Public Scholarship, Democracy and Scholarly Engagement

This article will examine the issue of scholarship resulting from engagements between academics and the communities of the university, and especially such scholarship that is derivable through the possibilities for the co-construction of knowledge between them. Towards this end, it will examine the limitations of conventional approaches to the production and evaluation of scholarship and advance an argument about the impact of such limitations on the broader social purposes and role of science. It will suggest how scholarship that is socially more encompassing might be advanced as intrinsic to the role of universities in their communities, and examines how the concept of community might be conceived for that purpose. It relates such public scholarship to the broader purposes of science as an intellectual and social activity that has affinity with the idea of public reasoning.