Universities and community engagement: learning with excluded communities

• Start date: 01 September 2007
• End date: 31 January 2010

There is increasing expectations on universities to engage with the local communities in which they exist. To earlier emphases on business engagement has been added a rising growing expectation that universities will help socially-excluded communities to adapt to the demands of the knowledge economy. This expectation is based on several partly contradictory visions of universities:

• Democratic communities where equals negotiate democratically and reflectively;
• As private businesses selling services competitively in global markets, and;
• As governmental instruments serving wider social purposes.

This project explores the practical ways these theoretical tensions are playing out in the way universities are engaging with a number of socially excluded communities. Central to the research is the idea that what unifies all three visions of a university is that the university is a learning community, and reach out need bring socially excluded actors into these learning communities as full participants.

The research will explore concrete university projects - in poorer British regions and nations – actively involving socially excluded groups. The focus will be how this is developing new learning and knowledge capacities in socially-excluded participants, using detailed place-based qualitative studies of communities engagement and co-evolution with universities’ own engagement activities.