Peripheral Creativities: Youth, Arts and Public Policies in Segregated Territories

CLEAR - Constructing Learning Outcomes in Europe: A Multi-Level Analysis of (Under)Achievement in the Life Course

Research and evaluation of the Project "Jovens Urgentes – Aqui e Agora" ["Urgent Youth - Here and Now"]

Projeto promovido pela PELE

Play4Life: Jovens Atletas como Ativistas no Desporto. [Play4life: Young Athletes as Sports Activists]

Observatório Desporto, Educação e Comunidades [Observatory of Sport, Education and Communities]

ClimActiC: Connecting Citizenship and Science for Climate Adaptation.

Leader of the Work Package 1 (Conversations about climate change, research and politics: citizens, researchers, economic agents, activists and policy makers co-designing actionable solutions)

JUSTFUTURES: Climate Futures and Just Transformations: Young People's Narratives and Political Imaginaries

The burden of accumulated scientific evidence unequivocally shows that climate change has profound and multifarious implications for human societies, as well as for biophysical systems, which will be aggravated in the coming decades. Its impacts, and the mitigation and adaptation measures to contain them, will especially affect people that are presently young. In Portugal and around the world, the future of young people and of other age groups will also be shaped by other sustainability-related challenges, as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2018) and numerous analysts have highlighted the need for ‘transformative systemic change’ in order to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement and Agenda 2030’s Sustainable Development Goals. Several perspectives and proposals have emerged to address the need to foster social, economic and environmental sustainability transformations, as well as support their agents and drivers (Linner & Wibeck, 2019).

Research has shown that techno-managerial discourses are dominant in the media and other public spaces, complemented by discourses focusing on individual change (Carvalho et al., 2018). However, transformations towards sustainability are eminently political, with power, justice and redistributive issues at their core. Pluralism and contestation are critical to overcome a post-political ambiance and to re-politicize the Anthropocene, namely by exposing and debating divergent visions of socio-ecological futures (Lövbrand et al., 2015).

Recent mobilisations around climate change have clearly indicated that young people are or want to be involved in climate change debates and futures. The JUSTFUTURES project will contribute to understanding young people's agency and political imaginaries. It will do so by mapping existing collective action groups, analysing narratives and media(ted) discourses of climate futures and examining, through extensive field work, young people’s imaginaries of climate futures. JUSTFUTURES aims to analyse how young people envision their roles in the transformations towards sustainability that need to be implemented over the next few decades. Understanding young people’s imaginaries of the future and conceptions of agency for shaping it is at the core of the research plan to be carried out. Looking at citizenship as a ‘communicative achievement’ (Hausendorf & Bora, 2006), the project also has an action-oriented dimension as it intends to contribute to youth groups’ abilities for reflecting on and expanding their civic and political engagement with climate change and sustainability. By doing so, it will help to create opportunities for young people to envision, plan and build just futures.

Against a background of systemic problems that are producing various forms of unsustainability and at a time when democracies are being tested by different forms of nationalism, populism and xenophobia along growing socio-economic inequalities, and are facing the system-shaking crisis generated by COVID-19, there is a pressing need to reflect on the politics of sustainability transformations, and to leverage existing, emerging and yet-to-be imagined opportunities for fundamental alterations in social and economic systems in ways that are democratic and just. Addressing recommendations from several scholars (e.g. Fazey et al., 2018; West & Worliczek, 2019), JUSTFUTURES mobilizes social sciences research to further understanding and facilitate democratic change towards climate-safe, just and resilient societies. It will do so by opening up spaces of dialogue and co-production between the scientific community and a critical stakeholder in sustainability transformations: young people.

Projeto "Participo! Participação cívica e política das mulheres" [Project Participate! Civic and political participation of women]

Youth Political Participation in Portugal

Portugal constitui um caso particular no que respeita à participação política dos jovens, na medida em que, ao contrário da maioria dos países europeus, a contínua baixa afluência às urnas dos jovens portugueses não é compensada pela sua participação noutras formas de atividade política, menos “elite-dirigidas” e não convencionais.

