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.