The article has a triple aim. The first aim is to study the structure of EU youth policy, especially the role of the EU Presidency youth events in the EU institution. The EU youth event in Hyvinkää during the Finnish EU Presidency in 2006 was the starting point of our case study. Second, we analyze how the EU Presidency youth events, the case of Hyvinkää in particular, function as tools of political influence in forming EU youth policy. Third, we analyze the Hyvinkää youth event as a democratic miniature society. To show the variety of youth participation in the different political arenas of the EU we bring reflections from the European Youth Forum and the European Youth Parliament to our analysis. The study suggests that in the future the EU Presidency youth events should function as important and versatile arenas of learning-by-doing enabling the growth of ‘young active EU policy citizens’.
In this article, we use a multidimensional approach to empirically study the concepts of dialogue and contact zones in the setting of the World Social Forum Tunis 2013, with a special emphasis on young, local volunteers. Although young Tunisians played a crucial role in the revolution, they have been side-lined in the construction of the country’s new democracy. Furthermore, although many studies have paid attention to the creativity of young activists in the World Social Forum, very few have thoroughly analysed the engagements and experiences of young, local participants. This is surprising, especially since the youth represent one of the biggest groups of participants in World Social Forums. Moreover, many World Social Forum volunteers, the backbone of the forum, are young locals. This article presents a combination of Jabberi’s autoethnographic work and Laine’s ethnographic work on the World Social Forum Tunis 2013. Using the concepts of de Sousa Santos, the article shows how young World Social Forum volunteers actively produced translations of knowledge and practices that enabled multicultural contact zones that connected the different actors in the forum.
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