Abstract

Student engagement and making community happen is a policy manoeuvre that shapes the political subjectivity of the undergraduate student In Australia, making community happen as a practice of student engagement is described as one of the major challenges for policy and practice in research-led universities. Current efforts to meet this challenge, however, merely recode ethical citizenship to a different but nonetheless prescriptive code of conduct,which closes down thoughts of making community happen to a single unified mode of being by appealing to a normalising practice authorised by expert knowledge. In contrast to this position, we use data gathered from undergraduate students’ observations of their university experience, which appeals to an ethico-politics that opens up the question of making community happen to non-normalising practices.Rather than a will to govern that shuts down debate, student discourse opens up thoughts of making community happen to new contestations and diversity over self-government in relation to others concerning questions of lifestyle choices and friendships. In this way,we argue that making community happen as a practice of student engagement is never fully actualised.While this challenge to the limits of student engagement and making community happen may be seen as a threat to our political existence, it is, nevertheless, a risk worth taking in the interest of student learning.