(Un)making the engaged African university: Rethinking community engagement through history and lived experience in South Africa

Dominant frameworks of higher education community engagement, largely derived from North American contexts, may be grounded in assumptions that do not fully account for the colonial and postcolonial trajectories of South African higher education. This webinar therefore rethinks community engagement in South African higher education by placing contemporary practice in dialogue with longer intellectual and political histories of the ‘African university’. To do this, this presentation draws on historical analysis of the evolution of African universities alongside narrative portraits of community–university relationships in Makhanda, South Africa. These portraits foreground lived experiences of community partners, students, and academics who inhabit and traverse the boundaries of ‘university’ and ‘community’.

By bringing historical and lived perspectives into conversation, the presentation seeks to advance three contributions. Firstly, it argues that community engagement is not a recent or imported institutional function, but part of an enduring and contested project of defining the social purpose of the African university. Secondly, it reconceptualises the relationship between university and community: rather than functioning as a bridge between two discrete entities, community engagement reveals the ways in which these domains are already entangled through shared histories and overlapping identities. Individuals move between roles as students, community members, educators, and activists, unsettling the boundaries that community engagement is often assumed to traverse. Finally, it examines the potential of community engagement to transform both higher education institutions and the communities that surround them, arguing that it is neither inherently emancipatory nor extractive. Its effects are contingent on the everyday practices through which it is enacted, and the levels of institutional support for these practices.