The Workers' University initiative provides an organisational form based on PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH (PAR) methodology in order to collectivise knowledge and activism at community level – i.e. to analyse, curate, educate, mobilise and intervene into the everyday life in various sites (factory, university, school). The existing models of civil society work have been inadequate to the task of
the necessary social transformation, as has been demonstrated by their record in the last two years, where they have missed chances to build upon the impetus of those pockets of solidarity and emancipatory practice emerging around the protests and plenums in 2014. In this sense, a particular 'COMMUNITY AS ACADEMIA' approach in the setting of the factory is proposed, to engage productively with the problems and struggles of workers, through analysing and understanding past failures and successes in order to build a more sustainable trajectory of transformation. By gathering the community around the simple question of ‘WHAT HAPPENED?’ Workers University (WU) firmly plants trust and complicity as the twin poles of any attempt at claiming social justice, equality and transparency in BiH. This work will connect the questions of resources and infrastructure in various economies that reproduce the social fabric, the knowledge, production and cultural production of workers, activists, academics and artists, as well as the issues of social harms, injuries and conflict prevention. Our key supposition stems from the lessons and experiences of long-term work in various contexts mobilising community to actively learn together and enact social change in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region. The adopted methodology of research, education and social change aiming at socio-economic justice is a combination of critical participatory action research and learning, embodied through a series of production units, public classrooms and interventions. It is responsive to particular community problems shared by workers and the unemployed in B&H society; characterised by shared ownership of research projects between various actors and their community-based reflective analysis of social problems; and it is oriented toward community action.
