Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CATCH-EyoU (Constructing AcTive CitizensHip with European Youth: Policies, Practices, Challenges and Solutions)
Período documentado: 2016-09-01 hasta 2018-09-30
The current generation of European youth was born in the EU; however, the extent to which the EU is a real and concrete entity in their everyday life experience and awareness is still not clear. What does being member of the EU mean to youth? How do young people engage as active citizens in EU issues?
Clarifying the meanings and significance of active EU citizenship, beyond the “normative” existing conceptualizations that inform policy and educational efforts, seems necessary in order to build a different, more inclusive and equitable EU, towards the variety of its different citizens, including those ones who currently resist or oppose it.
Through a consortium of nine partners from eight European countries, (Coordinator University of Bologna, Italy), representing different disciplines(Psychology, Political Science, Sociology, Media and Communications, Education, History)the CATCH-EyoU project addressed the nature and processes of construction of active citizenship among European youth, including an analysis of the multifaceted factors influencing young people perspectives toward the EU, their sense of EU identity and membership and the different forms of youth active engagement in European politics at various governance levels. It aimed to offer policy makers, professionals and young people themselves new “conceptual lenses” and instruments to better understand the factors that decide how the EU can be brought closer to its young citizens. These aims have been addressed through a multi-methodological approach, and including young people as partners, in order to ensure that youth’s own perspectives and concerns are fully incorporated.
Project activities were implemented as planned and allowed to identify the complexity of the factors and processes that, at different levels(macrosocial/societal, contextual/interactional,individual psychological) explain the forms and profiles of youth engagement in the context of the EU.
Results indicated that we may need to open the room to different ways through which young people can be (and become) active citizens in the EU, if we aim to ensure a committed active citizenship capable of reinvigorating democratic structures and processes to address current challenges faced by the EU. Current conceptualisations need to incorporate also critical and dissenting forms of citizenship, besides trustful and dutiful orientations, to ensure representation of the full variety of the youth population; moreover, we need to go beyond the assumption that sustained engagement is to be expected as a norm from all youth. The analysis of the three contexts (youth policies, media environment, school curricula) converges in indicating that the ways they socially construct young people tend to generate exclusionary mechanisms towards some groups of youth. Similarly, the view of the EU that they contribute to shape mirrors the vision of the EU as a distant, patronizing, bureaucratic entity that is still prevalent among the majority of young people that were surveyed in the empirical studies (both quantitative and qualitative). Empirical studies, as well as the intervention results, indicated that influencing factors and processes on forms and profiles of EU citizenship should be examined at different levels (from the macrosocial/societal to the individual psychological) and taking into account their complex patterns of interactions among these levels; some consistent patterns of associations have been found both cross nationally and longitudinally (e.g. concerning trust in the EU, political efficacy, identification, citizenship orientations), that are further supported by qualitative data analyses and the outcomes of the intervention with students.
Overall, the empirical findings indicate that attempts to engage young people should start from the construction of a more fair and balanced representation of this population – and particularly the more vulnerable and excluded groups - within youth policies, in the media and in the educational policies. Moreover, bridging the gap between young people and the EU rests upon providing youth high quality information and developing critical thinking and awareness. Further, building trustful institutions is a precondition to develop young people’s trust toward them.
The project produced an extensive multi-disciplinary literature review on the topic of (youth) active citizenship, which informed a range of studies, using different methods (e.g. cross-sectional and longitudinal, qualitative ethnographic, intervention). This triangulation of methods allowed to reach both a broader and deeper understanding of the phenomenon and its influencing factors and processes, as well as to offer evidence based guidelines to enhance youth active citizenship through interventions. This original methodological approach represents a major achievement of the CATCH-EyoU project.Moreover in different parts of the work, the project engaged young people in a process of co-construction of the knowledge and in the development of solutions for improving the dialogue with institutions, in terms of recommendations, tools, proposals of best practices.