What Frankenstein’s monster can teach researchers about the dark side of ‘impact’

As researchers, like Mary Shelley’s feverish anti-hero Dr Frankenstein, we are programmed to break new ground. Many academics will relate to the doctor’s description of his “voyage of discovery to the land of knowledge”: “I have lately been so deeply engaged in one occupation that I have not allowed myself sufficient rest,” he laments. What’s that? You have a pre-funding deadline with noticeable flanges under your eyes? Check!

And, when he feels his endeavours are not advancing: “My heart palpitated in the sickness of fear.” Do field conditions mean that your results are slow to come in and you won’t meet your funding deadline? Check! 

We work in an academic world in which the impact and sustainability of our labour, whether economic, social or cultural, are increasingly held up as a critical measure of our endeavour as social and natural scientists. Of course, the push for academics to make a concrete change in the world is no bad thing. Each year, taxpayers plough millions into higher education research. It’s reasonable they get something back. But given recent data about high levels of burnout and depression among higher education professionals, as reported byTimes Higher Education – and as clocked by the Birmingham University College Union’s health and safety executive in its rationale for launching an investigation into my own institution – it seems that many of us, in pursuing the end, have lost track of the means. 

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As we bounce from one short-term research grant to the next (for those of us lucky enough to secure one in the first place, that is), our work is critically evaluated against an idea of impact that fails to capture the human researcher embarked upon their endeavour. In a world where workplace mindfulness is ubiquitous in emails from staff welfare and well-being offices, we seem to have forgotten that our way of conducting research impacts us, the researcher, and that this has a very real toll on its impact as a whole.

I recently became very aware of this as, with colleagues, I reflected on the long-term impact on us of our experience some 10 years ago of observing hundreds of appeals of individuals refused asylum across the UK. This was for a three-year grant. The research was nominated for an Economic and Social Research Council impact award, but I also came across the concept of “moral injury” to describe the guilt and complicity we felt in watching the process. None of this we had reported at the time. I’d not created a monster, but I’d been there to observe the stitching of its parts and it took a toll on me. This is a toll of which novelist Shelley was astutely aware and yet is rarely considered in research ethics or impact. 

Impact is imposed by the major research funding councils and by the unrelenting spectre of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework. The REF defines impact as “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia”. By this definition, the way our research impacts us as researchers should count as central to this mission. But it simply, well, does not. 

So why Frankenstein? Because more than any academic text I’ve read, it is above all a lesson in designing research with an eye to ethical research impact. More than that, it is a warning as to what might happen if we stray from the path of reason and let our intellectual passion lead us in a harmful pursuit of grandeur. In this context, those who set the parameters of impact would do well to heed Shelley’s prescient warning to avoid promoting the kind of dishevelled doctor embodied by Dr Frankenstein and his work.

Shelley meant business in her warnings. “If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind,” she wrote. 

But beyond the impact of impassioned research pursuits on an individual state of mind, Shelley relates this to the wider world. For her, the ends and the means coincide. In this context, to not care for yourself or the impact of your research on yourself is to risk creating something monstrous: “If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America could have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.”

Shelley’s allusion to colonialism is poignant still in an academic climate in which calls to decolonise academia ring out strong. Key to the feminist research ethics that align with efforts to decolonise academia is self-reflectivity, putting yourself into your research, and that includes taking care of your needs and how the research is impacting you. Some in recent years have spoken of “slow scholarship” as an alternative to the fast-paced pressure of churn-it-out REF-able outputs. Others have left academia altogether, fearing that they, like Dr Frankenstein, are so thinly stretched that they cannot care for the creations their hard-fought labour brings to life. 

Shelley wrote Frankenstein more than 200 years ago, surrounded by men who were chomping at the bit with romantic zeal to create something original. As academics, many of us can relate to this desire but also the pressure that comes to alienate ourselves from the process. 

And this is why I have in my office an image of Frankenstein’s creature, not the gory, green, bolt-in-the-neck version we have come to know on our screens but a lonely, abandoned creature that has all the hallmarks of research projects swiftly dropped as the next grant comes in. We have an ethics of care to our research subjects but also to ourselves. Dr Frankenstein succeeded in creating life, but at what cost to himself, to his creation and to society as a whole? 

So, when writing your next research bid, recall Shelley’s words and think about the sustainability of your impact on yourself as well as on others: “A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow his passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule.” 

One tick for workplace mindfulness and slow scholarship indeed.