Celebrating Impact Prize: what success looks like

by Heidi Hinder

This week I’ve been looking back at comments from the judging panels in previous rounds of ESRC’s Celebrating Impact Prize to see what the most successful applications share in common. There are a few common themes, each of which answers a different question. I’m hoping capturing and sharing these will provide useful food for thought to those applying to the 2020 Celebrating Impact Prize and to those who are not yet in a position to apply, but are gathering evidence for applying at some stage in the future.

Ebola anthropology: from real-time social science to building future local capacity

Professor Melissa Leach is Director of the Institute for Development Studies, and with her research team won the 2016 Celebrating Impact Prize for Outstanding International Impact.

This is the third in a series of blogs delving further into the research behind the impact awards. Applications for the 2017 Celebrating Impact Prize opened this week.

I was truly delighted when our team won the ESRC’s Outstanding International Impact award in 2016 for our work during the 2014-15 Ebola crisis in West Africa.

Our Ebola Response Anthropology Platform (ERAP) and related Ebola: Lessons for Development initiative showed how and why long-term social science understandings, mobilised rapidly in real-time, could transform an epidemic response. Our work focused on issues like the social significance of burials, the value of community knowledge, practices and institutions, and contextualising the violence being experienced by health workers.

Shifting attitudes around cycling

Dr Rachel Aldred is a Reader in Transport at the University of Westminster.
Earlier this year Dr Aldred was presented with the Outstanding Impact in Public Policy award in our annual Celebrating Impact Prize.

This blog is part of a new series which looks into the research behind the five successful awards, whilst touching on how the winning academics will spend their £10,000 prize.

I was delighted to win the 2016 ESRC Outstanding Impact in Public Policy prize for my research into cycling. In this and the other categories, there was a strong field that showcased the importance of social science – and the need to support it.

From research to creating social change through art and engagement

Celia Kitzinger (University of York) and Jenny Kitzinger (Cardiff University) Co-Directors of the Coma and Disorders of Consciousness Research Centre and joint winners of the ESRC’s Outstanding Impact in Society Award, 2015.

Running into the office last week carrying a bundle of eight foot bamboo poles, along with a picnic blanket, an iron and a bag of sand, we reflected on the changing role of the academic.

What do I want? A closer relationship between theory and practice. When do I want it? Now, please, if you don’t mind.

Dr Jennifer Doyle, Trafford Housing Trust, Winner of the ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize for Outstanding Early Career Impact

It is strange and exciting being a researcher in social housing. There are no traditional links between social housing and academic research. As a collective, those of us in the built environment disciplines have broadly fallen into one of two roles:

• Those focused on an absolute necessity to deliver housing, to manage housing, and to look after our tenants, in the moment, continuously; and
• Those of us who have been afforded the luxury of time to conduct research to consider things more deeply, to reflect, strategise and plan for the future.