The economic crisis that has been overriding Europe for the last five years, together with an escalade of legal and illegal immigration, has increased the number of people living in third world conditions amidst Europe. These groups of people often comprise communities of illegal immigrants, slum-dwellers or refugees, but can also be constituted by European citizens living in situations of chronic unemployment, addictions, homelessness or others. These are groups of people for whom there appears to be no place within the organised totality of the European Union, although they formally belong to it.

Two years ago, an eclectic group of researchers, technicians, stakeholders, and local organisations together with two marginalised communities from the outskirts of Lisbon initiated the Portuguese Urban Boundaries Project. The project was organised having education as the overarching arena for research and transformation. Through a collaborative work with these local communities, it was possible to develop a process of emancipatory education centred in local organisational processes and local management of interactive and differentiated learning situations. This collaboration emphasized non-formal educational processes developed inside the two communities – what we called Communitarian Education,  and allowed researchers to theorize the educational challenges and the daily struggles of these communities in terms of political economy. Two years later the national project came to an end, but only to give place to the European Urban Boundaries Project involving five countries, a panoply of expertises, and local communities.

This symposium brings together five contributions from these European countries – Portugal, Germany, United Kingdom, Spain and Greece – and will address the educational challenges experienced by the members of local communities when facing formal education, as well as the possibilities that emerge from processes of Communitarian Education within marginalised European communities. In particular, the contributions gathered in this symposium will expand the knowledge developed within deprived communities and on the ways in which their sense of identity is shaped. At the same time, the papers will also address the role of broader European political arrangements in the constitution and shaping of these communities. The exercise of critical participatory research that characterizes the project encompasses different qualitative methodological approaches: Critical Ethnography, Participatory Action Research, and Ideology Critique. These will be illustrated by the five papers around three main streams. Firstly, to investigate the problems experienced by local communities when faced with the challenge of formal education. Secondly, to reflect, compare and connect formal and informal ways of education. In the same way that the simultaneity of formal and informal education can be a productive resource, it can be a source of diverse conflicts. In this regard, the contributions will challenge the usually dichotomized way in which formal and non-formal education is understood. Thirdly, the conjugation of these two streams of research allows articulating a critique of the way the academic discourse in educational sciences constitutes an ideology that limits the way researchers conceive the educational challenges of today’s Europe.