Guest blog by Dr Anna Ball, module leader for the Humanities Transform module at NTU/ Producer for Nottingham Refugee Week.

Following a four-month learning partnership with Refugee Week, final-year students of the Humanities at Nottingham Trent University have combined their insights and talents to bring you this sparkling new copyright-free Resource Pack for the 2024 festival, access HERE. Designed to be of use across the broad spectrum of communities and individuals who organize, deliver and promote Refugee Week across the country (and beyond), the pack offers a wealth of materials that can be freely used and shared – from educational packs designed for specific key-stage groups, to ready-to-go social media campaigns; from event toolkits to podcasts and challenges that can be used to prompt discussion and galvanise action, all featuring original text, artwork and thinking from students at the peak of their Humanities learning, charged with the task of putting their knowledge into action in the service of positive social change. Riffing off this year’s theme of ‘Our Home’, the students have paid particular attention to both the social and ecological dynamics that underpin this theme – including climate-induced displacement, and climate justice. The students invite you to please download this pack and, using the embedded download links, put the resources to good use, helping these students’ bids for social change take shape in the world.

Sleek and accessible as this resource pack may be, the backdrop to its creation shows that it is more than the sum of its parts. Over 180 students engaged in four months of team-based learning to explore how they could put their knowledge of varied Humanities subjects – from English Literature, to Media, to Global Studies, to Communications, to Linguistics – to practical use in the world beyond the academy. In part, this was an invitation to explore the transferrable skills that students hone over the three years of their degrees: their abilities in written expression, research, teamworking and presentation, for instance. But at a time when the value of Humanities knowledge is not always recognized, this module was also designed to reveal how ‘abstract’ insights from across these ‘pure’ disciplines – teachings as crucial as philosophies of human worth, literary acts of self-representation and even linguistic theories of cross-cultural communication – in fact enable graduates to make intelligent and capable contributions to what are often divisive and sometimes ill-informed cultural landscapes around them. What makes Humanities subjects valuable is, we hoped to show these students, their value for, well, humanity.

All of this has only been possible thanks to a unique ‘employability’ partnership generously offered with Refugee Week, who supported the underpinning learning and feedback on the module, enabling students to comprehend the ethos behind Refugee Week via its Theory of Change, for instance, as well as the technicalities of how to produce, communicate and present work for audiences beyond the academy. The module was additionally supported thanks to a long-embedded partnership with Nottingham Refugee Week, and speakers including filmmaker and former Refugee Week ambassador Allan Njanji, and Theatre of Sanctuary producer Issy Abdul-Rahim, generously offered their insights into the real-world cultural landscape of lived refugee experience and creative engagement, in which their work could be put to good use. The module was designed and delivered by a multi-disciplinary team from across NTU’s Humanities, led by Dr Anna Ball, an Associate Professor specializing in creative wellbeing for those within forced migrant communities, and a long-standing producer for Nottingham Refugee Week. Working – and learning – together, staff, students and community partners have forged a learning model in which ideas and action can be combined in the service of a greater good, and we hope to be able to share some of these learning insights across the University of Sanctuary network in the forthcoming months.

So, please help our students’ thoughts and actions for social change find a place in the world by putting these resources to good use. And watch this space to see what they’ll do next – because there has never been a time when we have been more in need of the careful thought and care that comes from the Humanities – for our humanity.

ACCESS ALL THE RESOURCES HERE.

Image Credits:
– NTU Humanities students pitching their team campaigns to Refugee Week producer Lara Deffense
– Original artwork by Laura Whitmore