Image: Grace Gay for Research Professional News. Source: Impact Media Specialists, via UKRI
Attacks on dissent and debate damage science, society and the economy, says Christopher Smith
Since its launch in 2005, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has made significant contributions to society. We have excavated the past and illuminated the future. We have helped to shape public discourse and modernised the humanities. We have learned from science, and science has learned from us.
Nonetheless, some commentators and politicians have undervalued and misrepresented arts and humanities research. As well as causing problems for individual projects, this risks undermining the arts and humanities’ wider contribution, damaging the fundamental underpinnings of science.
What’s more, such attacks completely miss the point of arts and humanities research.
We won’t adapt to the health challenges of the climate crisis if we don’t understand our communities or the environment. And we won’t address the root causes of the climate crisis if we can’t understand our place in nature and develop the design tools to find solutions.
Without philosophers and ethicists asking what we should do, rather than what we can do, we risk creating artificial intelligence (AI) that benefits only the very few.
If you suppress the dissent, debate and innovation that arts and humanities research brings, you will get weaker science and a less open society.
A happy marriage
Our vision at the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has always been interdisciplinary, pairing the work we fund with that of the other research councils.
A combination of art history and materials science, for example, showed that fragments of a glass beaker bearing an inscription from the Quran, found at Caerlaverock Castle in Scotland, came from the Middle East at the time of the crusades—a discovery leading to a community project fostering cross-cultural understanding. Scaled up, this approach is symbolised by the council’s investment in conservation and heritage science at UK Research and Innovation’s Daresbury laboratory.
Another distinctive example of the AHRC’s work is its decades-long pioneering of the marriage between arts and technology in the UK’s creative industries.
Economically, this is massively important. The UK is really good at the creative industries—from architecture, design and visual arts, to film, TV and video, to software and computer services. The UK’s £7.8 billion games sector brings together a broad range of collective creativity, from logic and narrative fiction to graphic design, to translation into commercial products, to the development of immersive virtual worlds and beyond.
These are sectors grounded in creativity, talent and skill. They generate wealth by marrying these qualities with the technical advances that come from intense creative R&D funding.
This process, wedding creativity with technology, driven by scientific content development, reaches beyond the creative industries into almost every facet of the economy. Google Deepmind, a UK-based AI company making major advances in neural networks and medical research, started off in gaming.
No easy answers
Of course, the AHRC’s motives are not solely commercial. Social benefit and human advancement are not measured only in economic terms.
The research we fund may seem of little personal consequence to you, but then we often don’t see the research that underpins the most basic elements of our lives, be it the drugs that treat our illnesses, or the technologies that stop our cars skidding off wet roads. That impact is still there, even if you can’t see it.
Nor is research less important if it only affects a few people. Research into rare childhood medical conditions, for example, is vital even if it directly benefits a comparatively small number of people.
So perhaps some arts and humanities research may seem esoteric now, but it was just over a century ago that women won the right to vote—and they did not pay independent taxation until 1990. When I was born, male homosexuality was both taboo and illegal; now we celebrate gay marriage.
None of these changes would have occurred without people advancing and exploring ideas that, at the time, some found difficult or scandalous. It’s a similar story with research going on today into topics such as the UK’s global past, our identity and our relationship with technology. Those ideas must be explored, even in the face of opposition.
In improving the quality of our lives and of society, it is inevitable that arts and humanities research will sometimes be controversial. That’s exactly as it should be.
When you’re dealing with matters of life and death, the nature of being, and existential threats to human civilisation, you cannot expect easy answers. But if there is no space for debate or dissent, we will not be able to build a better future.
That’s the true, intrinsic value of arts and humanities research. That’s why we need to celebrate it, and why we need to change the narrative.
Christopher Smith is the executive chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council