Innovation and Impact award winner Dr Karen Smyth
By: Communications
Applications for the Innovation and Impact Awards are open for 2023 and UEA staff, students and recent graduates are invited to enter themselves or nominate their colleagues.
The awards celebrate the research, innovation and collaboration successes of UEA staff, students and recent graduates, and recognise the significant impact of their work in helping to solve global challenges. Find out more about the categories and download the entry/nomination form.
We spoke to one of last year’s winners, Associate Professor Dr Karen Smyth (LDC), who won the 'Outstanding Social or Cultural Impact' category for her ground-breaking heritage work on the Paston Footprints project. She told how special it was for the project to be recognised and explained how one medieval Norfolk family has helped shine a light on what life was like hundreds of years ago
Tell us about the Impact and Innovation Awards
UEA’s annual Innovation and Impact Awards celebrate the remarkable research and entrepreneurial spirit of UEA staff, students and graduates, as well as the important collaborative work with partners beyond the University. The awards recognise and reward projects which are changing lives, helping shape our understanding of the world, and addressing local and global challenges.
How did you come to win the award?
I applied as Director of Paston Footprints, on the prompting of our community partners. The task to evidence cultural impact in making the award application is a worthwhile process, as it encourages evaluation with project partners and participants about lasting legacies. That the University is interested in how the research can have lasting benefits for external stakeholders is crucial and brings reciprocal benefits in securing collaborative partnerships for the future.
Just some of the evaluations, for example, included work with heritage organisations, churches and schools about the sustainability of the newly interpreted heritage in the landscapes and community ownership of this globally significant heritage story. New exhibition curating experiences with Norfolk Record Office and plans about metadata potential from our Paston letters digitization process were discussed.
With North Norfolk District Council, the Paston research has contributed to their Heritage Action Zone cultural programming development. With Community Action Norfolk we evaluated our contribution to their agenda of building community identity and belonging. With theatre directors we identified new heritage sector commissions.
We also did the usual tallying up of numbers for our application, discovering over 76,000 social media interactions and 50,000 visitors to our web site. The biggest challenge in the making the award application was the word count limit!
How did it feel to win the award and what does it mean for your work?
It was an enjoyable evening hearing about the vast range of ground-breaking projects occurring across the University. To hear the line '…and the winner is Paston Footprints' was exciting!
It was empowering to be recognised as creating meaningful change for diverse demographics engaging, often for the first time, with Norfolk's rich medieval and early modern heritage.
Most of all, these UEA awards are about celebrating collaboration. It has been a privilege to share the award with our project partners and over 60 Norfolk organisations who have worked with Paston Footprints, with many indicating how much they appreciate the recognition. The publicity of the award has also opened new networks for our future work.
Tell us a bit more about Paston Footprints
Empowering community investment in Norfolk’s early history and exploring wellbeing connections with past lives has enabled new audiences to engage with the world’s earliest and largest collection of family letters.
The life of this medieval Norfolk family is now better interpreted through community research (including discovery of new archives), an online letters database, digital reconstructions of Paston buildings lost to time or in private ownership, and all-age creative activities in 15 Paston community hubs involving 8,000 people, and 50,000 online interactions.
Paston heritage is better experienced with the creation of ten new Paston heritage trails in Norfolk, with the first-ever Paston branding across the country and 14 permanent displays. These trails are available at www.pastonfootprints.co.uk.
What is next for you?
Looking ahead, the focus of Paston Footprints is to explore medieval and early modern narrative links alongside contemporary wellbeing practices with 3rd sector health organisations on the ten new heritage trails in Norfolk.
Having researched the concept of ‘heritage wellbeing’ - with its intangible benefits of building communities and sense of identity - the aim of my future research into 'heritage health' is to amplify the voices of people with disabilities reshaping and re-narrating the stories that are told about cultural heritage.
Living with impairment can facilitate transitory creativities, through which new modes of thinking and being can be developed. Disability access in this model is one where we centralise the diverse, embodied, sensory and cognitive experiences of people with disabilities.
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