Commoning Civics: Exchanges of Knowledge Beyond the ‘Civic University’

Abstract

The revival of the ‘civic university’ agenda in the UK reopens questions concerning the framing, control and application of ‘knowledge’. While universities in the UK increasingly have to justify their work through benchmarking systems, questions persist over how ‘excellence’ and ‘exchange’ are understood, measured and valued in the context of pervasive capitalism. Such questions lead us to a concern over how knowledges (and knowledge-related resources) are exchanged, between whom and to what ends. In this article we consider the interface between knowledge exchange and political agendas that position higher education as servicing the reinvention of the UK as a ‘science superpower’, and the implications for development of the concept and practice of the civic university. We do so by reflecting on our own, and universities’, situatedness within civic contexts. We explore how ideas of commoning may help us frame civic ‘impact’ as a multi-directional process in which the university, as much as the city, is changed by encounters with new or differing constructions of knowledge, based on the ‘slow work’ of relationship building rather than top-down agendas.