Earley, B. (2026) ‘The popularity of “new antiquarianism” challenges how we understand research impact’, LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, 2 March. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2026/03/02/the-popularity-of-new-antiquarianism-challenges-how-we-understand-research-impact/ (Accessed: 3 March 2026).
Ben Earley’s blog post highlights a real tension in the academic archaeological community: traditional grants and REF frameworks still demand that tidy, linear model of public engagement — the university-led talk, the press release that generates newspaper headlines, and the TV documentary with your name prominently attached as presenter or consultant — yet the real magic often happens through non-academic dissemination, the parallel “reception at scale” that he describes so well. My posts, Paul Whitwick’s videos, independent channels like History Time, and Pen & Sword books absorb those academic outputs, chew them over with care and citations, then pass them on to tens or hundreds of thousands of readers and viewers who would never attend a campus seminar. This deeper, cumulative, uncontrollable uptake — which goes far beyond one-off newspaper coverage or academic-fronted TV programmes — genuinely shapes how the public actually encounters the past, yet it remains invisible to current metrics because there is no neat pathway or institutional ownership to tick. To keep academics incentivised and happy — and to stop the system quietly discouraging them from feeding the very ecosystem that keeps their research alive — we simply need to start recognising and measuring this non-academic dissemination alongside traditional engagement, whether through reception logs, altmetric multipliers or a new “uptake” box on the form, so the knowledge flows both ways and everyone wins.
(I wonder if this will be picked up as engagement with his blog article)