Partindo deste pressuposto, o Estudo sobre a Participação Política dos Jovens em Portugal pretende desenvolver uma análise comparativa da participação política deste grupo da população, com base nos dados do European Social Survey e de um inquérito representativo a realizar no âmbito deste Estudo, por meio de 1500 entrevistas presenciais. O Estudo desenvolverá também uma perspetiva qualitativa, composta por duas componentes metodológicas:

uma análise da estratégia dos partidos políticos para a mobilização de jovens, através de observação documental e entrevistas a líderes e membros partidários;
organização de focus groups e levantamento sintético de casos de estudo de novas formas de ativismo jovem, não convencionais e expressivas (artísticas/performativas).
O Estudo será realizado em parceria entre o CESOP-UCP, responsável pelas entrevistas e pelo inquérito, e o ICS-UL, o CIIE-UP e a GOVCOPP-UA, responsáveis pelo desenho do inquérito, pela análise e tratamento dos dados, pela realização dos focus groups e pela apresentação dos relatórios. Este estudo terá previsivelmente início no decurso de 2020 e estará concluído em 2021. Estas datas são indicativas pois tal dependerá da evolução da pandemia do COVID-19.

Portuguese Ethnographic Sub-Project - Imagi(ni)ng Democracy: European youth becoming citizens by visual participation

Responsible the development of the Portuguese Subproject of ImagiDem, H2020-European Research Council. Funding amount to FPCEUP: € 208 815,53. Grant Agreement ID: 804024

Portuguese Ethnographic Sub-Project - Imagi(ni)ng Democracy: European youth becoming citizens by visual participation

ImagiDem explores and conceptualises visual participation of young European citizens. By understanding how today's youth build political arguments, solve conflicts, build commonality, and what tools they use to politicize issues of their concern, the project aims at formulating a model of democratic practices of the 2020s. ImagiDem studies visual participation both online and offline. It analyses images and memes posted on social media, and follows young people's visual ways of participation as part of their everyday actions. The project combines visual ethnography with computational big data minining and analysis, and deploys this combination to a comparative research setting in four European countries: Finland, France, Germany, and Portugal. Researcher in charge of the development of the Portuguese Ethnographic Subproject. This position was achieved through winning a competitive international call for the development of the Portuguese subproject. Project led by Professor Eeva Luhtakallio (University of Helsinki). Duration of the Portuguese Subproject: 3 years. Funding amount to FPCEUP: ¿ 208 815,53.

Young People and European Citizenship

Principal Investigator: Isabel Menezes (University of Porto).

Main tasks:
- Analysis of quantitative and qualitative data of the project;
- Collaboration in writing up papers and other publications;
- Dissemination of the main scientific results.

The Education for Development in Public Institutions of Higher Education: Mapping Representations and Analysis of Experiences

Principal Investigators: Isabel Menezes and João Caramelo.
Funding amount: 18.767,39€

Catch-EyoU: Constructing AcTive CitizensHip with European Youth

A major challenge for the EU is currently “bridging the gap” between young Europeans and EU Institutions, and improving dialogue, in order to enhance young people’s trust in EU Institutions and their active engagement in EU issues. Including young people’s perspectives is essential to ensuring the continuation of participatory and representative democracy. Through the joint contribution of different disciplines (Psychology, Political Science, Sociology, Media and Communications, Education) CATCH-EyoU has the aim to identify the factors, located at different levels (psychological, developmental, macro social and contextual) influencing the different forms of youth active engagement in Europe. Through different studies, qualitative, quantitative, and an active citizenship intervention in schools, the project will provide a multifaceted understanding of the different factors influencing the perspectives of young people on Europe and of the ways in which young people engage in society, offering policy makers new instruments and “conceptual lenses” to better understand this generation, how they approach public authorities and how they engage materially and symbolically in order to participate in the construction of the societies they inhabit and shape the governmental regimes under which they live. This new understanding will help to bring the European Union closer to all its citizens, not only the young.
Principal Investigator: Elvira Cicognani (University of Bologna, Italy).
National coordinator: Isabel Menezes.
Funding amount: €2,498,787.00
Grant agreement No. 649538649538

Main tasks:
- Project management;
- Supervision of the data collection and analysis of interviews and focus groups discussions carried out in school context;
- Supervision of the data collection process through surveys;
- Supervision of short-term ethnographies conducted in youth organisations;
- Participation in the Consortium’s international meetings;
- Participation in international conferences as co-author of presentations;
- Writing up of national and international reports;
- Organisation of scientific dissemination events.

