A Socio-Historical Approach to Community Engagement: Beyond Managerial and Normative Analysis

In this article, the author offers a theoretical analysis of the social responsibility of higher education, particularly on the Community Engagement (CE) concept, which has gained traction in recent decades as one process through which higher universities interact with external actors, enhancing their societal impact. He argues that the mainstream CE concept reproduces universalistic visions of the university and overlooks the multiple power dynamics of those interactions. The mainstream CE concept is helpful for managerial and administrative goals, for university staff and leaders to delimitate this practice, and to position a normative standard or aim (e.g., public good and social justice). However, it struggles to account for the relationship between CE practices and other processes present in the global higher education system, such as the world class university project and academic capitalism. In this article, the author analyzes the limitations of the mainstream CE notions of community, university, and engagement and synthesize innovative CE studies and relevant antecedents in the fields of political economy and global history of science, sociology of higher education, and network theories, to propose a socio-historical approach to CE. In this socio-historical approach, “community” needs to be understood as a complex group of interests in dispute, embedded in different power dynamics, complicities, and co-dependences with academy, science, and scholars. “University” should be defined as a social institution, an open-ended organization grounded in the conflicts of the “community,” a socialization space for students and scholars, and a disputed workplace. Therefore, they are not a priori oriented towards the public good. “Engagement” means emergent and co- constituted networks, whether fragile or consolidated, not reduced to one-way or two-way relations. Later, I apply the socio-historical approach to describe CE in the Chilean higher education system, emphasizing how it allows us to understand the uneven position of peripheral and semi-peripheral countries (i.e., the Global South). Lastly, in the conclusion, I delineate how this approach could be used in future research.