Viewpoint: Tom Shakespeare

Tom Shakespeare trained in sociology at Cambridge and has worked at Sunderland, Leeds and Newcastle Universities: currently he is part of  the team at Beacon North East.  His books include Disability Rights and Wrongs and Genetic Politics.  He is a member of Arts Council, England, and has been involved in the disability movement for more than twenty years.

From positive engagements to negative capability

No university can avoid engaging with the public.  That much is obvious.  The employment of staff, the recruitment and teaching of students, the doing and dissemination of research, even merely existence in a (usually) urban setting, all constitutes engagement.

So “public engagement” obviously has to mean something more and wider.  The current emphasis on engagement is perhaps an overdue recognition that universities cannot, like the ivy on their buildings, take a parasitic role, sucking resources and people from their surroundings without facing up to the responsibilities which both public funding and intellectual independence bring with them.  Of course, many academics have always known this, and have honorably and usually with scant recognition spent time in serving the needs of wider communities.

My own activities in this area have arisen from my personal and theoretical interests.  In the emerging discipline of disability studies, engagement has always been central: theory emerged from, and connects back to, the disabled people’s movement.  Researching with, on behalf of, or for, lay disabled people is vital, although these prepositions conceal deep debate.  Whatever political position espoused, there has been a recognition throughout disability studies that research should aspire to make a difference to the everyday living conditions of disabled people, or to the wider issues of how to understand and respond to disability.

In my bioethics work, understanding the nature and impact of the new genetics and other biotechnologies has, for many researchers, been connected to outreach and dialogue with different lay communities: communicating, interpreting and discussing the new sciences to broaden the conversation and attempt to democratise how science develops and is applied.

In promoting public engagement around disability and around bioethics, there are diverse strategies, many of which we deployed at PEALS over the last decade: deliberative democracy, café scientifiques, consultation meetings and talks.  In finishing this reflection, I would like to highlight the role that art can play in promoting debate and reflection on conceptual themes.  Sometimes, of course, sci-art or arts in health or disability arts can be as esoteric and elitist as any academic paper or theoretical argument.  But in my experience, the right artist, in collaboration with the right scientist or thinker, can look with fresh eyes, producing accessible work which enables diverse audiences to respond emotionally, as well as rationally, to the complex challenges we all face today.  Social research and philosophical investigation can produce empirical data and normative argument: the third leg of the stool is the messy work of feelings, which too often in academia we neglect.  This is what we who work in universities have perhaps to learn from public engagement, and in particular from working with creativity as a root to engagement: that negative capability of which Keats once wrote, when people are “…capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”.