Conference Themes
The Conference Themes are:
- Dialogic Partnerships: Community engagement may begin with dialogic partnerships that create spaces for shared inquiry,
spaces where academic and community knowledge systems meet in mutual respect. - Engaged Research: Co-production of knowledge through engaged research practices becomes an acknowledgement that universities have much to learn from communities who have long practised resilience, creativity, and care in the face of structural and epistemic injustice.
- Critical Service Learning: is a pedagogical approach orientated towards nurturing both students and community members as agents of social change(Mitchell, 2008). Its goal is to ‘avoid the cultural safari’ which may lead to dehumanising and patronising forms of engagement, and nurture ‘agents capable of acting together with others to […] create social change’ (Forbes et al., 1991, p. 67). Through reflection, dialogue, and shared action, students and communities learn to see themselves not only as individuals in pursuit of success, but as participants in a collective human project.
- Volunteering / Engaged Citizenry: Too often conceived as charity or service to the ‘other’, volunteering can risk reproducing paternalistic and hierarchical relations. Instead, we may shift from ‘helping’ to ‘being with’, from acts of benevolence to practices of relationship-building that honour community agency and dignity and deepen students’ awareness of interconnectedness and shared responsibility.
- Social Innovation in higher education centres the voices and priorities of communities and works collaboratively to design creative responses to persistent social challenges. This may include community-based enterprises, co-operatives, or technologies developed to enhance wellbeing and social cohesion.
- Universities as Anchor Institutions: Asanchor institutions universities have the responsibilities to promote equity, inclusion, and social transformation. More than on the practical level of how they hire, buy, research and teach through deliberate strategies for local wellbeing, anchoring, read through an Ubuntu lens, is about belonging to, and being constituted by that place (Johnson & Hlatshwayo, 2025). It is about designing teaching and scholarship with (not on) communities to enhance human flourishing/development.
- Structural Introspection and Transformation: To be genuinely reparative, community engagement must also entail structural introspection within the universityitself. This means confronting the colonial legacies that shape curricula, hierarchies of knowledge, and patterns of inclusion and exclusion. This engagement operates inwardly as much as outwardly: it is about transforming institutional cultures and reimagining the university as a space of human and societal development.
Ultimately, community engagement of this orientation gestures toward a university that remembers and restores, that learns to be accountable for its history, that contributes to the healing of our collective humanity and contributes to the cultivation of humanity.
In doing so, we are reminded of Desmond Tutu’s call to recognise our shared humanity and interdependence,
and James Yoonil Auh’s (2019) powerful question: What do we truly value in society, and what kind of world do we wish to build?