Book launch: African perspectives of university community engagement in secondary cities

The title of the new book edited by Sam, Ntimi, Jesmael and I is very generic as Universities, Society and Development. The book was published by SUN Press, yesterday (2 Aug 2022). The ebook is open access available from my academia.edu site.

What is much more intriguing and tantalizing is actually the subtitle: 

African perspectives of university community engagement in secondary cities

The subtitle raises several questions: What are "African perspectives of university community engagement"? What actually is "university community engagement" to begin with? What modalities of 'engagement' are there? Who engages with whom or what? To what end? What aspect of "university" is involved in this engagement? How does it relate to the core functions of a university, which are teaching and learning, and research? What is meant by community in this phrase Does 'community' extend to businesses, government, public sector organisations, community-based organisations, or what exactly? Conceptually as well as practically, what is involved in these notions?And what are 'secondary cities'? Is there something particularly different and noteworthy about such engagement in so-called secondary cities? What is signaled by this prominent reference to locality? How does it relate to the idea of 'college towns' and the concept of 'anchor institutions' and 'anchoring'?

The book answers these questions in 11 chapters, certainly not conclusively but with great reference to ongoing conceptual work, academic and policy discourse, and most importantly, reflective cases of locally grounded practice. Overall there are conceptual chapters, normative chapters, empirical chapters and a final policy analysis chapter. It was originally conceived as one of the research outputs of the project “Enhancing University Community Engagement at Sol Plaatje University: Matching Institutional Outlook with Regional Absorptive Capacity” that started in 2018.

Today the book was launched in the Higher Education and Development Seminar at the University of the Free State, and on Friday it will be launched at Sol Plaatje University in Kimberley.