“Constructing AcTive CitizensHip with European Youth” or short: CATCH-EyoU is the title of a Horizon 2020 project funded under the same heading as PARTISPACE.
It is coordinated by Elvira Cicognani from the University of Bologna. Members of the PARTISPACE consortium took the opportunity of the consortium meeting in Bologna to meet with members of the CATCH-EyoU team for an informal exchange. The half-day meeting between the two projects was used to present each other the aims, methodologies and first results of the respective project. CATCH-EyoU was represented by coordinator Elvira Cicognani and team members Pina Lalli, Davide Mazzoni and Iana Tzankova.
CATCH-EyoU – similar to PARTISPACE – starts from the observation of a gap between young Europeans and institutions – particularly on the EU level. The project aims to identify the factors, located at different levels (psychological, developmental, macro social and contextual) that influence the different forms of youth engagement in Europe. The project engages in different ways of data collection, qualitative, quantitative, plus an active citizenship intervention in schools. The objective is to provide a better understanding of the different factors influencing how young people engage materially and symbolically in the societies they inhabit. Three main areas of links between young people and the EU have been identified: media, public policies and schools. These areas have been analysed with a mixed methods design and several outputs have been made available for download on the project’s website.
For PARTISPACE, represented by coordinator Andreas Walther and team members Barry Percy-Smith, Morena Cuconato, Alessandro Martelli, Dominic Zimmermann, Patricia Loncle, Demet Lüküslü, Siyka Kovacheva and Axel Pohl, one particularly interesting approach of the CATCH-EyoU project is the analysis of “good practices” of youth participation which is yet to be completed. One heuristic tool that the project has produced and which can be helpful also for the PARTISPACE context is the “catalogue of youth participation practices”. It is available for download from the project website at www.catcheyou.eu/the-project/publications/milestone8.
During the discussion of the two projects the two teams discovered a lot more of common themes and the meeting ended with mutual invitations to continue the discussion of more results to come.