(Re)Claiming Democratic Space: Co-Producing Participatory Futures with Underrepresented Youth through CLRA and COIL

Description

Background: Across Europe, democratic participation is increasingly undermined by rising extremism, misinformation, and political disengagement, particularly among underrepresented youth. YOUROPE is a Horizon Europe-funded project that responds to this moment not just as a crisis, but as an opportunity to rethink whose voices shape democratic futures. Central to the project is a commitment to community-led knowledge production that centres youth as co-researchers, not just participants. This paper situates YOUROPE at the intersection of social psychology, civic education, and participatory action, foregrounding methodological innovation over traditional silos.

Methods: At the heart of YOUROPE is Community-Led Research and Action (CLRA), a participatory methodology that frames communities, especially youth and their educators, as active agents in the research process. CLRA uses iterative, dialogic cycles of inquiry grounded in Appreciative Inquiry principles. This is paired with Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) to build translocal dialogue across the project’s 21 educational institutions. Together, CLRA and COIL create multi-sited, cross-cultural learning environments that are co-designed, reflexive, and anchored in lived experience. Quantitative tools complement this approach by measuring shifts in civic engagement, belonging, and institutional trust among significant numbers of youth and over 6,000 community members across Europe.

Findings: Early findings and previous research literature utilising each individual approach suggest that combining CLRA and COIL open-up meaningful civic pathways, particularly for youth historically excluded from policy discourse. Participants report increased political self-efficacy, stronger community ties, and a renewed sense of democratic agency. Beyond individual change, the process has catalysed institutional reflection and policy engagement, with youth-led recommendations reaching several European policymakers.

Discussion: This work contributes to social psychology by advancing a participatory, mixed-methods approach that challenges conventional binaries of quantitative vs. qualitative, critical vs. applied. It demonstrates how cross-context collaboration and community-grounded inquiry can offer not just insights about social worlds, but tools for transforming them. YOUROPE exemplifies how researchers can move beyond tribalism to co-create knowledge that is accountable, actionable, and attuned to complex social realities. This aligns with the conference subthemes on methodological innovation, sustainable futures, and doing social psychology in times of profound change.

Period	8 Sept 2025 → 11 Sept 2025
Event title	Beyond Tribalism in Social Psychology: Bringing Together Diverse Research Traditions: British Psychological Society Social Psychology Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Oxford, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International