Project Director
David Buckingham

Project Manager
Liesbeth de Block

 Researcher
Shakuntala Banaji

Project Details
EU funded, start date September 2006

Keywords
Youth, Civic Participation, Internet

CIVICWEB: Young people, the Internet and civic participation
 
Project website: www.civicweb.eu 

CIVICWEB is a 3 year project that began in September 2006, funded by the European Union under Framework 6, Priority 7 ‘Citizens and governance in a Knowledge-based society’.

This project focuses specifically on the range of civic and political sites now emerging on the web, especially those that are youth-orintated, and the potential of internet based civic activities for youth. These sites are created by many different organisations, interest groups and individuals; and they range from small-scale, local initiatives to national and international projects. Potentially, they constitute a powerful form of non formal learning, affecting the development of social capital, and political, social and  economic participation. The research focuses on three key dimensions of this phenomenon:   
•  the production of such sites, including the motivations, working practices and  economic models of the producers
•  the nature and characteristics of the sites, in terms of their content and  formal features (design, mode of address, structure), and the extent to which  they invite active participation among their users
•  the uses and interpretations made of such sites by different social groups of  young people, and the relationship between this online activity and their civic  participation ‘offline’.   

This project seeks to assess how these developments vary across the different political cultures of seven European member states; and their implications for pedagogy and intergenerational relations, both at a ‘macro’ level and at the ‘micro’ level of family relationships. The research uses quantitative and qualitative methods; and it seeks to identify instances of ‘good practice’ that can inform practitioners and policymakers in relevant fields.


Project co-ordinator:
Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media, Institute of Education (LKL), University of London (IoE)   


Project partners:
Lund University, Sweden      
Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands      
Central European University Budapest, Hungary   
Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain   
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia  
Istanbul BILGI University, Turkey

Members of the CIVICWEB project team