Evaluating the Engineering Exchange

Hannah Cane is a graduate of UCL’s MSc in Environment, Politics and Society in the Department of Geography. She wrote her final paper, submitted in 2017, on the Engineering Exchange. The paper evaluated the impact and efficacy of EngEx projects relating to air quality.

Findings

For her research, Ms Cane interviewed project participants, including UCL academics and partners from the wider London community. This led to a number of empirical conclusions, indicating that in the EngEx two-way participation model:

• Academics and EngEx staff largely conceptualise their work as ‘communicating expertise’ to the public, while community-based participants perceive the main value of the work to be the extra ‘authority’ it gives to their existing ideas.
• The willingness of researchers to participate in two-way/collaborative approaches could indicate potential to transform research impacts.
• In order for this to take place research practitioners need to allow their own approaches and perspectives to be transformed by the collaboration process, rather than seeing their role as purely the delivery of pre-existing knowledge.

The paper also offered recommendations for how the EngEx could improve its collaborations, such as:

• More clearly articulating its intentions to community participants.
• Rather than focussing purely on reaching a wider community audience, more could be done to gain wider support and buy-in within UCL. This could contribute to challenging existing power dynamics.

Read the report