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The European Union Center (EUC) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was awarded its fourth Jean Monnet Center of Excellence grant under the Erasmus+ program of the European Commission, for the period of 2025 to 2028.
The project supported by this grant, “Democratic Opportunities, Lessons, Cultures, and Exchanges” (DOLCE), is designed to address regional and global trends towards a destabilization of trust in democratic institutions by integrating European Union democratic principles, media governance frameworks, and civic participation models into research, teaching, and public engagement. DOLCE aims to achieve two main goals. First, it will integrate EU case studies and comparative frameworks into rapidly expanding campus programs that seek to move beyond exclusively U.S. based models for civic education, urban planning, media studies, public policy and law. Second, DOLCE team members will shed new light on the ways in which democratic resilience is built through cultural, institutional, and policy processes from the ground up. As a laboratory for comparative research and public engagement, DOLCE will promote the importance of EU-U.S. knowledge sharing to support robust cultures of civic participation through scholarly research, policy innovation and teaching.
As part of this project, the DOLCE team will organize speaker series, symposia, residencies, transatlantic research mobilities, media and digital literacy workshops, and curriculum workshops. DOLCE will also support course development, graduate student research, experiential learning, co-curricular activities, and study abroad.