The potential role of university community engagement in supporting social innovation in Hungary

University community engagement (UCE) is a "process whereby universities engage with community stakeholders to undertake joint activities that can be mutually beneficial even if each side benefits in a different way" (Benneworth 2018, 17.). Within UCE, community partners are typically marginalized and resourceless social groups and civil society organizations(CSOs)/nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) representing their interest. The aim of cooperation among such actors within UCE is to Vght social exclusion and injustice and supporting and strengthening environmental sustainability initiatives. Such an approach shows striking similarities with the social innovation (SI) concept, as SI refers to bottom-up processes that also include NGOs/CSOs and which are aimed at creating processes serving community needs and social transformation. This paper analyses the relationship between UCE and SI. Our research question focuses on the role UCE has in supporting SI in a Hungarian context and the ways it relates to proximity. After introducing theoretical similarities between the concepts of UCE and SI, we use four Hungarian initiatives as case studies that can be considered as successful ones in institutionalizing UCE in Hungarian higher education. We show that UCE, encompassing a wide set of activities, provides room for academics with diverse disciplinary backgrounds to initiate, join and institutionalize UCE-related activities. Such endeavours hold the potential to contribute to SI in numerous and divers ways. We refiect on these issues by utilizing an autoethnographic approach and using the "TRANSIT" model of transformative social innovation as an analytical framework. We also analyse the role of proximity in relation to the spatiality of UCE and SI. Our empirical results show that as UCE essentially involves the cooperation of actors with diYerent social (and potentially geographical) backgrounds, UCE's contribution to SI is infiuenced by proximity in a complex manner. Geographical distance complicates UCE cooperation as it makes it more diXcult to establish and maintain deep and close personal relationships between academic-and non-academic participants. Meanwhile, social distance between academic and nonacademic actors supports knowledge creation and the combination of expert and local knowledge, which is essential for high-quality SI. On the other hand, social distance also complicates the establishment of democratic, transparent and even relations among participants with highly diYerent social status and power. Furthermore, even though higher education in Hungary provides room for UCE processes supporting SI to a certain extent,, it also poses numerous limiting factors in relation to mutually supportive cooperation of academic actors and NGOs/CSOs/communities. Besides these local characteristics, the often antihegemonic character of UCE and SI might be also challenging in relation to realizing the expected social impacts of UCE activities.