A new project of which Prof. Simone Galea, Associate Professor at the Department of Education Studies, Faculty of Education is the academic partner, is developing a training and research programme focused on how to generate solidarities across cultural boundaries, taking the proximity of citizens with different ethnic-cultural backgrounds in specific places and practices in European democracies.
builds on the strengths of the interculturalist paradigm and explores how place-based solidarity practices are shaped by and can work around entrenched social inequalities and unequal power relations.
SOLiDi brings together 10 academic partners from sociology, geography and educational science and 23 non-academic partners in an international, interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral training network for 15 Early Stage Researchers.
Prof. Galea is directing the research project called Political Activism for Public Pedagogy: A Study in ‘Dissenting’ Solidarity.
This research project will explore political activism as a form of public pedagogy and the fluid formations of activities by social groups and movements that emerge from the mobilisation of people at particular places against neoliberal and/or state induced injustices in solidarity.
Prof Katy Bennett, at the University of Leicester, UK and Dr Angele Deguara from the Moviment Graffitti, Malta will be responsible for the academic and non-academic secondments respectively.
The overall aim of SOLiDi is to articulate an academically grounded practice and policy-oriented vision on solidarity in diversity to better equip professionals and organisations with adequate and innovative tools for facilitating solidarity in diversity. It trains doctoral researchers both in the state of the art on sociological, geographical and educationalist insights on solidarity in diversity, place-based practices, interculturalism and intersectionality as well as in analytical and transferable skills on public pedagogies and organisational and policy strategies.
SOLiDi’s objectives are to:
1. broaden understanding of how solidarities can be generated across cultural boundaries, going beyond intercultural dialogue by paying explicit attention to inequality and power;
2. articulate public pedagogies and organizational and policy strategies that support place-based solidarities in diversity; and
3. promote social innovation by facilitating the translation of academic insights into skills to promote and analyse societal change through training in research methods and ethics, thus nurturing a cohort of distinctively European ‘solidarity in diversity’ professionals.
