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

Symposium & Workshop

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 long symposium brings 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 will discuss 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? 

Presentations will provide insights from both, reflexive and practice-oriented perspectives and will include case-studies from all three contexts (universities, museums, industry). The symposium will be bilingual (English-German). You can find a detailed program in the PDF below.

The number of participants is limited. Please register with claudia.mendes@uni-hamburg.de