Affective auditing: The emotional weight of the 2022 Research Excellence Framework in the UK

In aggressively neo-liberalised higher education systems and in ‘high-performing’ research units – typically academic schools in high-ranking research universities – research assessment has come to dominate the daily organisation and enactment of research and research culture. So much so in fact that academics’ research praxis, their employability, career trajectories and very lexicon are in synthesis with the manufacture and mediation of performance values, often to the detriment of collegiality, critical citizenship and self-efficacy. Research assessment as a technology of governance is thus also a ‘disruptive technology’ epidemic to the (re)making of academic lives. Notwithstanding, studies of the affective aspects of research assessment and its emotional manipulation of academic lives are at best thin. Further, less is known of what we call ‘affective auditing’ from the perspective of academic middle-managers with institutional responsibility for implementing assessment procedures and with direct experience of the disruptiveness of research assessment at meso and micro levels. By way of response, this article reports on findings from interviews with academic middle or quasi managers responsible for overseeing research assessment in research elite universities in the high-performance and highly pressurised research context of the UK. These accounts elucidate the weight of ‘affective auditing’ on academic researchers and academic quasi-managers and the extent to which research assessment shapes the emotional contours of research lives.