Since 2024 Dr Charlotte Ryland, Director of the Queen’s College Translation Exchange, has been working to connect Languages researchers with the public policy community, through support from Oxford Policy Engagement Network. This began with an OPEN Leaders grant.
What is Policy Engagement?
Policy Engagement is about connection and communication. Within research, it describes the ways in which academics and researchers can use their expertise to connect with policymakers to inform public policy. This can take the form of informal or formal consultation and collaboration, with civil servants, parliamentarians, and others in the policy community. To find out more about policy engagement, visit the Oxford Policy Engagement Network (OPEN) website.
What is the Oxford Languages Policy Engagement Project?
This project began in 2024, with support from Oxford Policy Engagement Network (OPEN). It was founded by Dr Charlotte Ryland, with support from a group of highly engaged Early Career Researchers across the Oxford Languages community.
The project’s mission within Oxford is to transform policy engagement within the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages (MML) from one dependent on the commitment, energy and contacts of individuals to one that is embedded institutionally in the Faculty. Beyond Oxford, it aims to understand and capitalise on the opportunities for our discipline to inform public policy.
Policy engagement can take many forms, and this project focuses in particular on how researchers can engage with civil servants in order to support public policymaking.
The research group began by gathering feedback from academics in MML at Oxford, exploring existing and potential capacity for engagement. The group then worked with members of the Academic Engagement sub-group of the Cross-Government Languages Group to explore what effective collaboration between Languages researchers and policymakers can look like, and how it can be seeded and supported. The group also co-created a training programme on policy engagement, aimed at Early Career Researchers in particular, and ran a series of very well attended and dynamic webinars on policy engagement for ECRs across the UK.
Project outcomes
1. We published:
- a guide to policy engagement for languages researchers, particularly aimed at early career researchers
- a guide to governmental Areas of Research Interest [ARI] for researchers
- a brief for ARI officials on how languages research can contribute to ARIs
2. We held a workshop on Languages and governmental Areas of Research Interest, one of the ways in which UK government departments engage with the research community.
3. We produced a series of confidential reports, which were shared with policymakers:
- a report on policy engagement for languages at Oxford from an internal and external perspective. This report is confidential:
- slide decks on ARI-relevant languages research for four government departments
For more information about these reports, please contact charlotte.ryland@queens.ox.ac.uk
4. We designed a training package including course structure, slides, and scripts. If you would like to consult this, please contact charlotte.ryland@queens.ox.ac.uk.
5. Cross-Faculty collaboration on policy engagement
The project identified an opportunity for Oxford researchers of language and languages to collaborate on policy engagement. At Oxford, these researchers sit across numerous faculties in several divisions. The collaboration began by bringing together MML; Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics; Asian & Middle Eastern Studies; Classics; and Education for regular meetings. We are now working to make this collaboration sustainable, including cross-faculty training for early career researchers.
We are grateful to all who gave their time to this project.
Links
The Queen’s College Translation Exchange
Charlotte Ryland’s OPEN Leaders project
This project was inspired by Wendy Ayres-Bennett’s work on language and policy. See for example her report on Languages and Policy: Building Collaborations between Academics and Policymakers.
Arlene Holmes-Henderson’s work on the role of Arts and Humanities research in policymaking
CAPE: Capabilities in Academic Policy Engagement has published a set of excellent resources
Articles & Blogs
Languages and Policy Engagement at Oxford: An Act of Translation
Collaborating for Change: From the Languages Classroom to Whitehall, and back again