The project is satisfied to have delivered 16 of our promised deliverables during the first year of the project which reflects a team effort across the international consortium. Despite the difficulties imposed by COVID-19, we have been successful in organizing monthly online team meetings (12 to date) and sharing responsibilities between partners to achieve the objectives set out. Additionally, we have published 32 blogs on our website.
With regards the milestones, the first year of the project has focused on the detection of trends: to identify the actors, networks, and wider social contexts driving radicalisation, especially in the emerging context of everyday polarisation over mundane issue in micro-spatial environments, in order to base interventions in evidence grounded in contemporary data and methodologies. This has been achieved in trends, stakeholders, legal and media and cultural aspects of radicalisation/deradicalization focused reports (WPs3-5).
During the second reporting period, alongside the activities that underlined much of D.Rad dissemination, we also created a syllabus for the teaching of de/radicalization based on D.Rad reports and offered it as a lasting legacy of the D.Rad project. The syllabus was co-created with the involvement of students as well to make sure that it lived up to the expectations of the young people in terms of what they expect from the teaching of radicalization. Furthermore, in view of working with the youth but also others, we have prioritized media literacy tools and emphasized the value of creative methods in view of mediating us vs them dichotomies and themes of radicalization. We curated and organized two exhibitions in Belgrade (originally planned for Amman but moved to Belgrade after the departure of the Jordanian partner) and Paris, created an interactive digital map which serves to visualize data from WPs 2,4, 6, 8 and 9 as well as building a digitized dataset for creative industries and popular culture as a means of building social cohesion. This dataset brings insight and talent from particularly non-European contexts covering Iraq, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Nepal, Brazil and Greece. We also delivered the D.Rad I-GAP survey in 16 countries including Jordan situating injustice-grievance-alienation-polarization related findings in view of radicalization in the national and cultural contexts for sixteen countries. We published country summaries to situate the findings within their respective sociopolitical and sociocultural contexts.
