Courageous Citizens

Book excerpt: This book is an advocate for the change-making capacity of culture. It is also a source of inspiration for renegotiating our understanding of the world and affirming culture as a critical space to practice courage and perseverance amid complex societal reconfigurations. It focuses on courageous citizens: those whose daring, sharing and inventing contribute to our collective future, and for whom culture and democracy are the starting points for vision and action.0The contributors explore intellectual and practical interventions that open up a terrain of debate in the enduring struggle for just societies across Europe, zooming in on three key themes that have proven to be of particular relevance during the past decade, and that also keep resonating when looking at the very possibility of another future. They do so by acknowledging the underlying cycle of (re-)thinking, doing and changing that is inherent to remodelling the way we view the world, and concurrently, the potential of culture to generate positive social change.0The three key themes addressed in the book are: 1) Identity and Diversity, 2) Culture, Communities and Democracies; and 3) Solidarity and Fragmentation.