This interactive workshop helps participants develop impact narratives and strategies that align with the general ‘impact’ trends in academic institutions and challenge more instrumental approaches.

Professor Annette Markham will start the workshop by sharing insights from her research on how impact narratives have been operationalized in the Australian academic landscape. Next, she will introduce a framework to help participants identify their own values, vocabularies, and pathways toward generating possibilities for better ethical futures through mindful academic practices.

Participants will then take part in two hands-on activities:

• Identifying Impact Pathways: In small groups, participants will use speculative design prompts to identify natural or inherent impact pathways in their own or a selected research trajectory.
• Writing a Personal Impact Story: In the second exercise, participants are invited to reflect on and creatively intervene in the impact story being told through their own CV.

Bio:
Annette Markham is Chair Professor of Media Literacy and Public Engagement in the department of Media and Culture at Utrecht University, Netherlands. In addition to studying sociotechnical futures of AI-human relations, Annette has expertise in mixed methods and ethical frameworks for working in inter and transdisciplinary contexts, and has worked in a range of public and private sectors in the USA, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, and Switzerland. From 2021-2023, she completed a series of community-engaged projects as part of RMIT University’s Enabling Impact Platform in Australia. Previously, as founding director of the Digital Living Research Commons at Aarhus University in Denmark, she facilitated a series of arts-based interventions in multiple countries from 2016-2020.