Research from the past to inform religious tolerance among today’s youth

Open University (OU) academics have been awarded £282,000 to gain insights from the past to inform young people’s understanding of religious diversity and tolerance, working in collaboration with partners from across Europe.

Professor John Wolffe, Associate Dean, Research, Scholarship & Enterprise, in the OU’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences is the OU lead for ETOPEA - Religious Toleration and Peace, an EU Horizon 2020-funded project, which will carry out new research on historic peace treaties and religious settlements and then to use the insights gained to inform thinking about present-day peaceful religious co-existence.

The project, which will run from 1 May 2018 to the end of 2021, brings together an extensive consortium of academic and non-academic partners from Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Macedonia, Poland and Spain. The lead institutions is KU Leuven (University of Leuven), Belgium.

The OU is the one UK university involved although the team is also working with several schools and other 'non-academic' partners in this country. It will lead on a work package that will seek to equip teenagers to compile 'docutubes' – i.e. short films - using basic readily available technology, to bring together material derived from the project with materials they film for themselves drawing on their own context and experience.

"We hope that the project will have a major impact across Europe in giving today's young people an historically-informed understanding of religious diversity and tolerance that they can relate effectively to their own experience,” said Professor Wolffe.

Other OU colleagues involved include Dr John Maiden and Dr Stefanie Sinclair from the Religious Studies discipline and Simon Budgen from Open Learning Platforms.