"Partnership against violent radicalization in the cities" is the full title of the project, in which a consortium of academics, social workers, IT, security and other experts worked together for three years to research ways and means of de-radicalizing and preventing extremism. The team from the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg was part of a work package that focused on the development, implementation and evaluation of preventive, socially inclusive measures and democracy education. Students from the Master's program in Social Innovation were also involved in the research project at various stages.
Social innovation
"Within the framework of the project, we compared radicalization processes in different countries and examined the effectiveness of countermeasures", says project leader Markus Pausch from the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences. Measures were developed, tested and evaluated with and in the cities of Nice, Salzburg and Toulouse, which were involved in the European project. The team of the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences, which also included Heiko Berner and Nedžad Moćević, published a handbook with best practice examples for social work at the end of the project.
Expertise
The PRACTICIES project was funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Commission. The project ran from May 2017 to December 2020. The network and the joint research work have since resulted in further research projects in the areas of extremism prevention and democracy education. The expertise of the researchers in the Social Work and Social Innovation degree programmes at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences will again be in demand.