Symposium & Workshop

The politics of impact. Exploring concepts, practices and devices in the making across academia, museums and industry

Co-organized by Claudia Mendes, Co-Creation & Engagement Center, University of Hamburg & Zinaida Vasilyeva, IETI Project, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin

The requirement to achieve and eventually measure impact is becoming more and more prominent across different spheres, especially with regard to sustainability transformation. Public institutions like universities or museums, as well as industries, are expected to contribute to solving pressing local and global challenges through cooperation with multiple stakeholders, and to demonstrate their efficacy and success using the language of impact.

On the one hand, we see a flourishing of multi-stakeholder collaborations, participatory and co-creative formats that are expected to enable and/or foster the desired changes and transformations. On the other hand, there is a growing interest in finding ways of demonstrating, and measuring, but also in understanding and critically analysing impact. There is therefore an urgent need to understand how existing institutional practices, emerging participatory approaches and the concern for impact relate to, require and reshape each other.

This one-day symposium brought together interdisciplinary experts with the aim to explore how the political call for impact is shaping universities, museums and industries in specific ways. Drawing on a wide range of institutional and disciplinary backgrounds, we discussed how impact is approached, enacted and operationalised in different fields: What concepts, practices and devices emerge and circulate to make impact visible and measurable for different publics?

Program

November 29, 2024, 9:00 – 16:00 at HADLEY’s Bar, (Beim Schlump 84A, 20144 Hamburg)

Session 1: Paper Presentations

• Big and small politics of impact: REF, BMBF Richtlinien, and evaluation of the institutional impact in a museum, Zinaida Vasilyeva, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
• Evolution of ‘impact’ expectations in the European research and innovation policy: insights from an evaluator’s perspective, Ursula Caser, Uni Hamburg
• Productive interaction: network nature knowledge as a showcase for exploring museums impact politics, Julia Diekämper, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
• Impact and evaluation of science communication, Julia Panzer, Wissenschaft im Dialog

Session 2: Paper Presentations

• Wirkungsverständnis in der transdisziplinären Nachhaltigkeitsforschung, Lena Theiler, Institut für sozial-ökologische Forschung (ISOE)
• Impact assessment of innovation challenges within the project »Crowd Innovation«, Iliyana Madina, Fraunhofer IMW
• Praxiswerkzeuge zur Wirkungsmessung in Sozialen Unternehmen, Felizia von Schweinitz, Uni Hamburg
• Zwischen intendierten Impact und offenem Experimentieren: Fallstudie Bildung für Nachhaltige Entwicklung im JUPITER-CAMPUS, Claudia Mendes, Uni Hamburg

Joint Discussion

Lunch

Session 3: Lightning Talks

• by Sandra Richter, Nordmetallstiftung; Lotte Warnsholdt, MARKK; Tina Heyne, HADLEY‘s and other participants

Session 4: Interactive Workshop

• We will map open questions, transversal themes, ideas and tools as well as controversial topics during the presentations and discussions, to build a repository for joint exploration during the workshop session. It is also possible to tackle methods, cases or dilemmas hands on.

Wrap up