Intro:
Welcome to the Research Culture Uncovered podcast, where in every episode we explore what is research culture and what should it be? You'll hear thoughts and opinions from a range of contributors to help you change research culture into what you want it to be.
Emma Spary:
Hi, it's Emma and for those of you who haven't met me yet, I'm the head of researcher development and culture at the University of Leeds. My podcast episodes focus on research culture and research leadership. Now, you may have already listened to my previous episode where I was talking to members of the Research Culture Enablers network on how the network was started and what they hope it will bring to the sector. In this episode, I'm talking to more members from that group, but this time we're focusing on their career journeys and how they ended up in their current research roles. So I'm going to start with a quick round of introductions and ask Yasmine, Tish and Ellen to briefly introduce themselves and to tell us a bit about their role and how their research culture is structured in their different institutions. So I'm going to come to you first, Yasmine.
Yasmine Rhoseyn:
Thanks Emma. Hi, I'm Yasmine Rosen. I'm research culture strategy manager at the University of Bristol. This is a new role to the university as of January 2023 and my remit is the kind of whole university so institution wide, so I work closely with the academic lead, our associate professor chancellor of research culture. I sit within professional services, specifically in the research enterprise innovation division. The team I sit within is strategic operations. So we are a central team within this division, cross cutting and we have lots of different focuses. Other strategy managers focusing on research more broadly and enterprise innovation sit within this team.
Yasmine Rhoseyn:
Also. In terms of our governance, we get support from our main governing committee, the research culture committee. They were formed in late 2022, early 2023 and were adapted from a previously existing committee focusing on research improvement. They report to our main university research committee, which oversees all things research, including strategy at the university and Tish.
Tish Kriznik:
Thanks Emma. I'm Tish Kriznik and I'm the research environment and culture manager at the University of Birmingham and this is a new role to the university as of September 2023. And similar to Yasmine, I have an institution wide remit. My role sits within the research strategy and services division, specifically within the research environment and policy team, which is one of the crosscutting teams within our division at Birmingham. I'm closely connected with our division director and our pro vice chancellor for research, and I'm part of several internal networks, groups and committees that either work to support specific research culture initiatives or that are related to broader aspects of research culture within the university.
Ellen Cole:
My name is Ellen Cole. I'm research culture and quality manager at Northumbria University. I've been in post since June 2021 and I'm based in our research and innovation services team in our research policy area alongside ethics, research and development, research comms, research systems and info. And there's a second research culture and quality manager. I work alongside it. I tend to focus on research culture, where he focuses on the research quality and assessment side. I work really closely with our dean for research culture and our pro vice chancellor for research and innovation, and we also have a cross institution research culture committee who I work with.
Emma Spary:
Brilliant. Thank you all very much. So now on to the reason that we're here today talking about how we ended up
Emma Spary:
We are.
Emma Spary:
So I think for many of us working in research culture, we certainly didn't end up thinking this would be our chosen career path. And I think for many, including myself, it's been more of an evolution. So what I'd like to ask now is a bit about your career journey and what made you apply for your current positions in research culture.
Yasmine Rhoseyn:
Well, I'll go first. Thanks, Emma. And so, unlike several colleagues within this space, I don't hold a PhD. After completing my master's in social psychology and research methods, I went straight into work working within higher education at the same institution that I studied at, which is the University of East Anglia. And since then I've worked in a range of different roles within the sector, including wider participation and outreach. I did a bit of administration, student advocacy, project management and kind of more recently program and strategy management. Now, when I joined the University of Bristol in 2022, I was kind of airlifted into research culture and this was an emerging area, emerging space, and needed increased resource. So it's all by accident that I ended up working in this space.
Yasmine Rhoseyn:
Through this, I worked on a variety of different projects at Bristol and provided kind of overall program management for our portfolio of work during this time. This was a really great opportunity to meet so many interesting and passionate individuals across the university who were kind of real experts in their areas. I think there's so much scope within this area of work, which is incredibly exciting. And although institutional change is quite challenging at times, I think there's so much engagement from people to get it right. And this has ultimately led me to be interested in being involved in leading the strategy at Bristol and feeling that I could contribute to ensuring its success in this area.
