Dialogue or Duel? A critical reflection on the gendered politics of engaging and impacting Jocey Quinn, Kim Allen, Sumi Hollingworth, Uvanney Maylor, Jayne Osgood and Anthea Rose Introduction This chapter seeks to offer a critical reflection on the politics of engaging stakeholders in research. Specifically we shed light on the difficulties and tensions encountered delivering a seminar series on the ‘inter-relationships of education and culture’ that had at its heart a desire to facilitate a dialogue between academics and policy makers and practitioners. This series of seminars ‘New Perspectives on Education and Culture’ (http://educationandculture.wordpress.com/) ran from January 2011 to January 2013 and was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), one of the key funding bodies for research in the social sciences in the UK. The seminar series sought to explore the ways in which culture and learning co-produce each-other. As an academic field, Education is often positioned in rather limited terms as the following typical outline demonstrates: “Education has been called a field of practice, and the various contexts and subjects of education-pedagogy, learning, systems, institutional contexts, practitioners and students- constitute the subjects of education research” (Francis, 2012: 6). In contrast, we wanted to explore how learning is culturally constructed as an everyday experience from early years to later life and in formal and informal spaces including popular culture, family cultures, teaching cultures and local cultures. We wanted to highlight Education as a field of theory where multiple perspectives were essential to answer our three key questions: How does learning shape culture? How does culture shape learning and how do gender, ‘race’ and class shape inter-relationships of education and culture? Consequently, speakers and participants were drawn from a vast array of different disciplinary locations 1 and, importantly, from within and outside of academia. Our ideal vision of this dialogue between academic and non-academic stakeholders in the fields of education and culture was that it would be reciprocal, providing opportunities to expand our own knowledge but also affording opportunities to challenge the paradigms by which social and educational problems are positioned and to provide fresh conceptualisations which could inform the on-going work of policymakers and practitioners. Alongside our own professional desires to engage with and speak to wider communities through our research, the series took place in a broader landscape where questions of ‘impact’ and ‘public engagement’ have increasingly come to construct academic labours and identities not only in the UK but internationally, for example in decisions regarding research funding in Australia (Francis 2012; Taylor and Addison 2011; Williams, 2012). In the UK a key factor is the Research Excellence Framework (REF), a measure by which UK universities must present their research for evaluation and, through which academics and institutions are judged and measured on their capacity to engage and ‘impact’. In addition, funded by the ESRC, the series was implicated in several ways by the ESRC’s engagement strategy and impact agenda which emphasise at length the need for research council-funded activities to make a ‘demonstrable contribution… to society and the economy’ (ESRC website ‘What is research Impact’, 2013). As we argue through this chapter, such demands to engage with stakeholders outside of our academic communities and make our work count in ways that judged and evaluated according to preformed, measureable notions of ‘impact’ and ‘knowledge transfer’ were productive of tensions, challenges and affects which were not captured in the dominant, celebratory and clean narratives of impact and engagement. As Williams has recently argued, as academics will increasingly be asked to perform and package our ‘impact’… we should think critically about the consequences – both 1 including Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology, English, Media Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Geography, Education, Race and Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies.