Audit culture has transformed academic life into textual and discursive ‘things’ to be assessed, ranked, and differentially funded. This has created enormous amounts of new bureaucratic work, including entirely new jobs in universities – impact advisors, Research Excellence Framework (REF) managers, student survey teams, student experience officers – which redirect money and time away from doing teaching, research, and other front-line services, towards auditing them. Audit processes affect who gets to be an academic in UK higher education (HE), informing hiring, firing, promoting, and funding decisions. Doing meaningful research and teaching does not mean much if one's ‘outputs’ are not REF-able or if one's teaching does not ‘satisfy’ students. Thus, interpretations of the National Student Survey (NSS), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funding processes, and the REF are profoundly important as they inform who gets to stay and who has to leave the sector, how bearable their working conditions are, and what kind of academic work they can do. And so, while academics might experience audit as a nuisance to get through as quickly as possible so they can get back to their ‘real work’, audit is a key mode of reproducing UK HE and academic culture in which we are complicit.

As my research has shown, academics have interpretive power in the translation between audit rules in institutional texts and actual practice. We are required to do audit processes in exchange for universities receiving public funding, alongside requirements for accountability, and these are implemented within deeply managerial and undemocratic university structures.

What is the point of academic research? Should it be a pure pursuit of knowledge, protected from the whims of government and the zeitgeist? Should we be following Marx's oft-quoted maxim that the point is to change the world? And how much say should governments have on the direction of academic research? Throughout my PhD, I was pre-occupied with these questions around the ‘point’ of academic research, fuelled by an impatience around the slowness of change, the horrors of the world, and a worry that doing a PhD was a luxurious, selfish pursuit. While these impulses have not gone away, I have made my peace with the position of the academic and try to think carefully about the consequences of my research in a humble and accountable way. My theory of change is informed by what I have learnt from Institutional Ethnography (IE) and examining UK higher education (HE) audit processes, acknowledging how difficult and complicated it is to change complex bureaucratic organisations. Political life in the UK and beyond is also instructive; the world is a mess, and the best-laid plans often go awry, but slow and steady organising can produce profound and unexpected change. And so, in this final substantive chapter, I will examine the ‘impact agenda’ in UK HE and consider practices of measuring, tracking, and rewarding ‘impact’.

In UK HE, impact refers to the effect that academic research has on the world, often focusing specifically on changes that occur because of academic research.

We are delighted to have this book in the series. As the author explains, it has been a long and difficult journey to completion, which makes the outcome even more welcome. It also means that the book is both up-to-date and extremely timely, given that the HE sector is now publicly in crisis. We hope this book will be valuable to anyone trying to make sense of the complex world of UK HE. For many academics, engaging with bureaucracy can seem boring and take us away from the ‘real’ work, but, as the author points out, ‘not knowing the rules can leave us vulnerable to mythologised (mis)interpretations of how audit processes work and thus complicit in reproducing an academia which could be done differently’. The book has sector-wide and cross-disciplinary relevance, but we would like to see a well-thumbed copy on the desks of vice chancellors and other senior leaders and even on that of the Minister for Education – if only she had the time.

The author begins from her standpoint as a precarious early career feminist academic and used this to inform her analysis of everyday textual practices of academics in UK HE, in the context of an audit culture, and their differential impacts. Órla Murray makes a case that few in the HE sector would disagree with:

I almost did not write this book. A mixture of ill health, a global pandemic, and the postdoctoral job market made it impossible to focus on writing a monograph. I received the book contract in April 2020 just after the first COVID-19 lockdown began in the UK. I’d been applying for lots of academic jobs and fellowships and was still hopeful that I would get a book-writing fellowship or a research job with personal research time to allow me time to write this book. This did not happen, and so instead I tried to squeeze in writing alongside my paid academic work and kept delaying the manuscript submission deadline. My job was initially 4 days a week on a 1-year contract, and so I continued applying for jobs and fellowships, feeling disheartened and exhausted by repeated rejection. While my tiredness was in part due to the imminent end of my employment contract and the global pandemic, increasingly it became apparent that I was also ill. Near the end of 2020, I was hospitalised due to undiagnosed ulcerative colitis and had emergency surgery which saved my life. Thankfully, I had some sick pay, a supportive line manager, and free access to the NHS. But it was notable that while I lay in my hospital bed, I worried about my job. I worried that time off work and my new chronic illness and disability would stop me from surviving the academic rat race.

