Perspectives on Impact: Dr Jedidiah Evans

Dr Jedidiah Evans' research focuses on arts and incarceration, so his ideas about impact are truly outside the system. He runs weekly writing workshops at Parklea Correctional Centre and is associate editor of Paper Chained, which publishes the art and writing of incarcerated people. 

The Researcher Development Unit reached out to Jedidiah with a few questions on impact for the first in our series, Perspectives on Impact. 

What is your relationship with impact in relation to your work? How do you define it? 

In my work with incarcerated people, it’s especially challenging to imagine research doing anything, if it doesn’t directly lead to changes in prison policy or in explicit improvements in the lives of people impacted by the criminal justice system. But by saying that impact is about creating conditions necessary for change, I am treating my research—but also my teaching, my partnerships, my relationships, my passions—as opening up possibilities for change. Those changes might come in systems, but they might also come in individual lives. And I want to have integrity across all spaces of impact. I don’t want to be so enamoured with scale that I miss the significance of one conversation in a prison workshop. Equally, I don’t want to overestimate the value of these kinds of conversations and avoid the challenging work of supporting system-wide changes that, in turn, support communities impacted by prison justice.

Your impact is very much about the end user, so the benefits to your research are beyond academia. Is this how you designed it, or did you start research in a more traditional sense?

I started out as a traditional literary academic. I wrote a book of literary history, and my research activities typically involved long stays in libraries and historical archives. I am still interested in the study of literature, and I haven’t given up my credentials in that discipline simply because I’m more focussed, nowadays, on supporting incarcerated people to learn. If anything, starting as an academic within a humanistic field has been a valuable distinguishing feature of my work. There is no single field or discipline that “owns” prison justice, and I think it would be diabolical if we believed only certain groups of people have a right to think about the costs of incarceration. 

But it is true that I felt anxious in my own disciplinary space precisely because I couldn’t see how my work was doing anything for people—real people. That’s not because literary studies cannot help people—far from it!—but I couldn’t see a way for my commitment to community, to human beings, to justice, to generosity and hospitality… for all these things to breathe in my academic work. My search for a purposeful academic life led me to prison work: first, running workshops and classes, and now looking for ways to support large-scale improvements to prison education. And my hope is that I’ll also be able to do more research on the writing of incarcerated people: not only writing about prison, but the rich writing and art that is generated within prison walls. And that way, I’ll experience a kind of full circle in my academic life! There was little in the way of “design” at the outset of this journey: I was seeking to make my work more meaningful and beneficial to folks in our communities. But, over time, it has proven to be precisely the kind of work that I feel called to, and that has been an enormous gift.

What is your approach to academic impact? How do you navigate research that has impact in a community setting with the pressure to get citations, conferences, and lead in your field?

I’m lucky, in that I work alongside the men and women who feature in my research. They are not “subjects” of my work, but collaborators and co-designers, and always the pressure I feel to do good research is motivated by the lives of people that I have known, and to whom I owe an obligation to do more, and to do better. I don’t know if this is a model that is replicable across other disciplinary contexts—and I am too early in my journey to be utterly decisive about such things—but in accounting for impact, all I think about is people. People whose names I know, whose families speak with me, whose children I have seen grow up in photographs and through stories. I’m incredibly fortunate to also teach—not only incarcerated people, but also students at our university—and so am not in as precarious a position as colleagues whose sole responsibility is to generate research. Even still, while I do feel the pressure, I know that “leading the field” is only authentic if the people impacted by my research see that I am doing it for them and are included in the work well before it’s a citation. In that way, the pressure I feel is less citational, and more relational. Again, there is a risk that I overestimate my impact, and end up overwhelmed by the innumerable challenges facing folks on the inside. But I think it has served me well so far to shape my practice alongside people on the inside, rather be dictated by citational esteem.