Researcher Education and Development Scholarship Conference

Dr Jane Alys Shepard, Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange Staff Development at University of the Arts London, UK 

Preparation for the new Strategy, People and Research Environment (SPRE) element of REF2029 creates an opportunity for us, as Researcher Developers, to contribute to how our universities meaningfully and convincingly explain their research cultures.  

This contribution is important because, where the SPRE statement requires institutions to evidence inclusive and sustainable research environments, there is a risk that attention will be focused on dashboards, policy documents, and structural charts. What we really want to know however, and what we can really learn from, is what excellence looks like, and feels like, to the people who experience it. 

In this blog post I will reimagine the role Researcher Developers might play in narrating a university research culture from a people-centred perspective. I’m interested in this because, as someone who designs and delivers learning opportunities, the insights I glean into the needs, experiences and behaviours of researchers at my institution are crucial to creating responsive and supportive institutional practices. As REF2029 looms, I wonder how much of what I see, feel and hear will feature in the SPRE statements; how I would describe what I think makes these cultures great, and why anyone would want to listen to what I thought about it anyway? 

We know that bottom-up perspectives are important (Certeau 1984), and in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jane Jacob’s presented streets as the urban pathways through which a city’s social, cultural and economic life becomes visible. I think there is an interesting analogy to be made between ‘the street’ as a site of everyday life, and the institutional structures and systems that represent the everyday experience of a university.  

If we reframe ‘the street’ as a metaphor for how people navigate the policies, practices and relationships that form our research environments, then universities would do well to listen to those who work in research development and who can offer important insight into how these spaces function, thrive, and sometimes fail.  

Researcher developers as urban ethnographers of university research environments 

In my day-to-day work I’ve often found myself ‘walking the streets’ of my university, leaning into its day-to-day rhythms, accompanying research staff and doctoral researchers on their career journeys. Researcher development, however, is often positioned as ‘training delivery’, ‘skills provision’, ‘programme coordination’, and ‘EDI support’.  

In a 2026 blog post by the Researchers14 group (How Researcher Development Supports Institutional Research Excellence Framework (REF) and Strategy, People and Research Environment (SPRE)) the authors make a strong case for the enabling role of researcher development, and how this work strengthens the environment. It follows therefore that research institutions would benefit from drawing on the unique insight of those who deliver researcher development, and from the vantage point of what Celia Whitchurch describes as third space professionals (2012) who span the boundary between academic and professional practice (Obexer 2022). Why? Because we’re all walking the streets of an institution, but we have a different line of sight. 

To help illustrate this point, let me pose some questions: 

What does the research environment in your department, school or institution look like? What does it feel like? 

In what moments do you witness joy and vitality? (I hope there are some.) And where do you hear of frustration or stagnation? 

I ask this because I believe that you, as researcher developers, will have reflections that are different to the formal narrative. You will have a unique insight into and across your local research landscape, and this insight positions you as a cultural intermediary, who translates and interprets systems for others in your day-to-day work in research development. In creating forms of cultural infrastructure, you connect people, surface norms, help translate policy into practice, and sustain the informal networks on which research, collaboration and research cultures actually depend. 

Let’s think on this for a moment. In your work, how often do you 

• Witness informal mentoring? 
• Notice who feels excluded from networks?
• Hear about policies that don’t meet the need?
• Observe spaces where friction and competing demands drain creative energy and motivation? 

This ability to see, hear and feel a research environment is something of a superpower. Why do I think it’s a superpower? Because it reveals the gap between how institutions imagine themselves to function, and how they are actually experienced. It focuses on that human-centred perspective that is so crucial for creating supportive and productive spaces that we want to work in.  

‘Walking the Streets’  

To help unpack why this ‘superpower’ is critical to successful research environments, I draw on the work of journalist, urban design theorist, and community activist Jane Jacobs who played a central role in fighting against a proposed programme of urban redevelopment that threatened the New York neighbourhood where she lived in the 1960s. 

Jacobs believed that the architectural designs of town planners were flawed because they did not consider the ways people actually used the spaces in which they lived, worked, and socialised. Developments were hailed as a success, and even won awards, because they looked impressive in diagrams and sounded convincing on paper. The experiences of those living in the new developments, alongside the locational and structural suitability of the housing complexes being built, however, were largely absent from these evaluations. 

Unlike senior city administrators, who formulated their designs by looking down from the city from above, Jacobs physically explored local neighbourhoods on foot, observing how people used the space throughout the day, and night. She was alert to how spaces created opportunity for daily interactions, identified what worked well (rather than what was failing), and examined how structural systems, including buildings, urban spaces, and connective roads, enabled communities to thrive. It was Jacob’s practice of ‘walking the streets’ of city neighbourhoods helped her identify the markers of a thriving community. 

From the foundational principles of urban design theory that Jacobs established, we learn that by viewing a research environment from the vantage point of the metaphorical street or pathway, we can begin to understand what makes it ‘live’ and by extension, what contributes towards its demise.  

Applying this lens to our own local contexts, our research environments, we can infer that while structures matter, it is the meaning and value that people attribute to these structures that determines their success. Within the university sector, reports like, Research Culture; Embedding Institutional Excellence (Royal Society, 2018) support the argument that our research cultures are experienced and relational, while critiques like that of Heuritsch (2021) challenge our reliance on metrics-driven evaluation in favour of participatory research cultures.  

Focusing on interactions 

If we take positive collective experience of people as a marker of a success, then we need to focus our attention on how people interact within their research environment: the frustrations it surfaces, the workarounds they create, and the ways individuals define a successful research career, noting that this may be different from institution viewpoint. 

Positioning researcher development professionals as the urban ethnographers of the university creates an opportunity to understand what truly enables research environments to thrive beyond metrics, structures, and strategic priorities. It is from this vantage point we can best understand the quality of interactions, connections, differences, stressors, and motivators that shape everyday practice and form part of the broader social ecosystem within a university (Bourdieu, 1984). If institutions want to move beyond compliance for REF then this situated knowledge needs to be acknowledged, not as anecdote, but as insight into how research culture actually functions; and ultimately how it can be improved. 

Summary 

As the SPRE element of REF2029 asks universities to evidence their research environments at both institutional and unit levels, we have an opportunity. We can describe them from the air, or we can describe them from the ground. 

Jane Jacobs would recognise this instinct immediately: the tendency to mistake coherence on paper for vitality in practice. 

Researcher developers and educators are already on the ground. The question that remains is, can our voices be heard and are our institutions ready to listen?