This paper explores the conceptualization of the role of human agency and its relationship to institutional and social/political change by ‘thinking through’ the case of public engagement in UK higher education. The discourse of public engagement gained prominence since its inclusion into the criteria for competitive research funding, most notably the Research Excellence Framework (REF). As such, policies and institutions aimed at promoting public engagement can be understood as instruments of neoliberal governance tasked with making universities and academics more ‘accountable’ to the public (e.g. Watermeyer, 2012). However, ethnographic research of the practice of public engagement in the UK reveals a more complex landscape than the one a top-down notion of academics choosing to either ‘comply’ with or ‘resist’ policy directives would suggest. Namely, the reasoning behind (specific forms of) public engagement is simultaneously related to the ideas of what it meant to be an academic and the sort of status rewards this used to entail, and to the projection of the position one would like to see oneself occupying at a certain point – thus, it entails negotiation between the ‘past’, ‘present’, and the ‘future’. Rather than ‘compliance’ or ‘resistance’, public engagement brings about a form of agency in which the subject is actively involved in negotiating their own position in the social sphere. The practices of public engagement are thus fundamentally intertwined with the societal concepts of the relationship between the ‘university’ and the ‘society’ and, furthermore, play an active role in their reproduction and or/constitution. Building on Bourdieu’s (1990) work on practice, and Archer’s (2000) work on the relationship between structure and agency, the contribution uses these insights to question both the causal and the temporal framing of the transformation of European higher education, and to point to the possible alternative conceptualization of actors’ involvement in this process.

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