The Politics of Public Engagement Reclaiming community?

This article examines the tension between the rhetoric and reality of public engagement, seen through the eyes of a practitioner who has worked in both the arenas of community activism and as a public engagement broker within a UK Russell Group university over the course of the last 15 years. This has coincided with the rise to prominence of public engagement as a means of re-energising the debate about the University as an ‘ethical beacon’ and as an agent of civic and social life. This renewed engagement with ‘the public’ has created many powerful research programmes, conferences, debates, resources and toolkits, has fostered organisations and influenced policy. But has it maintained a focus on ‘community’ as a means of understanding and listening to real people, on the ground, and the issues and concerns that animate and concern them? And how far has ‘community’ been squeezed out because it is no longer part of the prevailing political discourse, supplanted by the more broadly interpreted - and possibly more palatable - concept of ‘public’? Suggestions are offered to counter possible ambivalence on the behalf of universities with regard to engaging in ‘deep’ community engagement through both historical and new articulations of adult education and democracy.

Professor Laing gave examples of contemporary issues at the heart of modern society, social urgencies such as the role of care in the community and the status of carers, public health debates on the future of the NHS, the shifting role of the voluntary and community sector in civil society, medical ethics and the public understanding of science (including social science).
As someone from a community sector and social policy background, in terms of my career, and as a woman from a working-class mining town, this resonated with me. I could see the value in university-based learning reaching out to communities and responding to their real research needs, and that my role I had been attracted by the concept of praxis -the coupling of theory and action expressed in informed, committed action -and, by extension, the role of pracademic, suggestive, as it is, of bringing academic knowledge and skill together with actionbased practice. I knew that people were looking for answers, or at least help with debating the exigencies of their lives and seeking solutions. I had questioned many times why we were not better connected with academic activity which was looking to respond to real social issues and the lived experiences of the communities in which I had lived and worked. The world of the University, instead, seemed rather remote.
What I greeted so enthusiastically in my new University-based role was the prospect of acting as a broker between these two worlds. To that end, the NCCPE team have been clear from the start that public engagement should be broadly defined and understood.

Brokers
It is not about 'specialists talking to non-specialists'. Instead, their definition focuses on 'mutual benefit' and on increasing the HE sector's 'relevance to, and impact on, civil society' (NCCPE website). They actively acknowledge that more emphasis needs to be placed on recognising that people are experts in their own lives, and should be respected as such. The role of brokers to catalyse and stimulate this work was explicitly understood in both the Beacons' projects and those of its successor, the Catalyst program (funded by Research Councils UK). Before any change of ethos and approach can take place in Higher Education institutions -often monolithic and adamantine cultures -practitioners who understand the world of both 'community' and 'university' have a vital role in critically investigating the rhetoric and definitions around engagement, and the building of resources and structures to embed change.
There is no doubt that much excellent work has happened as a result of the vigorous focus on public engagement since 2008, with bodies like the NCCPE and HEFCE at the vanguard. There is innovative and exciting university-based practice, across both preand post-1992 institutions, focusing on regeneration and renewal, community studies on Council estate culture, policy debate, and discussion at a civic level on health and social care issues, artsbased activities, which use local expertise to inform local history exhibitions, museum activity and research programs, and online discussion spaces on participation and democracy. These are just some instances of the outpouring of creativity in response to the challenge of making public engagement count. Public engagement has a global face too, which is testimony to its growth in importance since the early 2000s. The Talloires Network, formed in 2005, brings together heads of universities from 23 countries from across the globe. Their mission is described thus: We believe that higher education institutions do not exist in isolation from society, nor from the communities in which they are located.

The Talloires Network envisions universities around the world as a vibrant and dynamic force in their societies, incorporating civic engagement and community service into their research and teaching mission. (Talloires Network website)
The Network profiles exceptional academics and has created the MacJannet Prize for Global Citizenship. It also provides resources, newsletters and materials, and a list of civic engagement experts, as well as staging regional and global conferences. It was actively supported by David Watson, and its members contribute to the NCCPE's annual public engagement conference, Engage.
However, despite this creative upsurge in response to public engagement, NCCPE's key point from the start has been that, in order for public engagement to be 'real', it needs to be part of university culture, the fabric of the organisation's systems,  (Williams 1961(Williams , 2001. It does this through its support fund which was created to help adults -especially the financially and educationally disadvantaged -to attend annual residential lecture-based courses, and by helping to stimulate discussion on big social, political, philosophical and cultural themes through its support of public forums. This includes emerging informal networks such as Philosophy in Pubs (PiPs) -a community organisation which supports grassroots, community-based philosophy in public venues for people with a shared passion for inquiry -Sci-bars, and pub/ cafe lectures and discussion circles generally.
The Foundation's starting point for these networks is that community-university engagement, unlike its more broadly conceived cousin, 'public', is engagement which is by necessity complex and requires the long view, as Williams asserted. It brings with it little obvious financial incentive. Its cultural spaces in the voluntary sector and in Adult Education have been laid waste by funding cuts and the march of 'Plan X', Williams' description of the impact of neo-liberalism, which can seem like the only discourse in town. It requires a process of building trust and mutuality over many years. So, whilst universities may present an 'open door' to 'publics' with which they are comfortable, I am minded of Chomsky's (1999) famous quote 'freedom without opportunity is a devil's gift, and the refusal to provide such opportunities is criminal'. Freedom means nothing without the opportunity and power to exercise it, and communities which are deemed 'hard to reach' are only so perhaps because there is not sufficient will to engage with them and because university systems and structures prevail against them. For me, as a pracademic, the Raymond Williams Foundation version of informal adult education provides the space to critically investigate the rhetoric around engagement. We need this detailed scrutiny if we are to progress with community engagement, create freedom and opportunity, and forge social change in line with Laing's and Watson's vision.