Memory, Youth, Political Legacy And Civic Engagement

MYPLACE explores how young people‟s social participation is shaped by theshadows (past, present and future) of totalitarianism and populism in Europe.Conceptually, it goes beyond the comparison of discrete national „political cultures‟or reified classifications of political heritage („postcommunist‟/‟liberal democratic‟);it is premised rather on the pan-European nature of a range of radical and populistpolitical and philosophical traditions and the cyclical rather than novel nature of thepopularity they currently enjoy. Empirically, MYPLACE employs a combination ofsurvey, interview and ethnographic research instruments to provide new, pan-European data that not only measure levels of participation but capture the meaningsyoung people attach to it. Analytically, through its specific focus on „youth‟ and thehistorical and cultural contextualization of young people‟s social participation,MYPLACE replaces the routine, and often abstract, iteration of the reasons for youngpeople‟s „disengagement‟ from politics with an empirically rich mapping of youngpeople‟s understandings of the civic and political space that they inhabit. In policyterms, MYPLACE identifies the obstacles to, and facilitators of, young people‟sreclamation of the European political arena as a place for them.