19/20 Nov 2020 | Meetings with the European Institutions

On 19-20 November, I had a chance to participate in 3 online sessions with representatives of the European Commission, the European Parliament and the House of European History. These activities were a replacement for the trip to Brussels that usually occurred in the past years, due to the COVID-19 travel and physical meeting restrictions.

The first session: European Youth Seminar (EYS)

EYS is an online session which aims to listen to young people’s opinion on the recovery of Europe after the pandemic. I got a chance to meet Tom Berendsen, member of the European Parliament in the Netherlands and participated in a discussion with students from another university, on the topic of technological and digital solution. The session focused on digitalization where participants together came up with ideas to propose to Tom later in the online session. In the session, several issues were discussed, including digital divide, its threat to democracy and how to approach citizens from all layers of society. For myself, I can incorporate my ideas from the NECE Stakeholders' Challenge in this session.

My breakout room's idea is to approach citizens from local government and provide educational support to decrease the digital divide, which should be maintained permanently not just in times of COVID-19. This idea can be closely linked with the findings of Cengiz (2016) on civic engagement: overly technical discourse tends to be exclusionary for citizens to fully understand and actively engage in it. Therefore, we think it is crucial to come up with a socially inclusive digital options for people with different educational backgrounds.

The second session: House of European History (HEH) and the digital challenge

In the second session, we listened to Simina Badica, one of the curator at HEH, sharing about her work at the museum, as well as the opportunities and challenges that the museum is facing. We the Honours team were put into 4 groups, each coming up with a proposal on the digitalization process of the museum. The session gave great insights on how to better practice social inclusion in the art and culture sector, with the help of communication technology in the post-pandemic world.

My team came up with ideas to provide a more inclusive virtual experience, focusing on people with disabilities, in different ages and social groups. During the brainstorming process, we came up with a lot of different ideas. One thing I can really learn from it is how to group different ideas of myself and my team members into a concrete proposal for HEH.

Interested in our ideas? This video summarizes them all:

The third session: meeting with 2 EC officials

The third session touched upon the social media side of political and governmental communication. The information on how the European Commission has been using social media tools to communicate with citizens provided a practical look into the field. Indeed, the use of communication technologies is important in the unification of European identity (Shore, 2020). From the reading and the session, one thing that stuck inside my mind was the use of Pinterest as a communication platform for the European Commission, where the visual ideas of their activities and campaigns are stored. Pinterest is not a common platform when it comes to the governmental or institutional communication. However, the representation of European Commission on this platform creates a unified image of European countries with different infographics/images on geographical, social and political aspects.

When I look back, despite the unusual online platforms, the sessions still gave a lot of insights into the current Europe and served as great inspirations for my EC challenge.

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Reference

Cengiz, F. (2016). The EU policymaking paradox: Citizen participation is a must, but the shaping of policies has become too technical. Retrieved November 26, 2020, from https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2016/01/22/the-eu-policymaking-paradox-citizen-participation-is-a-must-but-the-shaping-of-policies-has-become-too-technical/

Shore, C. (2000). Building Europe: The cultural politics of European integration. New York: Routledge (Chapters 1-2; pp. 15-65).