The Radicalisation Awareness Network’s Youth & Education (Y&E) Working Group are looking for youth workers, teachers, and other relevant experts and professionals working with youngsters. Practitioners who can provide concrete examples from their daily practices or who are facing challenges around the extreme left are invited to respond to this call for participants.
RAN are looking for practitioners who have dealt with and can share experiences around the following three topics:
- Polarisation around discussions that are hard to deal with for youth practitioners. We will start with the example of currently heated debates about identity politics from a ‘woke’ perspective, mostly concerning race, gender, and sexuality. What do we see happening in the classroom with new taboos around these topics and ‘cancel culture’?
- Potential for escalation. Growing concerns among youngsters about their future have gotten many of them involved in activism. On some topics like the climate and energycrisis, for example, protests have been intensifying in scale and nature, raising questions and concerns about radicalisation towards civil disobedience, sabotage, or violence against material targets. We will look into this and potentially other topics where the lines between intensifying protest and potential radicalisation are vague as it is important to distinguish between the two and to share experiences and views on this distinction.
- Youngsters who (want to) use violence for left-wing causes. For example, with the rise of the far right in the past decade, a resurgence occurred in antifascist mobilisation, leading to violent confrontations with right-wing extremists in various Member States. We will investigate how such confrontations occur in schools and youth work organisations, and how youth practitioners can deal with these youngsters that are willing to use violence.
Target audience: teachers, youth workers, school staff and experts with relevant knowledge, experience and testimonies on this topic.
How to register
See the webpages of the European Commission for more information ->
