In this episode, we learn about a project at Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakówie where citizens were invited to participate in so-called mini-publics that aimed at giving advice to policymakers in navigating challenges around knowledge, information, and trust that came with the Covid-19 pandemic.
Our Citizen Science podcast series takes you on a tour across our 11 partner universities. Explore a new campus each episode and talk to members of our Una Europa community, to active citizens, volunteers and experts. They tell us more about their involvement with citizen science projects that want to make positive, impactful contributions to their local communities, cities, countries or Europe.
Our fourth episode is an interview with Dr. Marcin Zubek, a political scientist at the Institute of European Studies at Una Europa partner Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakówie. Marcin specialises in foreign policy and, as a member of our Europe and the World Focus Area, helped design and now teaches as part of the Una Europa Joint Bachelor in European Studies. Marcin was a researcher in REGROUP (Rebuilding Governance and Resilience out of the Pandemic), a Horizon Europe project that brought together experts from across Europe to advise the EU on the social, political and institutional challenges created by Covid-19. By studying how the pandemic opened doors for change, REGROUP explored how the EU can become fairer, stronger and more effective.
A central method for REGROUP was the use of mini-publics: small, randomly selected groups of citizens chosen to reflect the wider population and given time and balanced information on the project’s three focus points — knowledge, information and trust. Five partner universities hosted local or national mini-publics, and Marcin explains how the Kraków event was organised. Despite some logistical hurdles, the participants developed concrete policy recommendations for educational and participatory reforms. As a follow-up, REGROUP organised a larger transnational mini-public in Brussels that included randomly selected participants from the local events. Multilingualism posed its own challenges, but the group managed constructive debates on disinformation and science communication at the EU level, calling for clear, reliable information and greater transparency from EU policymakers. Overall, participants from both local and transnational events reported feeling empowered that their views could meaningfully contribute to policy debates.
Find out more about the REGROUP mini-publics on YouTube.
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