EU National Institutes for Culture - EUNIC


EUNIC Fair Collaboration: Survey and Roundtable Series

EUNIC is creating a variety of practical and comprehensive tools to facilitate fair practices of colleagues working in EUNIC members worldwide. To ensure that the final outcomes will be user-centered and relevant, it is your turn now - feed the creation of EUNIC's toolkit on fair collaboration by participating in one of our roundtables or by answering to our survey.

EUNIC is currently designing a practical and comprehensive toolkit on fair collaboration for colleagues working globally in cultural relations. It will offer innovative and applicable tools and ways of raising awareness of the topic and of engaging with the target audience to adapt existing practices of cultural relations towards fair collaboration. They will examine how fair collaboration is used and being defined internationally in different contexts and will pose questions to take forward, confronting and pushing the reader to rethink the concepts of cultural collaboration and consider new perspectives.

The final tools will be user-centered and inclusive with relevance for the work of colleagues in EUNIC members and the wider network. Hence, the iterative creation process will feed on inputs gathered from desk research, expert interviews, case studies, and a variety of points of engagement with practitioners and colleagues from the EUNIC network that will be provided throughout this project.

The first two opportunities to feed the creation of the toolkit with your inputs and ideas are now offered in June 2021: a survey to be filled in by 25 June as well as a series of roundtables in the second half of June.

Survey "What do YOU think is fair collaboration in cultural relations?“ – Feed it until 20 July

Take part in our global learning survey about different perspectives, perceptions, and inputs on fair collaboration for our toolkit until 20 July. The survey is quick and easy to answer as you can choose between answering via video, text or voice message – in any language you wish. Go to the survey here.

Roundtables „Fair Collaborations in cultural relations“

Register for one of our public roundtables on fair collaborations in cultural relations on 23 June (in English/French and English/Spanish).

The purpose of the roundtables is to

  1. share with you first approaches to the concept of fair collaboration in culture relations
  2. assure and listen to a diversity of voices, thoughts, experiences and needs
  3. co-create inputs for a user-centered toolkit on fair collaboration in cultural relations

Together with the survey, these roundtables are one milestone on our way to design tools on fair collaboration in cultural relations. Your input and outcomes of the idea jamming process are an essential contribution.

Background

To assure mutually beneficial outcomes of cultural relations – such as better understanding, greater connectivity and enhanced sustainable dialogue between people and cultures instead of one-sided processes often harming local structures or practices – relations at eye-level based on fair collaboration are crucial. The principles of cultural relations, which aim to build fair partnerships by practising mutual listening and learning and engaging in dialogue, co-creation, and joint capacity building, form the basis of EUNIC’s work in line with the EU strategy for international cultural relations.

But what does fair collaboration mean? And what does fair collaboration in cultural relations look like for EUNIC members working with local partner organisations worldwide? During the EUNIC General Assembly in December 2019, it was decided that EUNIC should further explore the topic of fair collaboration in more depth. In order to give practical answers to these and other questions, EUNIC decided to create tools specifically targeted at colleagues working in cultural relations and therefore in EUNIC members to facilitate fair practices by providing concrete ideas, recommendations and instruments for working in the field of cultural relations with partners in local settings in a fair way.

Following this decision, a group of experts was commissioned to work on a toolkit on fair collaboration in cultural relations through a call for proposals. The team of authors namely consists of Matina Magkou, Avril Joffe, Anna Steinkamp, Cristina Farinha, Katelijn Verstraete, and Sudebi Thakurata along with D.epicentre as the design partner.

The final deliverables will be presented at the EUNIC General Assembly in December 2021.



  • Cultural relations
  • Policy
  • Publication
  • Workshop
  • Fair Collaboration

Co-funded by the European Union Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.