Why is this relevant to a book about UK university audit cultures? Academic working conditions in the UK are awful. They make us sick and exclude those of us who are already sick, and rely on ableist and classist assumptions about what is possible.

Am I REF-able? This question plagues UK-based academics, whether they are permanently employed or stringing together temporary posts. The REF – the Research Excellence Framework – is the much discussed (and widely hated) UK-wide research assessment exercise, which judges the ‘excellence’ of academic research. The REF results carry prestige and determine research funding for departments and universities. However, the REF has become more than just an audit process: it has produced a powerful discourse around who or what is ‘REF-able’, shaping the way individual academics and their work are judged as valuable or not. Being perceived as REF-able is incredibly important due to the impact on the hiring, firing, and promotion of individual academics and the funding and staffing of departments and research centres. However, REF-ability is an amorphous concept, mixing the formal eligibility criteria of the official REF process with broader value judgements about what will score highly and therefore bring higher star ratings in the REF results and associated funding and prestige. The REF process and notions of REF-ability are deeply mythologised, with (mis)understandings circulating among academics, professional services staff, and university management. This chapter examines the REF as both an official audit process and a discursive framework used to judge the value of academics and their research.

Through a comparison of the official REF 2014 and 2021 guidance and interviews with physicists responsible for REF 2021 submissions, I show how the REF works in practice.

After a discussion of X (Twitter) and the kinds of feelings, sentiments, and practices that it engenders in users, Chapter 7 explores what people do on screens: the social practices, thinking, and being that occur in postdigitality. Pursuing the mission of the book to seek the human in the machine, this chapter attends to how crescent voices act at screens, discovering the many learned and habituated digital literacy practices which allow screen users to perform their identities multimodally in multitudinous and diverse ways. Based on interviewee accounts, this chapter offers a model of postdigital practices which employs the concepts of fishbowls, antholes, rabbitholes, and wormholes, while also drawing on Charles Taylor’s social imaginaries.

The final chapter serves to draw the various strands of the book together, surveying what has been discovered, and expanding on the fundamental arguments of the book. It therefore begins with an analysis of Pinterest, which stands as an emblem of all that literacy means in postdigital times, whether that be sophisticated multimodal practices, durational time, or algorithmic logic. Looking back over the screen lives discussed in the book, including those of the crescent voices and of Samuel Sandor, this chapter crystallizes the personal take on screen lives that the book offers, reiterating the need to ‘undo the digital’ and find the human in, on, with, at, and against screens. It also presents some of the problems scholarship must meet, such as digital inequalities, whether that be in terms of time, awareness, or skill with technology. However, despite the considerable negative forces at work in screen lives which the book has taken care to unravel, this concluding chapter advocates ‘taking the higher ground’ and enacting wonder in interactions with screens.

This chapter introduces the book, laying out its central questions, including what it means to be postdigital, what diverse kinds of life and humanity can be found in screens, and what new technologies such as automation and AI might mean for screen lives. Chapter 1 also describes both the background and aspirations of the book, as well as its structure and a guide on how to approach reading it. Beyond discussing the defining research questions, this chapter also details the ideas underpinning the book, including the notion that there has been a tangible shift between how we related to screens a decade ago and how we do now. In addition, the book is guided by an awareness of the often conflicting and intricate relationships people have with screens, as well as the concept of the ‘smallness of screen lives’, inspired by Deborah Hicks’ notion. The Comfort of Screens is a tapestry which unfolds a story of postdigital life, sewn from the fabric of 17 people’s screen lives, interviews with whom form the backbone of the book. These ‘crescent voices’ are also introduced in this chapter.

Opening with an analysis of Instagram, Chapter 2 is concerned with how to think about postdigitality. Touching on multimodality, time-space-place, and responsive loops, this chapter highlights the contrast between digital life and postdigital life, unravelling the many dimensions of postdigitality. It concludes that postdigitality represents a world of symbiosis, whether that be of body and mind, physical life and screen life, representation and non-representation, immersion and connectivity, or interaction and convergence. These combinations are what lends digital media its unique power to move across time, space, and place. To explore these ideas, Chapter 2 analyses data which has been processed through ATLAS.ti to produce a list of postdigital keywords used by crescent voices.