What is Public and Community Engagement (PCE)
What is public and community engagement (PCE)?
“PCE” is a term that is widely used in a variety of sectors, from the arts to science and policy.
“Engagement” is simply the many ways researchers and communities work together and share knowledge in both directions so that research is done with people, not just about or on them. It brings together two overlapping ideas:
Community engagement
is how we work with the specific communities our research involves - the residents, families, leaders and people of Segamat - inviting them to help shape what we study, how we study it, and how the findings are used.
Public engagement
is how we connect with the wider public - through events, the media and social media - to make science open, understandable and interesting, and to spark curiosity in the next generation.
Good engagement is a two-way relationship, not a one-way message. It ranges from keeping people informed, to consulting them, to genuinely sharing decisions, and, at its best, communities help set the research agenda itself.
That is the direction SEACO is committed to as we build SEACO 2.0: research that is co-developed with the community, not simply delivered to it.