Erasmus+ Funding: Intergenerational Resilience Stories

The University of Turku and SELMA-center are coordinating a new Erasmus+ project under the action type Cooperation Partnerships in Higher Education (KA220-HED), entitled Intergenerational Resilience Stories Strengthening EU Preparedness at European Borderland HEIs (LINNAEA). The project received funding in summer 2026 and will run from October 2026 until the end of May 2029. The project partners are the University of Latvia (Digital Humanities Center and Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art), Web2Learn (Thessaloniki, Greece), a research and development (R&D) partner specialising in digital learning, the University of Tartu (Institute of Cultural Research), and Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași (Interdisciplinary Research Institute).

The project was initiated by a group of scholars, Sanita Reinsone, Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Leena Käosaar, and Simona Mitroiu, together with Katerina Zourou, Director of Web2Learn. The group has previous experience of working together, for example through a Nordplus project on teaching Nordic and Baltic life writing. Their combined expertise spans life-writing and memory studies, digital humanities, and digital learning, providing a strong interdisciplinary foundation for the LINNAEA project.

The LINNAEA project aims to strengthen the capacity of higher education institutions (HEIs) in European borderland regions to contribute to societal preparedness and resilience through education, local experiential knowledge, and narratives of past crises. Focusing on societal transitions and crises of the late 1980s and 1990s in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Romania, the project uses memories and lived experiences as resources for learning and preparing for future crises. A key objective is to position borderland HEIs as knowledge hubs connecting local communities with broader European preparedness efforts, while strengthening students’ and staff skills in areas such as critical thinking, narrative analysis, and digital documentation. At the same time, the project promotes intergenerational learning, civic participation, solidarity, and democratic engagement.

These objectives are implemented primarily through intergenerational narrative labs that bring together students, teachers, and local community members to collect, interpret, and collaboratively rework experiences of past crises and societal transformations. Local narratives will be digitally documented and creatively reinterpreted, while the project will also develop shared methodologies, open educational resources (OERs), training activities, and an open-access digital repository. The resulting approaches will be embedded in HE curricula and shared across participating countries, enabling locally grounded knowledge from European borderlands to be transformed into transferable educational practices and insights for preparedness across European higher education.