By Lars Josephsen

Welcome to readers of CINEFOGO Newsletter #7.

Since the publication of the previous Newsletter (issue #6 in December 2008) the process of finalizing the entire project gradually has been reflected in Network’s activities. Thus two final CINEFOGO conferences were implemented in respectively March 2009 and June 2009. - The activities of the CINEFOGO Network were scheduled to run from September 2005 to August 2009. The winding up of project activities were terminated by 30. November 2009. The present Newsletter will be the last but one, and the final issue (no. #8) is published early in 2010. 

Both the mentioned final conferences aimed at contributing to presentation to a broader public of some important achievements and they outlined selected findings within the research topics that have been addressed through CINEFOGO activities. The first conference focused on “Social Rights, Active Citizenship and Governance”, whereas the conference in June covered two topics, respectively “Social Quality and the Changing Relationship between Work, Care and Welfare in Europe” and “Social Capital, Participation and Citizenship in Europe”. Brief accounts of both conferences are presented in this Newsletter.

Documentation of the 50 Work Packages, including the participating CINEFOGO-institutions, the scope, activities, deliverables, and findings related to Work Packages can be found at CINEFOGO’s web portal (www.cinefogo.org). More detailed information concerning each Work Package is accessible at the CINEFOGO Database (http://cinefogo.cuni.cz ).

The CINEFOGO Network has through its four year lifetime been active as regards cooperation with and support to selected related activities/projects concerning various aspects of civil society studies. These include

● WORKCARE. A three year EU 6FP supported project on ‘Social quality and the changing relationships between work, care and welfare in Europe’. Read more: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/socsci/research/nec/workcare

● European Student Corner on Civil Society. A website focused on assembling and sharing knowledge and information about research on civil society and the third sector in Europe.

Read more: www.civilsociety.se

● The European Programme in Civil Society Leadership – EPICSL. A Trans-European Top Executive Programme in Stockholm (March 2009), Heidelberg (June 2009), Vienna (September 2009) and Dublin (November 2009). Read more: http://epics.ie

● The Centre for International Studies in Citizenship, Democratic Participation and Civil Society - CIPACI. The Centre aims at strengthening research into the social and democratic processes that are involved in defining citizenship rights. Read more: www.ruc.dk/isg_en/forskning/cipaci

The Dialogue and Debate Section that concludes this Newsletter contains two contributions: The essay ‘The Social Quality in Europe’ by Claire Wallace and Pamela Abbott, that relates to the June conference mentioned above, and the article ‘How to handle EU’s democratic deficit: Two different perspectives’ by Annette Zimmer, commenting the two texts presented in CINEFOGO Newsletter Issue #6 (December 2008), respectively an essay by Vladimir Spidla (Democratic Legitimacy of the European Union), and an article by Karel Müller (European Demos and Democratic Deficit in the EU).