The LERU Focus Group on Public Engagement is excited to announce its upcoming blog series, “Forging Connections: Public Engagement in Europe and Beyond.” This 12-part series will provide a platform for diverse voices in the current landscape of Public Engagement. Public Engagement describes the myriad of ways in which the activity and benefits of higher education and research can be shared with the public. By showcasing Public Engagement communities from a number of LERU universities, these blogs aim to ignite conversations around how Public Engagement can be embedded within LERU member organisations – and elsewhere – in meaningful and practical ways.
Recent and ongoing worldwide challenges – such as the climate crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, our increasing dependence on AI, challenges to privacy in the age of social media, and the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza – have encouraged us to explore how academic knowledge can help address societal issues by engaging a broader public. The LERU Focus Group on Public Engagement wants to take this opportunity to better understand the history of Public Engagement, the pros and cons of current approaches, and how Public Engagement needs to adapt now and into the future to meet new demands.

The blog series will explore these elements from various angles, across the Humanities and Sciences, with posts authored by academics and experts who work together to make Public Engagement a force for public good at their respective LERU universities. The blogposts will offer short, accessible and reflective narratives, capturing the diversity of contexts and approaches being taken in Public Engagement. This will enable them to highlight, from different perspectives, where progress is currently being made, where it can be made, as well as offering reflections on how to overcome the challenges involved in undertaking Public Engagement.
This blog series will provide LERU member organisations with accessible and practical ways to further embed Public Engagement approaches in their everyday research activities. It will provide tools and inspiring examples to stimulate Public Engagement, all the while establishing and advancing commonly agreed-upon standards. The team wants to highlight that this is an exploratory conversation between representatives from different LERU universities on what Public Engagement is across the EU and how it is experienced in practice.
As well as exploring examples of good practice, we want to raise questions, explore tensions and illustrate that there are major different approaches to Public Engagement across universities. We hope to reach LERU members but also partners and peers more broadly, and thereby expand a community of Public Engagement leaders who will be in an ideal position to identify what action will be most impactful as a next step in their respective universities and countries, in order to catalyse change. We are, in this way, opening up a conversation that we hope others will join.
The LERU Focus Group on Public Engagement looks forward to entering into much-needed dialogues on Public Engagement with colleagues, citizen scientists, and the broader public across Europe and beyond. As such, they welcome responses to the forthcoming posts and hope to expand the blog to incorporate further voices into the conversation as the series progresses.
This first series of blogs (January-March 25) is edited by Drs Lauren Gould and Saskia Stevens, Associate Professors and Public Engagement Fellows at Utrecht University.
The second series of blogs (April-June 25) is edited by Victoria Brotto, Research engineer on Participatory Research at Labo citoyen (OPUS), University of Strasbourg, and Dr. Lucinda Spokes, Head of Public Engagement at University of Cambridge.
The third series of blogs (January-February 26) is edited by Dr. Josep Perelló, full Professor at the University of Barcelona and researcher at the University of Barcelona Institute of Complex Systems (UBICS).
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Sarah Cullen (January 27, 2025). Forging Connections: Public Engagement in Europe and Beyond. LERU Public Engagement Scholarly Blog. Retrieved May 15, 2026 from https://lerupesb.hypotheses.org/4