Introduction social responsibility and community based research in higher education institutions

Abstract

In this paper, Budd Hall and Rajesh Tandon situate higher education at a crossroads shaped by neoliberalism, the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and calls for decolonisation. They trace how the 2009 UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education placed social responsibility at the centre of global debate, and how their own UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education grew out of that moment. The authors set out a knowledge democracy framework built on multiple epistemologies, co-constructed knowledge, and open access to research, then turn to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the political, financial, institutional, and knowledge deficits threatening their achievement by 2030. They close by outlining the book's four sections, on universities as civic space, decolonised curricula, engaged teaching, and new understandings of knowledge and the earth, gathering voices deliberately drawn from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the excluded North rather than the global North alone.