Description
The purpose of the project is to bring the change into the way of thinking of the society. Especially the youth are the main victims of the populist and short-signed solutions which bring to the society gradual radicalization of voicing about multicultural issues and bring the growing of hate-speech in the public speech. By this project we are going to establish an alternative norm of respecting and open speech to the ethnic minorities in society. The tools are education by the multicultural workshops on the secondary school, media campaign focused on youth, roundtable, capacity building.
Summary of project results
The main goal of the project was to change the main discourse of hatred and intolerance among teenagers towards a more rational and Equanimeous attitude towards minorities and migrants. We achieved this goal through multicultural workshops in schools (offline) and by launching a campaign countering hate speech (online) in October 2015. The campaign was running during three weeks, while multicultural workshops were held simultaneously in school settings. The video spot and the quiz were designed to draw attention of the youngsters by presenting a certain dose of prejudices and controversial humor. The main part of the campaign though were the so called “hate facts”, which aimed at countering a big number of hoaxes and myths on Roma people, migrants, refugees, online behavior etc. Our workshops helped the students to think more critically and to see the interconnection between prejudices, hate speech and hate crime. The workshop “Our prejudices, our shadows” was stressing the dynamics and construction of prejudices at the individual level and the way it can be counter. “From prejudices to racism” deconstructed the most common prejudices on minorities and tackled the ways students can deal with discriminatory behavior in their environment. Parallels between Nazi discourse against Jews and the current neo-nazi discourse against Roma people and migrants were explored. Thanks to the last workshop on intercultural communication the students could deconstruct the notion of culture, language relativism and ethnocentrism, avoiding intercultural conflicts and barriers etc. The campaign “Hej-ty” drew attention to the importance of language we create on social networks and their potential effects in offline settings. We got positive feedback as well as critical voices concerning the dose of controversy of some parts of the campaign. The teachers were praising especially the “Hate facts” page, where they could find inspiration for the discussions held in the classroom.
Summary of bilateral results