Master's students from the HSZG researched youth engagement in a practical collaboration with the ENKOR project and presented their work and results in Berlin on January 27, 2023.
As part of a two-day joint meeting of the organizations involved in the ENKOR research project (Georg August University Göttingen, Thünen Institute for Regional Development and TRAWOS Institute at Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences), a workshop was held on 27 January 2023 for students from Hesse/Lower Saxony, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony.
Some of the participants had also attended the Future Forum for Rural Development
To kick off the workshop at the "Palace" conference hotel, the participants discussed in groups the particular opportunities and challenges that can be identified for civic engagement in a rural context.
A keynote speech by Susanne Lerche (TRAWOS) on gender-differentiated engagement research, together with the empirical findings from communities in Mecklenburg prepared by Dr. Anna Eckert (Thünen), then focused on specific patterns that are also structured by gender attributions and demarcations in the area of volunteering. In Göttingen, a separate format is being developed for research into female volunteering.
Miriam Fricke, Sandra Stibenz, Mirjam Revers, Stefan Kunert and Philipp Bruckmann - all students on the Master's degree program "Management of Social Change" at the HSZG - presented the preliminary results of their research semester. Since October 2022, the group had been researching youth engagement as part of the ENKOR project, conducting interviews and observations in a community in Saxony. They described an impressive process that ultimately led to answering the research question of which factors are conducive or obstructive to young people getting involved in village associations.
The morning concluded with a presentation by David Abram and Prof. Kai Brauer (Neubrandenburg University of Applied Sciences), who presented a community study from a village in the Mecklenburg Lake District region. As is often the case in rural areas in the face of demographic and economic developments, it became clear that civic engagement can make a decisive difference to village development. The ability to integrate and/or potential tensions between traditional associations and "new" external actors was illustrated by the example of an alternative school initiative.
According to the conclusion of the event, this student workshop successfully combined scientific exchange, new findings in the project network and the promotion of young researchers.
