GUNi launches the Conference Programme

The 6th International Barcelona Conference on Higher Education suggests discussing together around the most relevant, significant and inspiring issues for the advancement in the field of community-university engagement. Our proposal is to offer plenary, parallel sessions and workshops where to create new reflections, thoughts and visions on the field. Sessions will have together people that can bring theoretical reflections and examples of diverse good practices and initiatives, and there will be diversity of methodologies and approaches to enable participation and creativity to flourish.
Panel: "Learning to read reality"
We need to re-invent all systems that organize life: economic, political, environmental and social, to respond to new needs, overcoming the limitations and undesirable side effects of the models that we have used up to date. We should urgently and seriously consider the priorities in the generation and use of knowledge in our societies. What is at stake is the very concept of the idea of ​​progress. [more]
Building the world we imagine
This session will explore the vision of the world we want and deserve and its disconnection with the world that underpins teaching and research in HEIs today. The session will present fresh and innovative ideas and visions of students, practitioners and scholars with the aim to share everyone’s imagined world. Education has a big intergenerational responsibility in building the world we imagine. [more]
Why is engagement critical for social change?
Engagement is not just an idea, but a set of practical actions, which necessarily entail struggles for change and transformation that require altering the current social structures and power relations. [more]
Enlarging the conception of knowledge
In this session we will discuss what we understand by knowledge and its role in society, and how engagement contributes to make all cosmologies of knowledge count. [more]
Redefining structures and political frameworks for making engagement to happen
Adapting and creating appropriated structures at all levels is key for the mainstreaming of community-university engagement. The session will examine inspiring institutional design examples, the most relevant national policies, political frameworks and the role of networks, and how they have contributed to a scholar’s cultural change. [more]
Building partnership: making cooperation mainstream
Partnership is the central aspect in developing community engagement initiatives that deal with the issues of people. A partnership is a way of being and a way of working with others that implies mutual understanding, common good, reciprocity, collaboration in decision making and transparency regarding outcomes. [more]
Engagement with added value
This session is about quality assurance of engagement. The session will discuss the need of a system of indicators that measures the quality of engagement, and how it can be generated in ways that is consistent with the spirit of engagement and that engages all actors together. The session will also explore ways in which the system of indicators of engagement can be defined collectively and be introduced in the international agenda. [more]