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Knowledge Exchange and Public Engagement

Since its inception as LCACE in 2005, TCCE has been at the forefront of developing and supporting ground-breaking work in Knowledge Exchange and Public Engagement. We have produced literally hundreds of events bringing together Higher Education and the arts, cultural and creative sectors and many of these have also been more widely and publicly facing.

Our conferences and fora create many opportunities for knowledge exchange and we have developed innovative methods to support research collaborations through programmes such as Creativeworks London and The Exchange. We have also been at the leading edge of public engagement development and continue to support this work in a myriad of ways, outlined below.

REF, Impact and KEF

The issue of research impact within the REF is one we have been working on with our members over many years. We first tackled the subject back in 2006 when it was still a nascent area, commissioning research on the impacts of some of the early LCACE Seed Fund Projects.

Recently, we’ve designed and delivered events for our membership including 

  • Student Knowledge Exchange 
  • Workshopping KE Metrics 
  • The Knowledge Exchange Framework: Reflections and Future Actions
  • REF2021: Best Practice in Practice Research
  • Methods, Networks and Imagination in Cultural Knowledge Exchange 

TCCE have a sustained track record of supporting knowledge exchange between universities and the creative industries. Their valuable work has opened out new areas of partnership to unlock benefit from academics for a sector which delivers economic and cultural value for us all.

David Sweeney,
Executive Chair,
Research England

Festivals

These activities create not only a novel context for public engagement but also the opportunity for academics to think about new forms of teaching and knowledge exchange as a result.

 

Women Walking 

Last year, we continued with our mini-festivals and designed, curated and delivered Women Walking: Histories, Movement and Mobilities, a mini-festival with over 300 attendees, across six sessions, over 3 days. The pandemic has changed how we live and work so much, and for many of us, walking has become even more integral to our day to day lives. We curated Women Walking to encourage wider discussion and engagement around the complex topic of women walking. Sessions included:

  • In Conversation with Dr Kerri Andrews
  • Sensory Perspectives
  • Walking to Greenham: Women’s Bodies in Motion Across Art and Activism
  • Walking, Creativity, and Covid19
  • Untold Stories and Hidden Histories – Walking to Understand
  • Writing and Walking

 

Inside Out Festival

We established our Inside Out Festival in 2008 as a means of bringing research to wider publics. The festival ran for almost a decade and it gave all TCCE network members the opportunity to collaborate with many cultural organisations in London to produce a wonderful series of talks, walks, workshops, debates, concerts, hackathons, exhibitions, installations and flash-mobs each year.

Some of those we collaborated with over those years included: Freud Museum, The British Academy, The National Portrait Gallery, RSA, Editorial Intelligence, Tate Britain and Somerset House. Times Higher Education was our regular media partner.

The Inside Out Archive can be found here.

 

Walking the City

Our research communities are continually at the forefront of generating fresh and compelling knowledge about many facets of our city and urban life. Walking the City is a TCCE initiative that aims to take that amazing research and knowledge beyond the academy, out of the lecture theatre and onto the streets, bringing to wider attention some of the outstanding work taking place in our universities.

Walks have taken place throughout the city in areas as diverse as: Harsleden, Mayfair, Bloomsbury, Shoreditch, Stepney Green and Stratford. We have taken a break whilst we have been delivering other projects Walking the City will be back soon.

Here are the Walking the City archives for 2016, 2015, 2014.

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Earlier this year I tweeted about some pilot research I had done on how going to a cultural event with other people can enhance the cultural experience. TCCE picked up on it, and before I knew it I had been offered their support to run a roundtable discussion during their Inside-Out Festival. The event attracted a very keen and engaged group of interlocutors. A great example of how TCCE nurtures productive academic-practitioner conversations around “growing shoots” and new ideas.

Professor John Sloboda,
Guildhall School of Music and Drama,

TCCE

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