The project aims to analyze the new social and political phenomena in societies of different historical traditions and different contemporary development. The newly emerging forms of civic involvement outside and aside from the trajectories/channels institutionalized by public authority, designated as "ordinary", everyday citizenship, will be studied in two societies - Bulgarian and French, viewed respectively as ideal types of a recovering democracy and an established one.
The project aims at understanding everyday citizenship as a social phenomenon that calls into question the classical forms of political life and that represents a social challenge both to the traditional actors of political action and to its own promoters, inasmuch as its duration and impact are not ensured by any instruments of institutionalized power. At the theoretical level the project proposes a meeting of Eastern and Western research perspectives, which are determined by and focused on specific societal, cultural, and historical contexts, and strives to transcend their boundaries. The theoretical challenge is to think the contextual practices of everyday citizenship within the general horizon of Arendt's theoretical legacy regarding the political and the public, in order not to efface but to highlight the particularities of these spheres.