This NECE Campus workshop was delivered by the CriticalChangeLab and its interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Oulu, Trinity College Dublin, European Alternatives, and Ars Electronica. We are enormously grateful to Eva Durall, Niccolo Milanese, Caitlin White, Andrew Newman, Yusra Niaz, Tuija Cornér, Heidi Hartikainen, and Marianne Kinnula for bringing a fresh and creative perspective on how we can best support youth-led civic interventions.

The overall goal of the Critical ChangeLab project is to strengthen democracy in Europe by creating and implementing a flexible model of democratic pedagogy using a bottom-up approach that empowers young people to ‘own’ everyday democracy and engage in direct action towards justice-oriented transformations. The Model is created following a participatory process with youth, educators, and other stakeholders, using Participatory Action Research (PAR) and participatory evaluation.

At the core of the Critical ChangeLabs is a youth-centred approach, where young individuals explore issues that hold significance in their lives. These Labs embrace a participatory ethos, fostering collaboration between youth and various stakeholders, including educators and civil society organisations. The central focus of these labs is a steadfast orientation towards change. Participants actively engage in transformative processes, cultivating a systemic understanding of the contradictions embedded within Western democracy. It goes beyond exploring issues; it’s a journey toward a deeper comprehension of democracy’s complexities and a commitment to driving meaningful change.

This participatory workshop aimed to equip participants with practical knowledge and skills to act as agents of change in citizenship formal and non-formal education by nurturing relations of care that go beyond anthropocentrism. The rationale for reimagining civic education is based on the assumption that the anthropocentric worldview, limited to the nation-state scale, does not allow tackling today’s societal challenges such as climate change, hate speech, and misinformation. The workshop served as an invitation to jointly imagine alternative futures in civic education in which other voices and agencies than those of humans are part of democratic decision-making processes.

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