in place to help those who are new to engaging practices. Further, the incentives and rewards for making border crossings need to be clear. If we truly want to engage fairly, these activities need to be appropriately recognised in similar ways to teaching and research. Finally, I argue that for engaged research to be sustainable requires a commitment at the sector, at the level of sector-wide agencies with the responsibility for publicly funded research. The final piece of work that I want to highlight demonstrates a commitment to evidence-based change on the part of a public funder for research. I chair the working group that produced this STFC report shown on the slide. The report documents evidence about the current state of play in the peer review system that underpins the allocation of funding for public engagement with research. In summary, the report calls for us to improve our planning, assessment, monitoring and reporting of these activities. There is clearly still work to be done. However, this is the piece of work that I'm actually most proud of. Because if we can get this right and I'm not underestimating the challenges that lay ahead, this work has the potential to drive organisational and cultural change across the physical and engineering sciences. It has the potential to prioritise and promote fairness in knowing. As I draw to your clothes, I want to note that, like the OU, I'm a product of the 1960s. Alongside my twin brother Pete, I arrived into the world on an existential and feminist-inspired wave of optimism. I therefore want to finish in that spirit on a personal and a political note. I've argued tonight that the imperative to improve fairness in knowing is embodied in our 50-year-old mission. Whilst I salute the foresight of those who founded the OU 50 years ago, I argue that part of our role as academics and professionals should be to re-imagine the possibilities for meaningful engagement across sub-cultural borders. How then should I finish this lecture? If you know me well, and I think a few of you do, it's got to be a joke. A soldier walks into a bar. He stops for a moment to look in the mirror and realises this joke isn't going to end very well. He pops into the toilet where he changes his uniform from a military one to an academic one. He's now wearing a fairly traded tank top called Roy Trousers and a pair of sandals. As he walks back into the bar, he realises that everything, and I do mean everything, looks a lot more complicated. He's crossed a sub-cultural border. The soldier is now a sociologist. Okay, let's try that again. A sociologist walks into a bar. This time with a journalist and an inorganic chemist. He's joined by an educational technologist, a public engagement professional, a graphic designer, a librarian, a filmmaker, a public relations professional, a teacher with a group of students, an evaluation researcher, an impact manager, several fleece-clad environmental scientists causing a real stir with the static electricity they're generating. And a group of PhD students looking if there's any free food. Just as the group are starting to engage productively, a representative from UKRI turns up, UKRI stands for UK Research and Innovation. Among other tasks, they have a key role in allocating public funding for research. The UKRI representative points out, somewhat apologetically, that if the group had only followed a different pathway to the comedy club next door, the punchline to this joke could have been world-leading in terms of its reach and significance. If nothing else, this only goes to show you that the research excellence framework is no joke. More seriously, these are some of the amazing people with whom I have crossed borders as we have engaged. I want to emphasise that some of these people are academics, a good proportion are not. Some are academic-related, working their range to support roles. Some are professionals, stakeholders or end-users in a variety of roles. Others still are students. All of them are citizens. Engaging through multiple subcultures as they look to make sense of knowledge and impact on society. As the EU's first professor, to be promoted through the Knowledge Exchange profile, I want to take this opportunity to thank them for their support. It has been said that successful academics stand on the shoulders of giants. Engage research is different. To promote fairness in knowing, we need to stand shoulder to shoulder. We need to recognise that to cross borders requires empathy and purpose, pragmatism in process and generosity in acknowledging different contributions. We need to recognise and support different career pathways to excellence in universities, both academic and professional. We need to value all citizens proactively seeking out and addressing forms of injustice. In summary, we need to acknowledge that whilst we enjoy the privileges of academic life, we also have responsibilities to give voice to members of different subcultures. Thank you for listening to this lecture tonight. We almost got there. But more importantly, a huge thank you to those with whom I have engaged. I hear the spot, didn't it? Well done. It's time now to hear from you in the audience and our audience who are watching on the livestream too. Any questions and comments that the talk has raised for you? Please ask them now. I'm going to go and sit over there with Rick, by which time I hope the first question will be waiting. But I'll give you a cue in. OK. If you're going to ask a question, if you could introduce yourself very briefly, say