Responsive Research Quality Articulations of the Humanities

This chapter describes the development of research quality articulations. It shows how articulations of research quality in Swedish humanities policy spaces have changed between 1980 and 2010. The study demonstrates an increased presence and diversity of quality articulations in the spaces studied. However, different contexts produced different outcomes. Co-production between science and policy articulations resulted in what this study terms responsive quality articulations, neither internal nor external in nature. These findings have implications for how research quality can be studied and conceptualized, as well as for the history of humanities in Sweden. An understanding of how research quality has developed responsively complicates the commonly used narratives that depict the humanities as either passive or reactive to policy changes. Therefore, the findings offer an alternative narrative to the trope of a “crisis” in the humanities, by highlighting how humanities scholars influenced research policy in articulating quality. It shows that negotiations over research quality during these 30 years have been more complex than previously acknowledged, in turn allowing us to reassess current understandings of research quality in the humanities.