Dissertation

The Impact Agenda and the Production of Subjectivity

Paylor, Jonathan

2022

Overview

In what is often referred to as the 'impact agenda', governments and research funding agencies across the world have recently introduced audit systems and funding mechanisms that require academics to demonstrate the societal impact of their research. Grounded in an ethnography of a UK university, and informed by Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage theory, this thesis explores the role the impact agenda plays in the production of academic subjectivities. I demonstrate how the defining function of the impact agenda is the production of the 'impactful academic' - an enterprising subject who demonstrates their value through the effective and efficient pursuit of research impact. I argue that this function of the impact agenda effectuates neoliberalism's tendency to construct persons as competitive individuals. Moreover, I show how it entails mechanisms of power which operate at the level of language and subjective interpretation and at the level of pre-personal affects. While the workings of power are never far away, I also bring to light processes of subjectification that take us beyond constructions of the impactful academic. In doing so, I draw attention to a conception of subjectivity that is conceived in terms of collective agency and creativity and which breaks with the neoliberal notion of the competitive individual. I argue this alternative way to conceive subjectivity points to the potentials for converting the impact agenda and for creating an alternative that is based on the cultivation of collective joy. In offering this account I contribute to knowledge in two central ways. First, I offer an advancement on existing studies relating to the impact agenda. I go beyond much of the existing empirical literature which tends to lack the 'critical edge' of critical scholarship. At the same time, I go beyond much of the critical literature which tends to rest on limited empirical data. What I offer is an in-depth empirical account of the impact agenda that is attentive to the ways in which the workings of power are both reinscribed and circumvented and which presents an alternative that is grounded in an analysis of the potentials that lie latent and emergent in the present. Secondly, I contribute to debates surrounding critical policy studies' growing interest in the concept of assemblage. I illustrate the value of taking up a reading of assemblage that is anchored in the work of Deleuze and Guattari and puts to work the allied concepts of strata and abstract machine. I argue that such an approach offers a way to overcome the pitfalls of 'policy assemblage' literature which neglects questions of subjectivity and fails to grasp the wider forces at work in the arrangement of policy assemblages.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Subjectivity