Festivals workshop: types of festival activity

Participative Workshops

(Liane Ward, University of East Anglia)

Top Tips for running Café Conversations:

  • Encourage academics to sign up to running a café and give them support and advice as needed. May need to pay for venue and teas and coffees
  • It is a good idea to train staff to run Cafés as the methodology is different to a stand up lecture or presentation!
  • Encourage café leaders to bring along props or items that will be of interest to the attendees to stimulate discussion and debate.
  • Topics for Cafés need to be provocative to engage the public's interest. So, for example, "Is it selfish to have more than three children?" or "Increasing Happiness: Decreasing Consumption"
  • Numbers for Café attendances vary enormously and leaders need to cope with anything from 2-20
  • Café sessions need to be organised and so some resource is needed to set up venues, schedule/remind speakers and deal with possible last minute cancellations by speakers
  • Cafés can be built into teaching curriculum and assessment with some thought and preparation.

The UEA staff programme (CSED) will run a series of Café training sessions in the next academic year. CUE East courses are all free of charge (apart from the User Involvement in Research Workshop where a fee is applicable to external attendees) and we welcome colleagues from other HEIs . There are three Café Training sessions on offer in total.

The CUE East web pages generally give information about all of our activities.

Performance

(Martin James, