The European Civic Academy will be held online on 24 March from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. among Hungarian civil society.
By creating a space for academics, civil society and social movements to meet, the European Civic Academy aims to create opportunities for mutual learning and contamination. The theme of this fourth edition will be "Rebuilding trust in democracy: challenges and opportunities for civic activism" and will take place in three sessions. You can read the working document here and the programme attached.
The first session will be devoted to a theme within this framework "Inclusion: for the people or with the people?". How to involve people and communities that are marginalised and in need is one of the major challenges for the democratic organised civil society and social movements. Another trend relates to ideological polarisation in society that affects democratic civil society's ability to mobilise and reach out to audiences attracted by regressive narratives.
Some of the questions we will explore are:
· How do civic activists reach out to social sectors or geographical areas that do not mobilise, especially those who experience exclusion? Are the multiple mobilisations informing and influencing each other?
· Has the COVID-19 civic response facilitated civil society’s ability to reach out to different audiences and mobilise more diverse sectors of our societies, for their immediate and long-term needs to be addressed? To what extent are civic actors able to re-capture those that are attracted by regressive identity-based backwards thinking?
High-level speakers that have already confirmed their participation include Priscillia Ludosky, leading activist from Yellow Vests movement and the Citizens Climate Convention and Donatella della Porta, Dear of Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence and among the mostprominent academic experts on social movements.
We prepared some comms material if needed: https://drive.google.com/