The practice turn

performance and the British academy

Heike Roms

pp. 51-70

in: Jon McKenzie, Heike Roms, CJW-L Wee (eds), Contesting performance, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

It is the spring of 2007, and although this chapter has not yet been written I already know it will have been published too late. All university-based research currently undertaken in the United Kingdom, in whichever discipline, is done so in anticipation of the forthcoming Research Assessment Exercise 2008 (also known as "RAE 2008"), a national audit of research activity, conducted by the UK's Higher Education funding councils, that will for the next few years determine the level of research funding that the councils allocate to each British university.¹ Through a process of expert review, institutions will be ranked principally on the quality of the "output" of their research-active staff. This chapter was to be one of my outputs, but the inevitable delays that occur in a scholarly collaboration across continents have now pushed the prospective publication date of this book beyond the census date of the audit. Other scholars across Britain are currently still waiting anxiously to see whether their book or chapter or journal article will be printed in time as publishers work through a backlog of manuscripts.