Building toward a global dialogue on community engagement

“When I came to Freire’s work, just at a moment in my life when I was
beginning to question deeply and profoundly the politics of domination, the
impact of racism, sexism, class exploitation, and the kind of domestic
colonization that takes place in the United States, I felt myself to be deeply
identified with the marginalized peasants he speaks about, or with my black
brothers and sisters, my comrades in Guinea-Bissau.”
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 1994, USA

“All the action of love and consolation that American women offer to their
peers seems to me to be condensed, as in a poem, in the life and work of
someone who I consider to be the greatest woman of the present generation
in that country: Jane Addams [...] And the fact is that a Settlement [House]
comes to fill a human need for mutual communion, it is the agency through
which the one who asks and the one who gives, the one who cries and the
one who offers consolation, meet.”*
Amanda Labarca, Actividades femeninas en los Estados Unidos, 1914, Chile

Can we learn from each other? Can we create a global dialogue on community engagement? Coming from Chile to study in the US has required a huge effort in translation and being able to share what community engagement means in Latin America. In this blog post, I share a reflection based on my experience addressing two challenges in the field of community engagement that are amplified when we try to learn from different countries, regions, and languages: the abundance of terms (and their polysemy) and the persistent marginalization of this area compared to other university missions/functions (such as teaching and research).

First, in Latin America, besides the concepts of community, civic or public engagement, social responsibility, outreach, and third mission, you would find the concepts of extensión universitaria, proyección y acción social, vinculación con el medio y con la sociedad y servicio solidario (plus the direct translation from the English concepts compromiso comunitario, cívico, público, responsabilidad social, tercera misión). Those terms have different uses in each country and are embedded in a deep history and conceptual dispute of more than one hundred years.

Latin American universities and their community engagement (as an umbrella term) entail a complex history of student movements, university reforms, feminist leaders, underdevelopment, dependency, revolutionary processes, counter-reforms, neoliberal policies, and Eurocentrism/coloniality (Erreguerena, 2023). For instance, the concept extensión universitaria, used by student movements since the early Twentieth Century, was institutionalized by public universities as part of an effort to democratize the university and society. In the 70s, Paulo Freire reshaped this concept and practice, based on the idea of dialogue, aiming towards social justice and social change. In contrast, in the 80s and 90s, neoliberal policies defunded public universities and tried to force a change of perspectives in community engagement as a funding-seeking activity.

Second, whereas community engagement is already a marginalized aspect of universities globally and, therefore, is less known and studied, community engagement in Latin American universities has to overcome an additional marginalization. Northern countries have assumed that the idea of “university” comes from Medieval Europe and a Eurocentric concept of modernity where research and teaching have been the most important tasks. This universalizing perspective, nowadays reified in the idea of a world-class university and international rankings, consistently positions US and European universities as a model to follow. Therefore, Latin American universities are relegated to a peripheral position in the global higher education discussion, trying to “catch up” with their Northern colleagues.

This has implications for the field of community engagement. In Chile, for instance, CE professionals and CE offices may know more about the Carnegie Classification, Campus Compact, and the European and Australian networks than community engagement programs in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, or South Africa. They usually overlook that Latin American universities, similar to others in the Global South, were created after the independence wars in the XIX century, with an anticolonial spirit and the goal of developing new nations. And that their “engagement” has been part of their original structures and the minds of their pioneer scholars. Similarly, but as another side of the same coin, from what I have experienced in the US, Northern colleagues who look at Latin American experiences sometimes tend to perceive them as exotic cases or tokens, instead of a place of learning.

These challenges (concepts and double marginalization), however, deserve to be addressed in order to have a real global dialogue, leading toward global social justice and global cognitive/epistemic justice. We need a definition of community engagement sensitive to its changes over time, resulting from disputes, and their specific contexts. When we, scholars from the Global South, try to share our stories and traditions, there is a whole context that is missing if we use universalistic concepts such as “university” or “community.” What university are we talking about? Is it private, public, for-profit, faith-based, authoritarian, or democratic? What community? Is it a democratic society or a dictatorship? Which political and economic regime is it based on? Neoliberal, capitalist, communist, religious fundamentalist? We need a definition that helps us unravel and grasp this complexity.

We need to learn not through imitations or tokenisms but to inspire each other with new imaginations of the future. Alongside an ample perspective and flexible definitions, we need to make new contexts and stories visible. We have to learn from scholars who have walked this road before—those who, in a global dialogue, were inspired and continue to inspire community engagement. For example, the way bell hooks learned from Paulo Freire’s educational perspective, and Amanda Labarca (Chilean feminist and first woman scholar) learned from Jane Addams and her settlement house movement.

These challenges, placed in a global scenery, are my passion and shape my academic career. I hope to contribute to a better understanding of the field of community engagement at a global level.

*Translation by the author.

Matías G. Flores is from Chile and is currently studying a Ph.D. in Development Sociology, Cornell University. He co-organizes with Paulette Dougnac the 2023 IARSLCE Conference Roundtable: “Can we learn from each other? Toward a global dialogue in community engagement.”