Empowering the Margins of Europe through Regional and Global Engagement

ongoing

The goal of the EMERGE Alliance is to empower the margins of Europe, broadly defined to embrace both regions at the geographical margins of Europe as well as marginalised communities within these regions. This goal has four core objectives: 1) engaging the margins; 2) educating the margins; 3) connecting the margins; and 4) reimagining our institutions. Regions on the margins typically suffer from lower economic performance, higher unemployment and population decline relative to the central, metropolitan areas due to the forces of agglomeration. Certain population groups (e.g. lower socio-economic groups, ethnic and linguistic minorities, immigrants) within these regions are particularly disadvantaged. Empowering marginal communities by increasing their access to higher education and harnessing research to promote social inclusion benefits both these disadvantaged groups and their regions. In this way, EMERGE will contribute to strengthening European values and identity, enhancing the economic performance of regions on the margins and establishing a deep institutional transformation of the partner universities. EMERGE will create a new type of European University that is better suited to addressing the challenges of territories and communities by combining our strengths as a diverse network of universities with different scales, missions and disciplinary specialisations. Together our nine partner universities will be a living laboratory for a creative transdisciplinary and trans-institutional approach, which will help us design and test solutions and institutional models to empower the margins and address our common challenges. In the long term, the Alliance will be transformed into a European University whose First Mission is to act for the advancement of its regions and all its communities in a spirit of partnership, mutual respect and cooperation.