who you are. And the briefly we can keep the starting questions the longer we can give Rick to give a response. Has somebody got the first question? There we are. Thank you. Thanks, Nicholas. It's Catherine from the British Science Association. Really enjoyed listening to that, Rick. It was fantastic to put all the pieces together of the bits of work that I know you've been involved with over the years. And I have a question related to the British Science Association's work, which is to do with the extent to which members of the public feel engaged with science or not. So it strikes me there are people who come to the public events that researchers do, and they're kind of bound in and sit in the front row and they're really excited and they feel part of it. And there are people who would never come in and if they find themselves in their backstain they'll rush out the door again, right? And that's not entirely related to knowledge. Is there more to do with, I don't know, culture or identity? I wonder if you could say something about that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's fascinating. There are these invisible barriers, I think, to engagement. That's part of the challenge we face as science communicators and people interested in engagement. So this has been work that's been talked about in museums. What stops people from going to museums or science centres? There are these invisible barriers that mean that people are going to other places. I think the solution for us, again, is it comes back to that. I talk mainly about publics, do you know what I mean? But there are obviously a lot of interesting questions that we could ask about how we engage and where we engage and when we engage. And I think the crucial thing is to try and explore, and this is where the evidence base comes in, where people would like to engage and how they'd like to engage so that we can go to them. So the strategy of the British Science Association in doing these events is brilliant. But it shouldn't be the only strategy, do you know what I mean? I'm going to diversify that and think in a pluralistic way about different ways of engagement that brings in different audiences, basically. Next question. There's one just behind you. Could you pass the mic back? Thanks. Peter Leeson, not at all in the academic world, but helping companies change culture and improve. How does your work fit in today to the understanding that funding for science is based on having to produce results and encouraging competition between researchers because only one of them will get the grant and will be able to produce the money to continue working? Good question. Okay, so that really is that final report I talked about. The STFC report talks to exactly that challenge. So the question is then, what are the mechanisms for assessing what is an excellent grant? So if you purely assess the scientific research as the basis for awarding funding, then you will have exactly the answer that you've said you will award funding to the excellent researchers. If you think about it again in a more pluralistic way and saying, okay, there are different criteria for assessing quality, one of which is whether you can engage effectively. Do you have a good track record? Do you have a good plan? Do you have a sensible leader in place to do this kind of work? Do you have a monitoring process in place to actually make this work happen? The additional criteria for another piece of work will actually then say, well actually there's two ways we're assessing the quality of this work. So you can be brilliant in the research aspect and not get funded because actually you haven't demonstrated an excellent case in terms of the engagement. The rider on that, and this is the challenge that we've had with the STFC report, is then arguing about how do you slice the cake up? So you've got a limited amount of public money for this kind of stuff and a limited amount of money for the science, yeah? No, I'm reasonable because that's what they kind of love doing. So how do you then say, okay, what portion of that cake is sliced off to actually say this is purely for engaged work, basically? And when we looked at it in terms of the STFC report we only found that 3% of all the people who apply for any money for MFCFC even asked for any money for engagement. 97% never even asked for any money. So that's what they're doing on magic money. They had the magic money tree that Theresa May's been after, yeah? So that is a problem, do you know what I mean? So that is why I say that I do not underestimate the challenges, okay? Because we then have to change that argument. We have to change the discourse around what it means to do excellent research. And excellent research should involve some form of engagement. Is that the question down here? Can you just hang on one minute so that he's racing to you with the microphone? Go. When you say engaged, do you mean about to be married? That is a very good question. That is my son, by the way. Hello, love. Hello. No, I don't love. So what I'm talking about is think about it as a team, yeah? So if you think of a team, you might have some researchers on the team who want to find out new things and you might have some other people on that team that are doing different types of expertise to that team, yeah? So I'm trying to think of a good example that you would get. Imagine your beast quest, yeah? You love your beast quest, don't you? So how many people have you got on your beast quest team to try and solve those problems? You don't just have one person on there, you have different types of expertise to try and if there's a really bad beast, yeah? I didn't cheat you off. I didn't get that, sorry. I've cheesed you off. We have a science communication problem. It's more trouble from home, I think. I think your son's so great really well and it's a question I wanted to ask, which is about language. There's a really great lecture, Rick. Do you think, I absolutely agree that intelligence isn't the preserve of academics and that we have a duty to involve every citizen, including the little ones in science, but how much do you think the language of academics and write down to how we report research papers to settings like that? How much do you think that is a barrier to achieving that? Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, I focus today on engagement because I was given a very strict deadline by the OGM communications team. I don't know if I hit my 40 minutes, but hopefully I was close. I did get in. So I didn't talk anything about communication. I could have done a whole lecture on communication and when I started to put this together, I thought I'll do a bit of both and it just got too complicated, but you're absolutely right. Communication is an absolutely essential part of this process and it comes into me partly about the way we train researchers to think about communicating in different ways. So that's partly about simple stuff to mediate information in different ways for different audiences and there's some cracking examples of that. But it's also then about thinking about how you then give other people voice to then say what they want to say and that means that as researchers we need to quiet down occasionally. That then becomes a really interesting question about rules of engagement. So how do we define the rules of how we engage so that we can allow different voices to come into the process and have a genuine say in what we're trying to do. So it's a lot in that. Yeah, it's a very good point. Okay, we're going to go online first. This is a question that's come in on livestream from Down Under from Professor Joan Leach Who posted on one of our other channels that she got up at 5am to watch this. So she says, thank you to Rick for an invigorating start to the day Down Under. Also congratulations to the OU for 50 years. Rick, you provide a powerful vision for engaged research and a number of great projects. But engaged research in fairness and knowing is a long game. How do we set goals and then pursue a strategy over a number of years, maybe even a career, and not just one project? Yeah, it's a very good point. I mean, there's lots to that. So partly one of the things which obviously I wanted to talk about in the lecture is how you set the framework for that kind of career profile. And to be fair, that's why Tim's work and Sally's work were so important for the OU. So it allows the possibility. Once you've allowed the possibility, it's then a case of saying, well, how does that map onto different academic stages of a career? So if you take that right down to the start and say, okay, what is a PhD? So we have a kind of pretty clear idea about what a PhD is. It's a contribution to knowledge and it's written up as a full more academic process. But there are lively discussions on it at the minute about saying, well, actually, is that, does that capture everything that an academic researcher needs to do? So a lot of the training I've done with people like Claire Warren, where's Claire? is about thinking about a more holistic set of skills of what it means to be a researcher. So you obviously need the skills to be in the lab, for example, or in my case in the library, as an archivist searching for knowledge to that way. So you need those skills, but you need all these other skills. We need to be ethically sound. We need to be able to think about governance structures within our research, who has a voice in research. We need to think more about engagement. None of those things are assessed within a PhD, not in a kind of coherent or consistent way. And in certain examiners, never asked to look at those things. So that, for me, is where you start that process. If you have a more holistic view of what it means to do a PhD, then you start the process in a way that then allows people, as soon as they move into an academic career, when people just say it's papers, papers, papers, papers, papers. Which is what actually happens to say there's more to this. There's more to this than just research. Crucially, for me, the real challenge, I think, is recognition for this type of work once you move into a career. And that means you have to say, we teach, we research, we do this other stuff, which is engagement or knowledge exchange. How do we balance those priorities? And the challenge is getting into a head of school or a head of department to say this is also a really valuable piece of work. So that means you need days to do this. And that means you need to sit down at an appraisal at the end of the year and say, what did you do? You said this is what you said you were going to do. Did you achieve those goals? And if you do that, you start to build up a profile. And that really, to me, is once you can give that into place, and again, I'm not underestimating the challenges of that, you can start to build a career. I mean, in a way, I was lucky because I had this really kind of amazing opportunity to work with different people to build this career. But I could have chosen to go through a teaching research profile and apply for a