_Image credit: Berlin paste up, Dr Case http://www.symbi0sis.net/_
POPREBEL: Addressing populism and boosting civic and democratic engagement
Last week the Research Network received news of a winning proposal in the latest round of Horizon2020 calls. In partnership with UCL and an existing consortium addressing populism across Eastern Europe, we will be applying our model of community outreach and building, online dialogue and social semantic network analysis in the context of European populism today.
Specifically, our contributions will be a structured effort to listen to the voices of the people on the ground. Populist themes resonate with a part the European population. To people who reject populism, this resonance can be hard to understand and empathise with, as it seems at odds with the observed long-term trends towards societal prosperity and openness. Conversely, people who find populism attractive cannot reconcile what they perceive with the optimistic narrative of their political adversaries. We hope to learn what the rise of populist politics looks like from the point of view of Europeans living their daily life. We pay special attention to supporters of the populist agenda. Ultimately, we hope to provide our fellow populist specialist researchers in the project with a breakdown of populism that encodes the point of view of the people directly affected by it, supporters and opposers.
This will see us engaging in unprecedented community management and ethnographic coding: bringing together voices across divergent perspectives and applying multilingual and multimedia ethnographic coding across Polish, Czech, Serbian and English (as the European lingua franca) contexts.
You can read the topic we responded to here, and we’ll be sharing more information on the project as we prepare to kick off early next year.
The research network are over the moon to be diving into such a pertinent and edgy topic as this and are looking forward to involving all of you in the journey ahead.
Special shout out to our colleagues at UCL Jan and Richard for all their efforts, and of course @alberto on being my partner in crime to get this over the line.
Here we go!