In the past, European institutions have tried to foster…or even force upon the idea of European citizenship on people from the top down. And yet, never before has the experience of people been so transnational. Local communities are experiencing the impacts of globalisation, from offshoring jobs to incoming migration. Even if these issues are often only discussed from a national frame; global processes such as migration are negotiated at a local level because their impacts are felt through people’s everyday experiences. You can argue that these situations have existed before, be it migration out of choice or constraint, be it to study, to work or to survive, but they have been multiplied.
Not only that, people are experiencing new transnational situations, like digital workers, working outside of the formal labour market or people becoming stateless because they’re scared the biometric controls will remove their personal sovereignty. So we need new forms of sovereignty — personal, local & transnational.
Building transnational civic literacy
But in a connected world, we also need to understand how we can make sense of the world around us, how we cope with the changes taking place and how we influence the world around us. We need to build a transnational civic literacy — help people make sense of the transnational around them, whether it’s at the centre or at at the margins. How do we make more explicit the sharing of transnational experience?
Hacking the cultural hegemony
How you can develop a process that creates cracks within the cultural hegemony? You can use events to surface vocabulary people are using it and connect it to people elsewhere sharing similar experiences, rather than invent new words. How do you connect the creative and political
How can we use festivals as spaces and moments to enact it? How do we create disruption without resorting to sensationalism?
Assembling transnational infrastructure
How can you maintain the agility of an organisation that can shape and influence the movements, while focusing on the long term? How can we better connect groups without over-connecting? What are the questions that mobilise actors & organisations to come together? What are the questions that the actors urgently need answers to and are stuck with? How do we bring other worlds into dialogue? How do we frame the alternative in a system which blocks out other experiences?
How do we create the tools that enable us to make tangible change? If other organisations have the individual tools, how do we create the collaborations or arrangements that enable us to access and combine together the tools to create transnational infrastructure?
How can we provide the tools to the existing community, while creating space for the new community who can help us navigate to unknown destinations?
How can we support people to develop civic protocols or coops that are:
Strategic: contribute to one or more of our priorities
Transnational: are developed or organised in more than one country
Creative: imagine, demand or enact new forms of citizenship
Participative: involve new audiences
Collaborative: are developed with an external network or organisation
Open: Whose methods will be shared
Sustainable: Whose outcomes will be taken forward after the project
