Target area:	Higher Education & Human Rights
Sub-target area:	Higher Education & Human Rights
Target countries:	Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Spain
Duration:	01/03/2025 – 28/02/2027
Partners:	INSTITUTO iKigai (Spain) - Coordinator Panteion University (Greece) K.A.NE. (Greece) Escape4Change (Italy) World University Service (WUS) Austria Out of the Box (Belgium) Aspon Consulting (Cyprus)
Budget line:	Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Programme (CERV)

Project description

During the twentieth century, Europe's population had to cope with dark days due to the establishment of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, coming with wars, terrible crimes including the Holocaust, the imprisonment and the deportation of large parties of the societies as well as the suppression of fundamental rights such as the freedom of speech, assembly, thought, conscience, and religion.

The project aims to highlight one of the nonviolent forms of resistance against authoritarian & totalitarian regimes: humour. It will focus on three forms of humour: (i) whispered/verbal jokes; (ii) written jokes and cartoons on the tolerated press as well as those on the illegal one; (iii) graffiti and/or jokes written on walls.

The general objective of the project is:

- to promote awareness and memory of resistance and organized opposition to totalitarian rule through the collection of jokes, cartoons and graffities in four different countries in the EU which experienced such regimes (Greece, Italy, Spain and Austria).

More specifically the project will:

- preserve the memory of the resistance movements against dictatorships through events and digitization of historical material and testimonies;

- bring closer to the target groups not only the European cultural diversity but also EU’s common history via a “trip” in different countries, periods and expressions of humour;

- create discussion around the fundamental rights, with special focus on freedom of speech and better understanding of its importance for democracy;

- better understanding of the fact that the EU citizens have the courage and the strong will to establish a democratic community on the ruins that wars and totalitarianism left behind; and finally

- build faith on democracy, preventing the rise of radicalism which leads to dark days of unfreedom.