Everyday Citizenship as a Social and Cognitive Challenge: East-West Perspectives
Everyday Citizenship as a Social and Cognitive Challenge: East-West Perspectives

Summary/Abstract: The society in which people have been living in the last few decades has been variously defined. Some of the best-known definitions are “risk society” (Ulrich Beck), “liquid modernity” (Zygmunt Bauman), “digital age” (Pierre Lйvy), “world-system” (Immanuel Wallerstein), “society of distrust” (Pierre Rosanvallon), “society of distancing” (Michael Walzer), “acceleration society” (Hartmut Rosa), post- or secondmodernity, age of uncertainty, knowledge-based society. While each definition highlights and problematizes some separate structure-defining particularity of the contemporary age, what unites them all is the question, “How do we go about living together?” This question underlies the different theories that produced these various definitions; it is a question that has always accompanied human civilization, a question related to the birth of the social sciences, which represent an attempt at rational understanding of the process of people living together. This is also the big question addressed by the present research project, though only as it applies, to just one of the countless fields of social reality, that of civic activeness. What is more, in our project the scope of the topic is narrowed to only the practices defined as ordinary/everyday citizenship, more precisely the kind of selfinitiated, self-organized practices of individuals and groups working outside the traditional institutions of political action, i.e. outside political parties, trade unions, direct and representative democracy. This everyday citizenship is the social and research challenge that our attention is focused on.

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