chair, for a professorship through that route. But for me, I thought, no, actually, no, I think we should do this in a different way. I think I should give this a go, you know what I mean, and try through the knowledge exchange route. Honestly, I mean, Hazel was Dean at the time, Hazel Rhymer, she didn't know whether the case would go through because we were still trying to make sense of what is excellence in this kind of work. So yeah, it's basically the same things we do for every other aspect of our academic career, but it gets hidden and we need to foreground it. So are we good? We've got somebody with a microphone. Hello, Rick. Thank you. Hello, Rick. Thank you. I really value that. Thank you so much. I think it's interesting around some of the risks, and it comes down to communication, but for academics, the risks in communicating and engaging, because I've had a lot of experience in lots of different areas of engaging and lots of people saying, well, they won't understand our research and what's the value of it. And actually, I think coming back to your son, I'm still thinking about his concept of engagement to marriage, and maybe that makes you think in a different way, maybe it's about equitable, maybe it's about compromise. Those questions you have can make you think in a completely different way, but you have to be able to risk your reputation, be considered horrific and way out there. So I wondered about your concepts of resilience for academics and how can we support them to see the value as well as being resilient to being open to those different approaches. The first thing I would say is I've noticed over my academic career that people always assume that engagement is going to work perfectly. I've seen so many studies which say, 100% of these people thought this was a great activity, and that makes me go, OK, 80 evaluation wasn't done very well. Because if you look at people who do this work consistently over time, they take those risks. You're sitting next to Jane Seel. She knows exactly how hard it is to do inclusive research in a meaningful way. It's really difficult. I don't actually personally feel it's any more difficult than any research activity. Researchers are used to taking risks. That's what we do. We don't know the answers to the questions before we start. We've got an educated guess, but actually we don't know. If you look at some, there was some lovely work which I examined done through one of the arcs at the OU a little while ago. It was looking at engagement in schools across Kenya. What they'd done was they mapped out a plan with their methodology. They said, these are the things I think we're going to do. Then they put a line through the middle of it which was their confidence threshold. Up until that point they thought, I'm pretty confident that's what's going to happen. After that, it's all to play for. I didn't know because they'd actually allowed people to genuinely have a voice in directing the research. I thought it was brilliant. As you make those decisions, the confidence threshold moves, because suddenly you know what you're going to do next. You only know what you're going to do at the next step if you really genuinely want to open these things up. I don't think that's actually that different from a lot of research. If we're really genuinely challenging ourselves. We should take risks. That's what we are as researchers. That's why it's fun. We are well thought through risks, but nevertheless, risks. Okay, I'm sure there may be more questions. Forgive me, I'm going to try to wind us up and we can take questions afterwards. Thank you, Rick, for that excellent lecture and for the stimulating conversation that we've just had since then. I have to say, and you wouldn't expect any less of us, that we do continuously try to improve what we're doing. Feedback from the audience would be greatly appreciated. In helping shape the way that the series progresses. There is a feedback form that we will send you tomorrow, because we have your contact details. Now, our fifth inaugural lecture will be delivered by Joe Phoenix, Professor of Criminology, on Tuesday the 21st of May, and it's on Youth Crime and Justice Does Age Matter. Details can be found on the Open University research website or our 50th anniversary webpage, 50. We've got a small trailer for that, I think. Can we run it? Most modern democracies have separate ways of dealing with children who are in trouble with the law than adults. However, this has created a problem. For the last 150 years, we've been trapped inside a recurring debate between age-related justice issues and age-related welfare issues. This is the debate, if you like, between the demand to care versus the drive to control. The lecture is a provocation to think differently, not about the young people who get caught up in the system, but rather our responses to them in light of everything that we know about crime, justice, and the transition of youth from being young to being adults. I have been left asking two questions. How and why age matters, or more, how and why it ought to matter in the production of criminal and social justice? Great. Something to look forward to there. So all that remains for me now is to say thank you for joining us this evening. Thank you for being with us from all around the globe and supporting us and supporting the OU. For those who are here in person in the auditorium, it's time to celebrate. Please come and join us downstairs. For those who are online, we'll have one for you. Thank you very much. Thank you.