Conference Program

Across Europe, democracy is increasingly shaped by platformized media environments in which polarized public discourse and disinformation influence how citizens access information, interpret public issues, and participate in democratic life. Political disaffection and misinformation are often framed as problems of institutional failure or information disorder. Yet these diagnoses risk overlooking a deeper issue: democracy cannot be sustained by institutions and procedures alone. It must also be continuously learned, interpreted, and enacted by citizens in everyday life, as a lived and relational practice of democratic formation (Biesta, 2011).

Starting from this premise, the paper explores how citizens themselves understand the educational foundations of democracy, shifting attention from normative and institutional accounts to the meanings, experiences, and expectations expressed by ordinary people. The analysis draws on findings from the Horizon Europe project MeDeMAP – Mapping Media for Future Democracies and is based on a large-scale qualitative study involving more than 400 participants across ten European countries. Through focus groups and in-depth interviews on democracy, media, and participation, the research examines how citizens identify the educational conditions that allow democratic culture to endure and how they understand the formative role of media within increasingly platformized and information-polluted environments.

The paper makes an original contribution at both the empirical and conceptual levels. Empirically, it moves beyond formal policy frameworks and normative models of democratic competence to foreground citizens’ own accounts of how democracy is learned and experienced. Across highly diverse national and social contexts, participants consistently described democracy not simply as an institutional order, but as a social and interpretive practice shaped by everyday encounters with political information, public debate, mediated narratives, and competing claims to truth. This bottom-up perspective shows that democratic learning is not confined to formal civic education, but is embedded in the ordinary environments in which citizens encounter and make sense of public life (Freire, 1970).

Conceptually, the paper reflects on democracy as a pedagogical ecology, stressing that civic formation does not reside in any single institution but emerges across media systems, schools, families, communities, and citizens’ interpretive practices (Markham, 2019). In this perspective, media education is not limited to the acquisition of technical competences, but concerns the development of critical capacities through which citizens learn to evaluate claims, recognise manipulative narratives, and position themselves in relation to democratic life (Buckingham, 2003; Martens & Hobbs, 2015). Participants repeatedly described media not only as sources of information, but as pedagogical environments through which people learn to recognise public issues, negotiate meanings, and exercise civic agency (Giroux, 2011). At the same time, they stressed that these capacities cannot be taken for granted in environments marked by polarization, opacity, and disinformation. Schools, families, and civic institutions therefore remain essential spaces for cultivating critical media literacy and the democratic resilience needed to navigate contemporary public life.