This chapter provides a discussion of the location and relative worth of public engagement initiatives in the current political and economic climate, one that is dominated by neoliberalism and the market. It is suggested that we need to retain a sense of the different values and imaginaries brought to bear on public engagement, along with the dynamism and creativity of people in dialogue with each other. The chapter focuses on one example of a public engagement initiative, Social Science in the City, which was initially created to offer spaces for critical reflection in the face of public sector cutsand globalisation under the auspices of the University of the West of England. This initiative is now subject to competing discourses and policies focused on evidence-gathering and impact assessment. It is not clear how the impact agenda will influence what was originally conceived as simply as a series of events focused on allowing people to gather together for critical reflection about key contemporary issues. At the same time, there are currently opportunities for expanding Social Science in the City in ways that both straddle the impact agenda and the alternative imaginaries that encouraged some of us to choose to study social science subjects in the first place, namely, a concern with social justice based on principles of equality and inclusiveness.

The broader political context

It has been argued that universities are being refashioned away from their national social-democratic goal of inclusiveness and equality of opportunity identified in the Robbins Report (1963), towards a neoliberal idea of the university as serving global, corporate and economic interests (Holmwood, 2013). The Browne Report (2010) was prefigured by the 2003 White Paper on higher education (Secretary of State for Education and Skills, 2003), which recommended an American model of universities based on the replacement of publically funded research with corporate sponsorship, a greater reliance on wealthy alumni and the creation of highly skilled knowledge workers. The application of research, particularly science and technology, to innovative products and services for companies competing in increasingly saturated markets to enhance the ‘global competitiveness’ of higher education was an essential strand in this account (Deem et al, 2008).