We feature below materials from Dr Rajesh Tandon’s lecture on "Experience of Engaged Scholarship and Knowledge Democracy and new Approaches to Community-Based Participatory Research” at The Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex, UK on December 01, 2015 together with his presentation on findings from the IDRC-supported study on Community University Research Partnerships (CURP) at the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU), London on November 30, 2015.

Can adult education and learning be understood without reference to community and people’s daily lives? The response to be found in the chapters of this volume say emphatically no, they cannot. Adult learning can be best understood if we look at the social life of people in communities, and this book is an attempt to recover this view.