Tish Kriznik:
So I completed my PhD in 2015 and I was a postdoc researcher until 2019, which is when I moved into professional services roles within different universities. So I've worked as a research integrity officer and then as a research governance officer with a specific focus on trusted research before moving into my current role on research culture. And since starting in these professional services roles, I think interest in research culture has become much more prominent in the sector. So I feel like I made the switch from research to professional services quite an opportune moment, and the transition to my research cultural has really been shaped by both my research experience as well as the work I've done within professional services. So my research background is in sociology and this has really strongly influenced how I think about and approach my work. I've always been interested in social practices and how these are shaped both at the individual level and also considering what levers and drivers influence the broader context in which social practices sit, and how we ensure that those external factors are supporting and enabling the kinds of practices that we want to see. So while in my research life that was more related to health inequalities, I now apply this thinking to practices and contexts related to research culture. And having worked in professional services at different universities that have differing levels of research intensity, I've seen the different ways in which research is organised and supported within all these different contexts, as well as the variety of different roles and resources that are in place to enable the delivery of research.
Tish Kriznik:
And this has made me really passionate about ensuring that everyone who contributes to research, in whatever role that may be, is appropriately supported and recognised. So that's kind of how I've come to where I am now, and it's also one of the reasons why I'm part of the research culture enablers network.
Ellen Cole:
So I came into research culture from a different path again. So for around 13 years, I was a librarian, working in a range of different roles in university libraries, but particularly supporting open research and scholarly communications. In 2019, there was an opportunity to take a secondment in our research policy team, supporting loads of different areas across assessment, culture, research development, different concordats. And I loved that secondment. And when an opportunity came up to join the research policy team on a permanent basis, I took it with the opportunity to focus kind of much more on research quality and culture. I think also this can be kind of quite a daunting agenda. There's loads of things that can fall into this kind of research culture space, but actually my previous roles, I've seen huge cultural change happen around open research in that time, just seeing kind of starting off like, say, around 13 years ago, of having to really knock on doors and try to convince people of the need to do this, to now reaching a point where certainly open access is almost a given in the sector, and we're looking at much more kind of demanding or much wider range of different things people can do to make their research more open. But also at Northumbria, kind of going on that journey to become a more research intensive institution.
Ellen Cole:
I've seen that happen in my time here, so I've got a sense of kind of what's possible and that this can be a really exciting space to work in.
Emma Spary:
Brilliant.
Emma Spary:
Thank you. As Ellen's just said there, research culture is such a big area, I think there's no shortage of things for us to do. But across the sector, we are seeing a bigger push for positive change, and this includes growth within our own institutions with new emerging strategic plans. But also there is the new emergence of research culture funding and sector wide initiatives like the inclusion of people, culture and environment in ref, the research excellence framework, and of course, your own research culture enablers network. I will also put links into the show notes. So if you want to find out more about the research excellence framework or the network that we're talking about today, the research culture enablers network, you can find all of the information in the show notes to accompany this episode. So what do you think? A lot of this work and these pushes are going to help us progress in research culture.
Yasmine Rhoseyn:
Thanks, Emma. So I'll just give a bit more context about some of the drivers and then we can move on to talking about the ref and kind of what we expect next in this space. So obviously we've seen a lot of interest from universities with the creation of dedicated roles, but also just thinking about a more strategic approach to research culture and how change can be driven. We've seen certainly interest from funders. Now we're seeing funders mentioned or mentioning research culture in a variety of different funding scheme applications. We're seeing researchers being asked within their applications to evidence how they and their institution are ensuring a positive research culture, ensuring career development opportunities, considering kind of equity, diversity and inclusion, and also kind of considering how they can encourage involvement in research from staff across multiple career pathways. So, including your kind of technical and your research professional staff as well, which is really interesting. We've seen a focus from the uk government, for example, in the research and development 2021.
Yasmine Rhoseyn:
I think it was people and culture strategy, an inclusive and kind of welcome research culture was the focus of that. And obviously we've seen a lot of interest and drivers from researchers themselves who are of course really engaged and really passionate about many key issues relating to job precarity, access to professional development opportunities, kind of increasing open research and embedding diversity, just to name a few. As you said Emma and Ellen talked about earlier, this is, or can feel like a daunting remit and can be all encompassing. So I think it's important to note that research culture is kind of used as an umbrella term that covers a range of different areas that shape the environment in which research is undertaken. And while there may be some overlap with kind of people or organizational culture maybe sitting within human resources departments, there are specific things that are relevant to research and that do need to be addressed. So although we've seen some organisations choosing to deliver on research culture by adopting this into the remit of human resources or EDI staff or staff development, as opposed to creating kind of new individual, centralized teams, that we've also seen other kind of organizations creating those individual roles. So there isn't really a one size fits all. There are kind of different approaches, I think, that institutions are taking to delivering on this work and we don't yet know kind of what is the best approach, that kind of best practice.
