GENARTMENT · InterGENerational Youthful Narratives: ARTs-Based Approaches to Digital Citizenship and Civic EngageMENT

This project explores how arts-based methods and community-based research principles can strengthen civic engagement among young people and enhance the digital participation of older adults. Positioned at the intersection of sociology of childhood/youth, ageing and cultural sociology, the study focuses on youthful narratives to facilitate two-way knowledge transfer through intergenerational communication, using a life course perspective. The main objectives are: exploring children's digital citizenship experiences by understanding the interaction between analog and digital realms; strengthening intergenerational relations through arts-based methods to foster solidarity; and enhancing civic participation and participatory culture among young people as a crucial democratic heritage. The first two objectives are interconnected through arts-based methods, while the second and third are linked through intergenerational communication and collaboration. The first and third objectives promote democratization through digitalization and use art as a tool for emancipation. Art and literature aim to evolve perspectives on childhood and empower participatory culture by sharing reciprocal youthful narratives. GENARTMENT targets small communities, including children, youth, and older adults, engaging them in the research process through co-design and co-implementation with a citizen science approach. The project involves several stages: creative data collection, integrating participatory and arts-based research methods, enhancing methodology through collaboration with children, conducting interviews to explore their digital experiences, and story collection with children and their elders through creative workshops. These stages aim to develop tools for building connections between people of various ages, exploring their past and present childhood experiences, memories, and adult imaginaries of the present and the future.