KuSe

Cultural Self-Sufficiency: The Right of Young People to Cultural (Self-)Education

Including the right to culture as the 18th Sustainable Development Goal in the UN Agenda 2030 can improve the conditions of young people in their cultural self-sufficiency. In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of cultural rights and youth rights in shaping the lives of young people around the world. However, to date, cultural education and youth work in Germany have been less oriented towards a rights-based perspective. For example, forms of cultural self-sufficiency, through which young people realize their right to cultural education in the face of social transformations and post-migrant interdependencies, continue to be ignored by cultural policy actors. The project "Cultural self-sufficiency: The right of young people to cultural (self-)education" (KuSe for short) emerges against this backdrop. The project seeks to encourage young people to recognize, explore and make visible their practice of cultural self-sufficiency based on different cultural venues - city library, district (centre), and home education facility. This is in addition to empowering young people to navigate complex cultural landscapes, embrace diversity, and shape their own narratives. Through participatory research methods and interdisciplinary collaborations, the project seeks to unravel the complexities of cultural self-sufficiency and advocate for policies that uphold the rights of young people to engage fully in cultural expression. Together with them, methods will be developed and analyzed to derive skills and approaches to cultural and aesthetic (self-)education that can be transferred to other contexts. In this way, the right to culture is to be underpinned by a youth and cultural policy conceptionof spaces and by methodological approaches to enable cultural (self-)education.

The KuSe Project is not only about research; it is also about advocacy and policy change. By engaging with policymakers, educators, the cultural venues and other stakeholders, the project advocates for policies that uphold the rights of young people to participate in cultural life and express themselves freely. This includes advocating for the inclusion of cultural rights in national and international legal frameworks, as well as promoting culturally inclusive educational practices and creating a world where every young person feels valued, respected, and empowered to shape their own destiny.

In cooperation with the Institute for Social and Organisational Pedagogy