Yasmine Rhoseyn:
Evidence is still ongoing as to how we can tackle this, and it's likely to vary based on kind of institutional characteristics as well, and linked to that.
Tish Kriznik:
And in support of all the things that Yasmine's just said, we've also seen obviously some examples of direct funding and investment in the research culture space, which I think has really influenced institutions to put more emphasis and focus in this space. So obviously two notable examples have been the Wellcome Trust's institutional fund for research culture, and in England at least, Research England's Enhancing research culture fund. So these have allowed institutions to dedicate time and resource to initiatives supporting positive research cultures, including in some cases looking at funding specific posts to look at institutional research culture. Many institutions have also chosen to use these resources to look at developing strategies for addressing research culture within their own contexts. Although obviously we're all at different stages, as Yasmine said, we're all at different points on the journey here. So some, for example, have got fully formed action plans that we know about, others are still finalising their action plans, and others are perhaps even early in the development. But having access to specific resources to dedicate time to this I think is really, really key in pushing the agenda forward with respect to research culture.
Ellen Cole:
I think we also have to just acknowledge that Ref is a key driver here, particularly with the plans announced in the initial decisions in 2023 for environment to be replaced by people, culture and environment. With that increased weighting of 25% within ref. It's a significant change and it reflects the emphasis and value on the place, on the importance of a positive environment and institutional culture that supports people to enable the delivery of high quality and impactful research. And as we record this now, we're awaiting, potentially, an announcement this week on a pilot for what those people, culture, environment indicators and what a bit of the assessment might look like. I think there's often a little bit of reluctance to acknowledge the role of ref in this area, but I think there's actually a real opportunity here because it will spur on institutions to engage in research culture who might otherwise not be quite as far along on this journey, as well as encouraging us to collaborate with each other and other stakeholders within the sector, and also to create opportunities like this network for us to start talking to each other.
Emma Spary:
Brilliant.
Emma Spary:
Thank you so much. In there around the drivers, some of the things that we're going to be expected to respond to as well, and collectively, how we can ensure that all of these things remain collaborative and don't become yet another thing that we're put into competition with each other on. So we are nearly up to time and what I'd like to do now is give you an opportunity to have the last word and maybe that shout out for why people should get involved and more important, how they can get involved with what you're doing.
Yasmine Rhoseyn:
Well, thanks, Emma. So I'll go first. My key message. So I suppose, key takeaways, that this kind of area of work isn't just one person's role or responsibility, even though we might have that title or you might not have it in your job title. I think it's a whole team approach that will really lead to that change. It's an institutional approach, needs to be collaborative. We need buy in, we need a sense of community, and there are lots of opportunities to be involved in shaping a positive research culture and people might not realize that they are actively contributing to that research culture. So I just encourage listeners to think about how they could shape research culture in their space.
Yasmine Rhoseyn:
Yeah.
Tish Kriznik:
And we're, of course, very much aware of this within the research culture enablers network, which comprises colleagues from a diverse set of roles, from a range of higher education institutions across the UK. And we found that as we're meeting with one another, we're starting to build up a bit of a picture of all of these different kinds of roles and the contributions that we make to research culture. So some of the roles might be more strategic level, while others are more sort of on the ground, as it were, working with researchers on day to day activities related to research. While we may not all have the same job titles, we're still enabling that research to take place and we're hoping to somehow capture this within the network, to bring this knowledge together to help others working in the research culture space within the sector, to be able to better recognise and acknowledge their contributions to research culture within their own organisations.
Ellen Cole:
So anybody who has a research culture enabling role, whether that's all or some of your role, whether you have a passion for the whole piece or just one specific area, you're very welcome to join the network, to contribute to and build on that perspective. You can build partnerships with like minded colleagues and hopefully we can translate some of our experience into best practice, developing a body of professional knowledge and actually taking some leadership in this research culture space. So there will be a link to the network in the show notes where you can find out more and hopefully sign up. You'd be very welcome. Great.
Emma Spary:
Thank you. And just one final reminder, if you do want to find out more about the network, there is the episode that we did earlier on, and again, I'll put a link in which talks about how the network was formed and what its hopes are for changing the sector. So that is us done for today. I would like to thank Yasmine, Tish and Ellen for joining me and give them the opportunity to say goodbye.
Yasmine Rhoseyn:
Thanks Emma. Bye everyone.
Ellen Cole:
Thanks everybody.
Intro:
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