Towards a Social Innovation Research Agenda in the Humanities

Vienna.
The next speaker at Challenge Social Innovation 2011 is Sean Ryder, who begins by noting the idea that more humanities funding should be channelled to the way cultures communicate with each other, and that such research could significantly address social innovation. More broadly, though, what can humanities research tell us about innovation? It can take historical, philosophical, and cultural perspectives on the causes, processes, and consequences of innovation; it can highlight the contextuality of the meaning of innovation; it can point to the fact that knowledge can never be disinterested, but is always culturally embedded; it can show innovation as a force of disturbance, complexity, and conflict (involving creative destruction, for example); and it can take a long-term perspective on innovative processes: the consequences we come from, and the possibilities we’re moving towards.

Further, of course, the history of culture is a history of innovation; the history of avant-garde movements is one example for this. Artists have always also been involved in breaking free from established models, in promoting creative destruction; many artists are also uncomfortable with being involved in research or innovation programmes, however.

Social innovation involves areas such as ecology, social justice, tolerance, democracy, and inclusion; those are worthy goals, but also value-laden, and should be interrogated. Humanities provide knowledge that can help us understand the way that values and cultural practices operate around and through innovation, too. If knowledge is power, the transfer of humanities knowledge is key to the empowerment of individuals and groups. Social innovation demands action, then: a transformation of relationships, and not simply knowledge for its own sake. Humanities scholars sometimes see themselves as producing knowledge that has no immediate impacts – but this may be underestimating their work.

There are a number of emerging fields – medical humanities, digital humanities, heritage studies, creative arts, creative industries, and language and literacy studies – which have some very strong potentials to contribute to social innovation, in particular. A humanities research agenda for social innovation, then, should include the investigation of theoretical, historical, and cultural models for producing knowledge; the funding of collaborations between creative arts, humanities, and social partners; and the evaluation of research and knowledge transfer impacts.

Institutions need to model, encourage, and support those interlinkages; researchers must seek ways to add value and impact to social innovation (to move from analysis to action), but also manage the question of whether such goal-oriented research compromises academic freedom and simply pursues short-term instrumentalism.