Information
At Ponte Europa, we organize public debates, conferences, roundtables and other forms of deliberative experiences with citizens, local associations, schools and others on the challenges facing the EU (democracy, environment, gender equality, human rights, migration, social policy, etc.). Bringing together two former initiatives (“Thoughts for Europe” and “Engaged Academics”), Ponte Europa is the place to go for all of us at the EUI who want to get outside our beautiful ivory tower and engage with civil society!
The EU is facing a challenging moment: Euroscepticism is spreading, and citizens can feel distant from the European project. This is why Ponte Europa aims to ‘open the doors’ of the Institute and connect the EUI with civil society at large. Too often, civil society and academia are considered as distant worlds that might not speak the same language and are therefore not intelligible to one another. We believe that this can and should be changed. Our initiative aims at making civil society benefit from the skills and knowledge of EUI researchers, and providing young, engaged academics – from every department – with a ‘civil society perspective’ on their research topics.
In practice, the purpose of our initiative is to organize public debates, conferences, roundtables and other forms of deliberative experiences with citizens, local associations, schools and other institutions on the current challenges of the EU: democracy, environment, gender equality, human rights, migration, social policy, etc. For the time being, we work ‘locally’, but this will not prevent Ponte Europa from going beyond Tuscany or Italy in the future.