JoSeES: Serious Games in Higher Education: Impacts, Experiences and Potential

Principal Investigator: Pedro Ferreira. F
Funding amount: € 106.998,00

Living and Doing Politics: An Educational Travelogue Through Meanings, Processes and Effects

The current changes on youth participation suggest a 'participatory revolution', once the youth involvement is no longer limited to the conventional structures. Taking these changes into account and recognizing the role of citizenship on public, educational and scientific domains, it is crucial to understand the influence of civic and political development of young people on other areas of their lives. Therefore, we intend to explore the effects of civic and political experiences with developmental quality on school performance. Moreover, this project aims to understand the internal dynamics of participatory contexts, once the research is mostly based on individual perspectives.
European PhD at the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences of the University of Porto.
Supervision: Professor Isabel Menezes and Professor Tiago Neves.
Discussants: Professors Xavier Bonal Sarró, Ernesto Ganuza Fernández, Florbela Luiz de Sousa and Pedro Daniel Tavares Ferreira.
President of the jury: Professor José Alberto de Azevedo e Vasconcelos Correia.
Approved by unanimity, cum laude.

Press Play to Activate: Video Games and Citizenship Education of Youth

Principal Investigator: Pedro Ferreira.
Funding amount: € 4.470,00.

Main Tasks:
- Literature review about the use of video games for educational purposes;
- Research and analysis of serious games, framed by their adequacy to developing citizenship education;
- Development of data collection instruments: survey focused on citizenship and juvenile civic and political participation; survey on gaming habits and experiences, and citizenship education activities; focus groups on the use of serious games;
- Preparation and implementation of gaming sessions;
- Setting up and coordination of a closed group on Facebook for the participants in the gaming sessions;
- Transcription and analysis of the qualitative and quantitative data generated through the procedures described above.

PIDOP: Processes Influenting Democratic Ownership and Participation

This project examined the processes which influence democratic ownership and participation in eight European states. It drawn on the disciplines of Politics, Sociology, Psychology and Education to examine macro-level contextual factors (including historical, political, electoral, economic and policy factors (including familial, educational and media factors) and psychological factors (including motivational, cognitive, attitudinal and identity factors) which facilitate and/or inhibit civic and political engagement and participation. Principal Investigator: Martyn Barrett (University of Surrey, United Kingdom). National coordinator: Isabel Menezes. Funding amount: €1.930.000,00.

Main tasks:
- Bibliographical research in national and international databases;
- Writing up of the state of the art on the civic and political participation of minority groups, namely native and immigrant youths;
- Participation in the Consortium’s international meetings;
- Implementation of focus groups with native and immigrant youths;
- Conduction of in-depth interviews with parents, teachers, activists and political decision-makers;
- Analysis of documents produced by NGOs and public institutions;
- Participation in national and international conferences as author and co-author of presentations;
- Collaboration in the elaboration of a survey and the respective the statistical analysis of the relationship between political, social and psychological factors and civic and political participation;
- Collaboration in the writing up of national and international reports.
- Collaboration in the elaboration of non-technical documents aimed at the dissemination of the project;
- Writing and co-writing of papers published in national and international journals.

Mediation in the Community

Principal Investigator: Tiago Neves. Funding amount: € 39.960,00 (PTDC/CED/66812/2006).
Main tasks:
- Bibliographical research on the contemporary fragmentation of judicial and social regulation systems, and on the articulation between disadvantaged contexts and delinquency;
- Ethnographic work with youngsters in a community centre;
- Development and implementation of conflict management activities with youngsters in a community centre and professionals from the local council;
- Co-writing up of a manual on conflict management with youngsters.

Mediation in the Community

Principal Investigator: Tiago Neves.
Funding amount: € 39.960,00 (PTDC/CED/66812/2006).
This research experience began while I was in the final year of the BA in Education Sciences; upon completion of the BA, I joined the research team as a full member.

Main tasks:
- Bibliographical research on the contemporary fragmentation of judicial and social regulation systems, and on the articulation between disadvantaged contexts and delinquency;
- Ethnographic work with youngsters in a community centre;
- Development and implementation of conflict management activities with youngsters in a community centre and professionals from the local council;
- Co-writing up of a manual on conflict management with youngsters.