Community Engagement and the Work of Cultivating Humanity: Insights from Young People’s Experiences at the Community-University Interface in Makhanda

Résumé

Although universities increasingly express commitment to ideals of community engagement and access, the lived experiences of those who sit at the intersection of these two worlds are often overlooked. This chapter therefore explores what the lived experiences of Makhanda’s ‘local students’ – young people who form part of the Makhanda community and go on to study at Rhodes University (RU) – reveal about the humanising capacity of higher education community engagement. Drawing on Nussbaum’s (1997) notion of cultivating humanity through the nurturing of sympathetic imagination, and informed by the framework of transformative storywork, this inquiry took the form of a collaborative digital storytelling process undertaken by local students and an external facilitator. The digital stories produced during this process illustrate how local students navigate belonging and marginality, recognition and erasure, across the socially constructed boundaries that divide ‘university’ and ‘community’. The stories do not offer a unified account, but rather a mosaic of tensions, crossings, and emergent understandings. They show how community engagement can be both humanising and alienating, holding potential for connection and recognition, while also surfacing unresolved dynamics of power and exclusion. Ultimately, this chapter argues that cultivating humanity in higher education requires not only institutional commitments to community engagement, but also the creation of spaces where lived experience is valued as knowledge. It is through the deliberate unsettling of binaries of ‘university’ and ‘community’ that more humane universities might begin to take root.

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