Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.

Engage 2017 – Exploring Collaboration in Community-Campus Engagement

December 6, 2017 — December 7, 2017

Location:Bristol, UK
Audience:Anyone
Key Contact:Lisa Adlington
Contact Email:lisa.adlington@uwe.ac.uk.

The promise of collaboration is enormous: as a route to sharing expertise and working together to do purposeful work that makes a difference. For universities, it can be a route to better research and teaching, and to express universities’ commitment to engaging more productively with society.

Recent years have seen a flowering of approaches: from citizen science to co-production; from patient involvement to urban ‘labs’.

Whilst there can be huge benefits, the practice of collaboration can be challenging. Indeed, challenge can be a key ingredient for healthy partnerships. Engage 2017 will take stock of what we are learning about how to realise the promise of collaboration. Looking across the spectrum of collaborative approaches, it will showcase cutting edge practice and share the latest thinking from within higher education and beyond.

The conference will explore:

Practice: increasingly sophisticated approaches to collaboration are evolving across the higher education sector and beyond.  We will showcase some of the most interesting practices, and explore their commonalities and differences

Principles: we will explore the assumptions, ethics and reasoning that underpin practice, and share the latest critical thinking about collaboration.   We will confront challenges head on: Whose knowledge counts? When is it better to collaborate, and when is it better to work alone? To what extent can mutual benefit be realised from collaborative working? How can power be negotiated and shared?

Prospects: where next for collaboration? With such a huge weight of expectation, we will challenge delegates to construct a critical, aspirational vision for university collaboration.  What, collectively and individually, should we be attending to in order to realise its potential?

Bookings for the conference will open in September.

For enquiries, please contact lisa.adlington@uwe.ac.uk.

Engaged Practice Learning Exchange

In the run up to Engage 2017, we are offering an Engaged Practice Learning Exchange (EPLE) from 2.00pm-5.30pm on the 5th December. EPLE provides an opportunity for public engagement professionals to have some time and space to stimulate innovation in what they do. Find out more EPLE 2017.