This chapter will discuss how a mode of cognitive-cultural production, a festival, was mobilised for persuasive purposes, through a case study of a group of film scholars and researchers in Bristol, UK, who linked subject-specific knowledge with a kind of ethical praxis to reach marginalised community groups through the production of a film festival. The Bristol Radical Film Festival (BRFF) takes place annually in venues throughout the city of Bristol, in the South West of England, presenting a curated programme of ‘radical’ films and documentaries which are screened in non-traditional venues. The context of this work is how the changing political economy of UK higher education, along with new forms of measurement of the impacts of academic research, has led to a reevaluation of the public engagement activities of academic communities.

University festivals

Because the study described here examines the role of universities in the cultural economy (Chatterton, 2000; Hughes et al, 2011; Sapsed and Nightingale, 2013; Comunian, Smith and Taylor, 2013; Comunian and Gilmore, 2014), it needs to be acknowledged that this research coincided with a period of dramatic change in the political economy of UK higher education. Most notable was the newly elected Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government’s Comprehensive Spending Review of October 2010 that announced deep cuts in funding for higher education for the period 2010-11 to 2014-15. The Browne Review (Browne, 2010), published at the same time, redrew the guidelines for funding academic institutions and, following this, the Higher Education Funding Council for England announced significant adaptations to the tools of measurement of academic research, specifically those that measured its impact. The arrival of the Research Excellence Framework's ‘impact’ agenda demanded that the ‘use’ value of academic research to society had to be articulated more clearly than ever before.

Festivals are sites of cultural production which, through practices of curation, interpretation and presentation, connect cultural producers with the public. They were being operationalised within UK higher education for the purposes of achieving public engagement with research, and other external impacts (Buckley et al, 2011). The proliferation of university festivals between 2010 and 2014 (Ager, 2016) sparked renewed interest in practices associated with ‘third mission’ agendas such as widening participation and public engagement.