'It's an ideal, isn't it...this really cohesive (university) community is going to engage with this really cohesive community out there... if we're not actually a real community ourselves, how do we actually engage with the community out there?'(Contract Researcher)
 
What makes for an engaged research community? Is being connected to or being part of the university community, the status, strength and durability of those connections, vital to engaged academic practice?
 
This workshop will provide a deliberative space whereby participants may actively explore the essential building blocks for creating and sustaining a research community that cultivates and delivers engaged academic practice.  Workshop participants will be encouraged to focus on features such as roles, discourse, disposition, physical spaces, institutional environment and other features they would like to bring into the frame.
 
The workshop will be facilitated by postgraduate researcher, Julie Bounford, who is researching the idea of community as perceived and experienced by a purposive sample of academics at one higher education institution.  For the purposes of her research, Julie has interpreted community as a relational phenomenon, created and reproduced through the propinquity and interplay of actions, dispositions and structure. Her research explores and interprets individual actions, not only as they relate to predetermined aspects of the structure but also to facets that are of their own making.
 
Julie, an insider researcher, is also employed as a Community University Engagement Manager and, as a 'third space' professional.  She co-created and delivered a four year national pilot on public engagement in higher education from 2008 – 2012 as part of the Beacons for Public Engagement programme.