The recurrent waves of the pandemic and associated emergency rules and executive decrees in all probability will stay with us for decades and further exacerbate democratic erosion, and the  polarization of public and political spaces (McCoy, Rahman, and Somer 2018; Merkel and Lührmann 2021; Svolik 2019). To identify what causes democratic deficit at the micro level of the polity and how they can be mitigated UNESCO has called for a new social contract in education whereby learning for democracy can be reimagined or retooled(UNESCO. 2021). This paper  aims to address the question of how education can contribute to “resilient recovery” and shift the axis of politics through the interplay of political actors, institutions, and communities to produce regenerative practices which de-polarize political and social relations. It will focus on the potential role universities can have in promoting resilience through pedagogical practices which involve their publics in learning ‘for democracy’ and the production of critically engaged sensory citizens (Fourcade 2021; Hill, Salter, and Halbert 2018; Isin and Ruppert 2020)

What happens when the complicated assemblage of institutional structures, processes and material relations coupled with the broader social, political and cultural connections of higher education are faced with an external crisis? How, you may wonder, the role of universities in active de-polarization or regenerative re-polarization can be measured at times when academic communities with face-to-face relations and a clear spatial boundaries have evaporated with serious implications for academic morality and commitments (Amadasi and Holliday 2018; Aristovnik et al. 2020; de Velde et al. 2021)). In the wake of Covid 19 the impact of platform education, machine learning and algorithmic practices, clusters of habitual human conduct have become but even more multiple, relational, and fluid at an accelerated speed. This situation has fundamentally changed the very concept of civic and political socialization at universities opening up a new perspective for governance whereby students are increasingly understood, sensed, instructed, and modulated by the very means of how they inhabit the internet(Decuypere, Grimaldi, and Landri 2021; Perrotta 2020). The formal/informal scenes of academic socialization have in part disappeared but still students feel obliged to behave in accordance with the expectation of an envisaged global academic and civic community.

How to demonstrate learning strategies that can help to produce critically engaged sensory citizens? How to support students develop into political agents of change? This paper as the final report of Post-Covid Citizens project funded by EERA-GENE award will focus on international students originated from East-Central Europe (as the most active and mobile segment of the population under scrutiny with the highest techno skills in their generation) and it aims to understand their sense of civic self in a global world, their imaginaries of citizenship as well as their vision of what the future holds for them. At the same time, in seeking to provide a reasonably comprehensive account of the role of universities the study interrogates students’ visions coupled with the higher educational environment where these visions are formed. Thus framed, this research project aims to look at how East-Central European international students who desire to become reflexive, relational, and critical global citizens can make sense of the present constantly changing institutional environment and the future in societies where techniques of sensory governmentality increasingly cut across regulatory and disciplinary ones.

In seeking to provide an account of how citizenship is currently sensed, conceived and envisioned and also the way it has been institutionally maintained an experimental methods is proposed. It involves the establishment of 6 focus groups in 6 different countries (Russia, Hungary, Slovakia, Latvia, Moldavia, Georgia), followed by narrative interviews with each of the interviewees. Drawing on the sociology of expectation literature the analysis has centred around past, present and future expectations (Beckert 2016; Bussey, Inayatullah, and Milojevic 2008; Facer 2013; Milojević and Inayatullah 2015; Mische 2009). The expectations’ referential capacity, the mere fact that they are in some sense structures to be realized made the method applicable for understanding how learning for democracy becomes possible by reimagining certain publics and getting engaged with these imaginaries(Borup et al. 2006). The project’s considerable merit is the multi-dimensional nature of collaboration and engagement – its participatory nature, its local/global frame of reference and analysis as well as its concern with the emotional and mental wellbeing of young adults. The project interlinked institutional and personal networks in as much as it operated in concert with six participant researchers and 36 international students in six European institutions. This approach to research transitioned from the traditional academic approach to working more with our data providers who were central to raising voices in a context where these voices gain meaning.

Revisiting the UNESCO report the project underscores the pivotal role of universities in resilient recovery „ in radically reconfiguring our place and agency” in the face of Covid-19. Lessons learnt from previous research which drew on the concept of engaged universities and engaged learning as an inclusive pedagogical tool in building agency were substantiated. Forms of engaged learning including cultural learning, learning cultures and learning for democracy is proved to be a possible counterbalance of semi-authoritarian regimes. Alternatively, reported practices of space perception and space construction revealed that space seems to be perceived to diminish in terms of public spaces or opportunities for spatial mobilities, but also a vast array of practices of scaling up from the local to the global is identified to be blocked. Our insights in all probability will enable institutions of political socialization to respond more effectively to student perception of their present and future position as citizens in an interconnected global world.

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