Abstract

This study explored the diverse ways in which those engaged in university-based arts and humanities research (researchers, administrators, partners, beneficiaries) construct and respond to the challenges of interpreting, enacting, and demonstrating the cultural value of research. We refined and tested a methodological approach, proposed initially in Oancea(2011), that is based on qualitative network analysis, or configuration tracing and analysis. The data collected include well over 70 hours of interviews, 24 co-produced configuration drawings,email follow-up and qualitative answers to an online questionnaire. In addition, we reviewed clusters of theoretical resources that had either been mobilised in related research, or we deem ripe for further exploitation in this field. These resources include theories of the valuation of cultural goods; critiques of cultural valuation; and philosophical, cultural-psychological and ecological approaches to cultural values/s. Our review of these resources highlights the limits of dualist thinking, but also the theoretical and methodological relevance of concepts such as networks, interaction, intersubjectivity, configurations, texture, flows, and ecology. The study has furthered our understanding of cultural value as a contested concept, beset by conceptual, philosophical, practical and political tensions. It has taken us through many crisscrossing discourses and has shown us that interpretations of value – cultural or otherwise –underpin economies of description, prescription, inscription and ascription, while at the same time being part of complex ecologies of cultural life, creation and understanding. Meaning,expression, narrative and practice, combined and recombined in experience through the interaction between self and others, sit at the core of our participants’ description of the arts and the humanities. We set off on this study with a theoretical and methodological interest in tracing conceptual and empirical configurations of value from research, as articulated and practiced by our respondents. Our evolving design enabled us to take guidance from the participants in order to follow such configurations flexibly. This process has showed us the fruitfulness, as well as the challenges, of the form of qualitative network analysis that we have developed. Subject to further testing and refinement, this approach is amenable to use in research, evaluation,communication and developmental work.