Educational choices shape futures, influence life chances, and are among the most significant factors in social mobility. Despite political and academic consensus on avoiding early selection, inequalities in educational opportunities are on the rise, even in systems that aim for equity or discourage parental choice. Paradoxically, the belief that today’s educational opportunities are meritocratically earned is growing, reducing the demand for inclusive education. EDUMERIT aims to explain the policy feedback of school choice implementation by revealing its contextually embedded effects on parental experiences and fairness beliefs. It shows how varying exposure to educational selectivity and political-social constraints, shaped by stakeholders' discretion and discourses, result in discrepancies between real and perceived outcomes, as well as related fairness judgements. It breaks through the state of the art in studying policy feedback effects in shifting the focus from policy design to policy implementation, and from broader popular attitudes to parental fairness reasoning in school choice. It offers a bold new conceptualization to define under which conditions feedback effects in education result in the rising meritocracy beliefs at the expense of re-distributional demand. It sets out a comparative nested empirical design to reveal parental school choice experiences and related fairness reasoning by combining cross-European evidence with survey experiments, qualitative interpretive interviews and social media analysis in Estonia, Poland, and Sweden. EDUMERIT innovates by addressing endogeneity in education policy feedback effects and advancing a relational approach to fairness reasoning. It develops the role of ‘forward-looking’ social mobility in the broader fairness debate, elucidating inequalities that matter. It strengthens the policy and politics of inclusive education by enhancing the compatibility between meritocracy and solidarity of welfare policies.

To set out future-proof pathways to strengthen democracy through improving accountability, transparency and effectiveness of media production and expanding active and inclusive citizenship, the project aims to clarify the extent to which certain media under which conditions perform which democratic functions for which audiences, thus making it apparent what is at stake for democratic media - and for democracy itself. By applying an innovative multi-method design consisting of data science methods, large-scale quantitative analyses, in-depth qualitative approaches and participatory action research, the project will cover (1) perspectives of both representative and participatory notions of democracy as they exist in European societies, (2) the entire range of news media, regardless of distribution channel, mandate, ownership and source of financing, (3) the legal and (self-)regulatory framework under which media houses and journalism operate and people use media, (4) the media's potential to promote and support political participation (supply side), and (5) the media use patterns, communication needs and democratic attitudes of the audiences (demand side) in all EU Member States. Based on the research results, an interactive multi-layer map of European political information environments will be created, whose layers reflect the legal and regulatory framework and the democratically relevant features of media supply and demand. In addition, the obtained “real” map is to be confronted with a map of how European citizens envision the future media landscapes. By comparing these maps, conclusions can be drawn from congruencies and discrepancies between them, good practice examples can be identified and guidelines can be derived to support developments that promote democracy and counteract phenomena that may jeopardize democracy. These guidelines will be addressed to policymakers, regulators, self-regulation bodies, media houses, journalists, NGOs and citizens.

The goal of the project is to find out how humour literacy can be used to reframe the conflicts and controversial issues in the public sphere and bring benefit to European society by promoting dialogue rather than conflict. Humour literacy is understood to be an ability to decipher the signs, references and messages that humorous discourse evokes, and an awareness of the benefits and risks of presenting these messages in humorous form to different audiences, public and private, such as a risk of humour failure, humour scandal, or discriminatory humour. Humour literacy has not been systematically and cross-culturally studied before. We plan to fill this gap by employing a comprehensive analysis of humour on all levels of the communication process: production, content and reception, which corresponds to the three R&I work packages of the project. We want to reach our goal by conducting interviews with humour producers (artists, standup comedians, cartoonists), collecting and analysing humorous content, as well distributing questionnaires and conducting focus group discussions with humour recipients (e.g. visitors of humour or cartoon museums). The staff exchange between 23 partner institutions (15 academic and 8 non-academic ones) from 11 EU and 3 non-EU countries over the period of 48 months. It will be organized in such a way as to create synergy by combining the professional and culture-specific expertise of the academic project participants, who represent diverse fields of study including linguistics, folkloristics, sociology, critical literacy, second language teaching, political communication and computational analysis, with that of practitioners. This will ensure the knowledge exchange between academic and non-academic partners as well between EU and non-EU partners. The project results will be disseminated among academic and non-academic institutions with the specific focus on educational activities which aim at promoting humour literacy.

Emotional competence, which characterizes emotionally intelligent individuals, is a basic competence. It includes various skills and abilities, such as emotional self-awareness, emotional self-control, self-motivation, empathy, and social skills. These refer to the ability to influence, communicate, collaborate, resolve conflicts and work as a team, and are applicable to all human interactions.The researchers confirm that young people tend to use ICT and social networks to communicate and express themselves, and companies, for their part, highlight the lack of youth skills for communication and active listening as one of their main issues faced when integrating the new generations into their work teams Therefore, there is a gap that can generate problems, especially when we talk about new technologies.The communication of emotions based on ICT has its own codes and language. The use of visual elements (such as emoticons, gifs, video, images…) and new words (gamer slang, Anglicisms, abbreviations, new meanings of words and idioms…) shape communication. And while emotions are universal, the interpretation and understanding of these elements of language is subjective and can lead to misunderstandings.Within this context, the LoeL project aimed to empower young people so that they can develop their emotional competencies, identifying and expressing their own emotions; communicating successfully with other people, both online and offline; and being aware of the limits and potential of ICT-based communication, successfully managing their emotions in professional settings (including volunteer experiences, in the company field or being entrepreneurs).The specific objectives were to:- Develop empowerment and training resources that allow young people to identify the origin and nature of emotions.- Provide a varied set of activities that combine real communication methods and channels based on ICT with work and personal environment scenarios.- Know the linguistic expressions that in different cultural contexts express basic emotions.- Learn appropriate verbal and gestural indicators to send effective messages in dialogues, negotiations or conflict situations.- Provide companies and organizations that work with young people with training material that allows them to improve the personal and work environment.LOEL's target groups are two:- Young people.- Youth workers. The project produced 2 main results:1. The LoeL APP is an interactive software designed to train young people in the identification, management, communication and understanding of their own and others' emotions. It is available for Android and iOS mobile devices and focuses on developing the emotional literacy of young people. It offers a series of games specially designed to raise awareness and develop specific skills that are highly useful in communicating emotions in personal and professional settings.From a gamified approach, the App displays a total of 10 different types of games, divided into 7 categories. A reward system is included as a motivator, which works by providing the player with experience points and tickets to customize their avatar and room. The level system includes 4 statuses: Beginner, Talented, Expert, and Master.2. The training of youth workers took place in October 2019 in Bilbao, around a 25-hour program, carried out over 5 days, based on the thematic blocks:- Some theories and many practices on Emotional Intelligence. Emotions and their link with other basic skills, such as empathy, assertiveness, and communication.- Informal methods to facilitate learning processes. LoeL concept. Knowing the LoeL APP.- Let's talk emoji. Jargon and the transformation of language in the s. XXI. The influence of ICT.- Audiovisual narrative, the art of telling stories through illustrations, photographs, and videos.The assessment of the LoeL App was very positive, as reflected in the results of the two testing phases carried out with young people and youth workers. Its application in informal and non-formal educational environments was highlighted by the latter, as one of the great added values of this product. The creation of the Guide for Youth Workers, and the availability of the materials and resources generated for the training carried out is also an additional element that facilitates the implementation of youth empowerment initiatives in the field of emotional management.