The transformative mission of universities: Personal trajectories and institutional drivers of community engaged scholarship

Higher Education policies acknowledge the need to reframe science-society relationships. Public Engagement with Research (PER) is one of the components of the increasing efforts aimed at this end. Growing financial and operational support for PER requires a better understanding of the science-society dynamics. This paper provides an overview of a research project titled PLACES which employs comparative case studies to examine academic community-engaged scholarship in Italy, France, and the UK. PLACES seeks to fill crucial evidence gaps on proactive science-society relationships at the individual, institutional, and systemic levels. The literature reveals ambiguity in the terms ‘public’ and ‘engagement’. Thus, we limit our research to PER forms intended to foster genuine societal change, which we term “transformative community engagement”. This paper presents the theoretical framework underpinning this concept, focusing on the prescriptive, analytical/descriptive, and methodological dimensions of transformativity.