TEAM

Donatella della Porta, Joana Lilli Hofstetter, and Angela Adami

START YEAR 2022

END YEAR 2025

In the last two decades, many crisis have increased challenges for Europe: While the nation states dominating the European project have hardly been able to find adequate responses to these challenges, at the local level new forms of participation, democratic innovations and practices of solidarity and citizenship are experimented. ECS_Euro Project takes up the question of how new approaches can be identified at the local scale vis-à-vis the longstanding challenges for Europe to establish cross-border social cohesion and cooperation in particular regarding the social fields of migrant rights, housing and care work, which have been particularly affected by the financial and pandemic crisis. How can we understand that e.g. 1) both mayors and activists are committed to a “Solidarity City” in which migrants should have the same rights as all residents; 2) the care of children, the elderly and the sick is frequently becoming a public matter, negotiated at the local level; and 3) in disputes over affordable housing, the social question is increasingly related to urban spaces.
The project team conducts ten qualitative case studies in European cities (two each in Italy, Slovenia, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark). We study local initiative’s discursive references, online environments and socio-spatial relations by triangulating three qualitative methods: frame analysis, digital and global ethnography. The project contributes to debates on urban social movements, civic initiatives and municipal politics, intersectional studies, European studies and social theory, and further develops concepts of citizenship, solidarity and democracy in a practice-theoretical, intersectional and transnational perspective.

FUNDING

Volkswagen Stiftung