Art as a pathway to impact: Understanding the affective experience of public engagement with film

Darren Langdridge,Jacqui Gabb,Jamie Lawson

doi:10.1177/0038026118822822

Darren Langdridge, Jacqui Gabb + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026118822822

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Abstract

The need for social as well as academic impact in social science research is now well established. Art is increasingly being explored as a means of generating social impact, most commonly as a way to engage publics with research findings, but to date with little exploration of the process of engagement itself. In this study, we set out to explore the power of art to engage the public. We do this by examining the ‘affective’ experience of engagement through a qualitative investigation using one-to-one interviews and a modified visual matrix exercise. In this article we report on the findings from our analysis of the affective experience of watching a film series, and through this discuss the use of film to communicate research findings and value of a novel qualitative psychosocial methodology for exploring the process of public engagement.

Highlights

The need to document impact in social science research has manifested itself most directly in the UK and elsewhere through the requirement to produce ‘pathways to impact’ documents when seeking grant funding and the measurement of impact within the variousThe Sociological Review 67(3)national assessments of research excellence (Reed, 2016)
In this article we report the findings from our psychosocial exploration of the affective experience of the film series, discuss the value of using film to communicate research findings, and demonstrate how the psychosocial methodology outlined provides the means to conduct a process-oriented assessment of impact through public engagement
This article reports on our use of a modified visual matrix exercise involving 16 people and 15 qualitative one-to-one interviews to investigate the affective impact of the film series

Summary

Introduction

The need to document impact in social science research has manifested itself most directly in the UK and elsewhere through the requirement to produce ‘pathways to impact’ documents when seeking grant funding and the measurement of impact within the various. Understanding the way that film may serve to facilitate a non-cognitive mode of engagement is critical (see Hill, 2005; Jones, 2003; Skeggs & Wood, 2012, for studies that provide valuable insight into affective processes of audience engagement with broadcast televisual material) With this in mind, it is important to evaluate the ‘affective impact’ rather than measure audience numbers or the communicative effectiveness (knowledge ‘exchanged’) of any artwork designed as part of a ‘pathway to impact’. With the above in mind, a key element in this project concerned the ability to determine how we might best make sense of the processes underpinning the impact of the artwork, its ‘affective impact’ and mode of engagement with the audience This project involves us exploring the way that we might use film to ‘encode’ (Hall, 1980) affect such that people may find themselves affectively engaged with our research material. Details of the project and all the films are provided on the project website (www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/art-of-relationships/), and on the artist’s own website (www.stevegeliot.com)

Evaluation methodology

Findings

Conclusion