Place as a strength

Opening the day, SAHA Co-Chair Professor Murray Pittock reflected on the shifting landscape the arts and humanities find themselves navigating today. He emphasised that the sector’s ties to “particularity, locality, nationality and place,” in other words its profound local rootedness, can be a strength. He offered his own current study of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe’s economic impact as a case of “the particularity of place and why it matters economically.” He later chaired a panel with Dr Dan O’Connor (Executive Director of Partnerships, Portfolio and Engagement, AHRC) and Professor Tom Crick (Chief Scientific Adviser, DCMS), who brought invaluable funder and policy insight to the day. The afternoon’s discussions explored how trust with communities is built and sustained, how to build impact that outlasts project funding, what “place” means for policy making, where languages education in Scotland is heading, and how digital tools can make the sector’s interconnected work visible, tell its story to different audiences and encourage further collaboration between sectors.

Open forum: putting people at the centre

Leading the open discussion, Professor Claire Gorrara, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research and Public Engagement) and Dean of the School of Advanced Study, noted when citing recent work on public attitudes towards research that what people want is hope; and we, she reminded the room, are “hopeful people,” with solutions, ideas and practices of our own.

During the open forum, attendees crowd-sourced what effective advocacy looks like in practice, surfacing words like grassroots, partner-based, evidence-based, people-centred and connected. One colleague drilled down into what “people-centred” means in reality, broadening it to include citizens, artists and professionals alike, all valued as an essential piece of the shared whole.

Another point made more than once was the importance of moving away from extractive research models, in which academics parachute in, take from a community and leave when the funding ends. That is why it’s so important to bake co-production values in from the start such as building capacity and skills, exchanging knowledge so that both sides actively learn from each other, sharing materials, and making sure the community co-owns the research. We heard what that looks like in practice, from the Highlands and Islands to Liverpool: local people trained to carry out the research themselves, and oral histories deposited in the local archive for anyone to use instead of leaving with the researchers when the funding ran out. It also means treating each project as part of a long-term partnership.

Three practical ideas stood out. These are steps that anyone thinking of starting a place-based partnership could put into practice right away. Be present: advocacy means being in the room, at other people’s events, for the long haul. Professor Gorrara spoke of “trust capital”: the vital, unhurried work of spending time with a community for its own sake, with no outcome driving it. Be fair: community partners and artists should be costed into projects and paid fairly, with their time, labour, practice-based insight, and lived experience treated as expert consultancy as opposed to volunteer support. And finally, be brave about failure, which is part of the research process, too. One colleague described how an unsuccessful City of Culture bid began a relationship with the local council that grew into a jointly designed regeneration plan and some seven years of work.

A shared frustration was visibility. Colleagues explained how an immense amount of excellent place-based work is happening locally, but it remains largely invisible to policymakers, to the wider public and even to colleagues outside the networks where it happens.

Revealing our research ecosystem

And that’s where we came in! After the tea break, we provided a lightning tour of the map and what is possible through our live, public dataset of the UK’s arts and humanities research infrastructure, with Scotland in focus.

We specifically showed how the map takes the problem of visibility head-on: (1) it puts infrastructures on the map, from university centres to community-led collectives; (2) it amplifies connectivity by showing who is working next door, and with whom; and (3) it offers national insight into where the work is, how the sector is changing and what is missing.

Being in Scotland, we were particularly interested in demonstrating what Scotland’s research ecosystem currently looks like on the map, and how much more there is still to discover. We talked about how a growing number of Scotland’s infrastructures on the map sit outside universities, from the Pictish Arts Society to the Children’s Parliament, reflecting the community-focused work discussed earlier in the day. We also gave the room a taste of the Humanities and AI Map, which launched the following day, and of the AI work it shows across Scotland, including BRAID, which had come up during the panel.

We then went on to highlight the dynamic nature of our research landscape: what is visible (and how we understand it) is constantly changing. The map keeps pace with research trends as well as policy and funding priorities as contributions from existing and new infrastructures continue to grow. Because it is current, the map can also foreground cold spots in the regions and research areas that are thinly served today, giving subject communities and local groups the evidence to make their case for support and funding.

Above all, the map was designed to democratise discoverability. Many smaller infrastructures have few staff who can take on outreach, while search engines reward those with a steady stream of content and long-established web presence. Other registers of research infrastructure set conditions for inclusion, such as reliance on public funding or national significance, which can leave out grassroots networks, community archives and practice-based groups. MAHP gives anyone, inside a university or out, a say in how their work should be represented, a way to keep their own record up to date, and a route to being seen beyond their own networks, whatever their size or reach.

Languages in Scotland

To close the afternoon, the summit turned to the specific place-based challenge of language learning. Professor Fiona Barclay (University of Stirling) set out the current landscape in Scotland. She told us how, despite a positive policy backdrop (including the 1+2 languages policy and the Scottish Languages Act for Gaelic and Scots), fewer pupils are taking language qualifications, with the drop in French particularly stark.

Professor Barclay described language learning as an ecosystem, where a leak at one stage, such as fewer pupils taking qualifications at secondary school, can damage university provision and the future supply of teachers. Using the British Academy’s cold spots mapping, she showed how university provision is concentrated in the central belt, and described a series of cuts and closures, some made and some proposed. Pointing to Ireland to show what is possible in an Anglophone country, she highlighted that almost three quarters of pupils there sit a foreign language for their Leaving Certificate, at the end of school, while in Scotland fewer than 20% of learners take a language at National 5 level, at about 15 or 16.

Building on this, Professor Catherine O’Leary (Co-Chair, SAHA) introduced SAHA’s recent report, Languages in a Global Scotland. The report takes a broad view, covering Gaelic, Scots, British Sign Language, and home and heritage languages, alongside the risks and benefits of AI. Professor O’Leary stressed that effective advocacy means speaking the language of policymakers and telling a positive story.

To sustain momentum, colleagues are working towards a cross-party group on languages in the Scottish Parliament.

Bringing the day to a close, Professor O’Leary drove home why gatherings like this matter. It is these discussions and the coming together, she reminded us, that move a community from “we must do something” to “let’s actually do something.”

Are you on the map?

Hope, presence, visibility are three words we are taking home from Edinburgh. The Mapping the Arts and Humanities Project can help with the third. If you lead or belong to a centre, society, archive, network or collective in Scotland, or anywhere in the UK, search the map to see how you are represented, and add what is missing.

Our thanks to George Meredith and Federica Simone for organising the day, and to Professor Gorrara and SAHA for the invitation to present the Mapping the Arts and Humanities Project at the Humanities Summit.

📍Are you on the map? Check here. |🗺️ Explore the map | Add your infrastructure |📥Get in touch → mapping@sas.ac.uk