Energy Urbanity and Active Citizen Participation

This paper poses the question: ‘can energy innovation initiatives in Innovation Playgrounds foster a new ‘energy urbanity’ through active citizen participation in the energy transition?’ The concept of ‘Innovation Playgrounds’ and an accompanying Framework are described and linked to implementation evidence of the EU H2020 positive energy research and innovation project +CityxChange, related to emergent active citizen participation in two cities: Limerick, Ireland and Trondheim, Norway. The purpose of the study is to demonstrate that spatially clustered energy innovation initiatives in urban areas involving active citizen participation contribute to a new ‘energy urbanity’ for the energy transition. The research methods are based on a comparative case study approach and close observation of two case sites, with a focus on the ‘Innovation Playground’ area of each city. The article’s three main conclusions are: that a Framework approach to active citizen participation in energy innovation initiatives in urban areas facilitates new models of active citizen and community participation around energy innovation; emergent active citizen participation in energy innovation initiatives in urban areas suggests a new type of engagement that is information-rich, blended, action-led, citizen-focused, and spatial; and that a new paradigm of ‘energy urbanity’ for the energy transition can be proposed.

Social bonding and children’s collaborations as citizen-peers at primary school

This qualitative research explored 9- to 12-year-old children’s citizenship participation at primary school in the Republic of Ireland. During 2016–2017, 160 children from 6 co-educational primary schools participated. Through a process of grounded analysis, children are identified as active citizen-peers of their peer groups. As citizen-peers, children used social strategies to assert their agency and autonomy within the adult-controlled school environment. Social bonding between children also influenced the ways citizen-peers negotiated peer group social hierarchies. Inductive analysis of observational data identifies children’s social strategies as covert and overt forms of Collective Social Action ( CSA); motivated by competition and/or protest against the activities children did not want to participate in at school. This research found that low social bonding between children affects peer solidarity, which suggests that social bonding is an important aspect of children’s collaboration as citizen-peers at school.

Pedagogical and Social Significance of Historical Local Lore in Modern Institutions of General Secondary Education and Institutions of Higher Education

The article examines the pedagogical and social significance of historical local lore in modern general secondary education and higher education institutions. The authors conclude that the study of various aspects of life in the region needs constant search and improvement. It should go beyond established schemes and models, be guided not by biased views, prohibitions and prejudices, but use a wide range of opportunities to better solve the problem. Modern teaching methods must involve all the creative potential of the individual. Historical local lore is the academic discipline that allows to reveal the creative potential of the researcher, to form him as a future scientist, active citizen, creator of the future of his land.

Containing Future Epidemics With Trustworthy Federated Systems for Ubiquitous Warning and Response

In this paper, we propose a global digital platform to avoid and combat epidemics by providing relevant real-time information to support selective lockdowns. It leverages the pervasiveness of wireless connectivity while being trustworthy and secure. The proposed system is conceptualized to be decentralized yet federated, based on ubiquitous public systems and active citizen participation. Its foundations lie on the principle of informational self-determination. We argue that only in this way it can become a trustworthy and legitimate public good infrastructure for citizens by balancing the asymmetry of the different hierarchical levels within the federated organization while providing highly effective detection and guiding mitigation measures toward graceful lockdown of the society. To exemplify the proposed system, we choose a remote patient monitoring as use case. This use case is evaluated considering different numbers of endorsed peers on a solution that is based on the integration of distributed ledger technologies and NB-IoT (narrowband IoT). An experimental setup is used to evaluate the performance of this integration, in which the end-to-end latency is slightly increased when a new endorsed element is added. However, the system reliability, privacy, and interoperability are guaranteed. In this sense, we expect active participation of empowered citizens to supplement the more usual top-down management of epidemics.

Political Obligation

Political obligation refers to the idea that there is a duty to obey the law as well as to support one’s state in a number of other ways—for example, by promoting its interests, by defending it when attacked, by voting, and, more generally, by being an active citizen. These duties can be very demanding and seriously interfere with one’s capacity to autonomously choose how to lead one’s life. As such, their existence deserves close scrutiny. The main attempts to justify the existence of political obligation appeal to the ideas of consent, fair play, gratitude, natural duties of justice, and associative obligations. Each of these theories is shown to struggle either with underinclusiveness or with overinclusiveness. It is normally thought that all and only the citizens of a given state have a duty to obey its laws and support its political institutions, but none of the classic theories seem to be able to justify a duty of this kind. In light of this, two responses are available: one is to give up the idea that there is political obligation, thereby becoming a “philosophical anarchist”; the other is to revise the traditional understanding of political obligation.

Citizens and the European Union since 1950

The article covers the relationship of the citizens with the European Union and its predecessors since the beginnings of the European integration in the 1950s. It dis­tinguishes the period of the unquestioned citizen during the 1950s and 1960s, the period of the questioned and mobilized citizen since the 1970s and the period of the active citizen since around the turn the of century, in looking at European elec­tions, referendums, European movements, interest organizations, regular European opinion polls, complaints by citizens at the European Parliament, at the European Commission and at the European ombudsman and legal proceedings by citizens at the European Court in Luxemburg. In addition, the article looks at the change be­tween periods of trust and periods of distrust by citizens in the European institu­tions since the 1950s. It argues that the trend towards the mobilized and active citi­zen includes an eventual strong rise of distrust in periods of crisis, but also by a return of trust by the citizens even in difficult periods such as the recent Covid19 pandemic.

From management to student

The paper presents the results of research on human rights conducted during 2018 and 2019 at faculties of teacher education and studies of psychology, pedagogy, and social work in Croatia. The aim of the research was to examine the representation of human rights learning outcomes in these studies, with a special emphasis on children’s rights, children’s participation, and the concept of the child as an active citizen, common in the discourse of the contemporary childhood paradigm. The research was conducted by using the mixed methods approach. Triangulation with three different sources of respondents was applied: a survey with university teachers, interviews with representatives of study programs, and a survey with students, where all types of data in the analysis were treated as equal. Different types of data showed unequal perspectives between institutional actors, but also similarities of the university population with other levels of the education system.