Participatory Co-Creation of Oasis of Humanist and Environmental Fraternity: an Action Research project for a united and sustainable future – Oasis de fraternité

The participatory research project for the co-creation of "Oasis of Fraternity" aims to analyze its transformative power by recreating social, fraternal, and humanistic bonds to combat the disintegration of our contemporary world and environmental degradation. This project is the result of a collaboration between researchers specializing in participatory sciences, bringing together two citizen initiatives: one in Grenoble, initiated in 2007, focused on the creation of "houses of fraternity," and the other, launched in 2023 in Montpellier, supported by a collective of more than thirty organizations that created the 2030Festival to serve collective action.
By mobilizing a proven Participatory Action Research approach, the project aims to analyze this citizen convergence by catalyzing, incubating, and supporting it, with the goal of creating, sustaining, and spreading "OASIS OF FRATERNITY" for a diverse audience: citizens, whether in situations of great precariousness or not, associations or collectives, elected officials, social or economic actors. The "OASIS OF FRATERNITY" can represent a physical built space or an open space to rethink and recreate connections in order to counter the rise of extremism, the intensification of radicalism, identity withdrawal, individualistic passions, and denial of environmental degradation.
From a research perspective, the analysis focuses on the transformative power at the individual level (capability, personal development, attachment, posture) through the organization of six participatory workshops, complemented by a sociological survey in the form of interviews. The scientific objective is to structure a large-scale research project aimed at replicating the approach and the creation of "OASIS OF FRATERNITY" (ANR or ERC).
From the participatory action perspective, the goal is to enable the emergence of a sustainable structure of collaboration and collective intelligence from the partners, recreating the conditions for participation in civic life. It is about fighting against the atomization of citizens in the face of major issues that concern them and which they could take ownership of.