ERIC Number: EJ979655
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012
Pages: 15
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1750-8487
EISSN: N/A
Neoliberal Social Inclusion? The Agenda of the Australian Universities Community Engagement Alliance
Peacock, David
Critical Studies in Education, v53 n3 p311-325 2012
University-community engagement (UCE) represents a hybrid discourse and a set of practices within contemporary higher education. As a modality of research and teaching, "engagement" denotes the process of universities forming partnerships with external communities for the promised generation of mutually beneficial and socially responsive knowledge, leading to enhanced economic, social and cultural developments. A critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2003. "Analysing Discourse: Textual analysis for social research". London: Routledge) of the Australian Universities Community Engagement Alliance's (AUCEA) "Position Paper"(2008 "Universities and community engagement" (Position paper 2008-2010)), as reported in this article, suggests that its uneasy synthesis of neoliberal, social inclusion and civic engagement discourses into a hybrid UCE discourse semantically privileges neoliberal forms of engagement. Perhaps, as a result, the AUCEA seems to have missed an opportunity to influence the Australian "widening participation" debate on securing access and opportunity for marginalised students at universities and building social and cultural capital within their communities of origin. (Contains 5 notes and 1 table.)
Descriptors: Neoliberalism, Foreign Countries, Higher Education, Social Integration, School Community Relationship, Economic Progress, Discourse Analysis, Semantics, Access to Education, Disadvantaged, Social Capital, Cultural Capital, Educational Opportunities, Partnerships in Education, Educational Policy
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Australia
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A