Thursday, July 07, 2011

MyPlace Website is up!

We have previously mentioned our participation in MyPlace, a collaborative research project covering 16 countries, and financed by the EU under Framework Program 7. Their website is now up! What is it all about? To quote from the MyPlace website:

"MYPLACE explores how young people's social participation is shaped by the shadows (past, present and future) of totalitarianism and populism in Europe.



Conceptually, it goes beyond the comparison of discrete national 'political cultures' or reified classifications of political heritage ('postcommunist'/'liberal democratic'); it is premised rather on the pan-European nature of a range of radical and populist political and philosophical traditions and the cyclical rather than novel nature of the popularity they currently enjoy.

Empirically, MYPLACE employs a combination of survey, interview and ethnographic research instruments to provide new, pan-European data that not only measure levels of participation but capture the meanings young people attach to it.

Analytically, through its specific focus on 'youth' and the historical and cultural contextualization of young people's social participation, MYPLACE replaces the routine, and often abstract, iteration of the reasons for young people's 'disengagement' from politics with an empirically rich mapping of young people's understandings of the civic and political space that they inhabit.

In policy terms, MYPLACE identifies the obstacles to, and facilitators of, young people's reclamation of the European political arena as 'my space'."

Want to find out more? Go to the project website here.

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