Information
Ponte Europa aims to ‘open the doors’ of the European University Institute and connect the EUI with civil society at large. Too often, civil society and academia are considered 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 pursues the twofold objective of 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/participatory 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 now, we work ‘locally’, but this will not prevent our WG from going beyond Tuscany or Italy in the future.
Ponte Europa and its predecessor WG, Engaged Academics, are thankful for the generous support of Prof. Federico Romero (History Department).