La missione trasformativa e generativa dell'Università. Operare con le comunità per il cambiamento

The debate about the so-called "third mission" of universities and their social impact is today, in our country, open and lively. In particular, the expression "public engagement" — sometimes uncritically borrowed from Anglo-Saxon academic jargon — carries a high degree of indeterminacy and therefore lends itself to widely differing interpretations.
This volume enters the heart of the discussion with a proposal built around a particular definition of the university's mission: a mission that is neither "third" nor separate from those considered more classical, namely research and teaching. It is the idea that research and teaching can be profitably integrated within a constitutive mission of universities as institutions of collective utility: a transformative and generative mission.
This is a vision in which universities can act as engines of (transformative) change in our communities and societies, through the seeds of knowledge and practices they produce and share with other social actors within a framework of reciprocity and mutual benefit (generativity).
This proposal is developed in the volume in two parts: a first in which several general reflections are offered, emerging from various research experiences; and a second in which the experience of the FOIST Laboratory for Social Policies and Educational Processes at the University of Sassari is presented — the laboratory to which the authors of the volume belong — as it has developed over the past decade, drawing on the pioneering intuition that, nearly fifty years ago, inspired its founder, Alberto Merler, and that continues to shape its approach and method to this day.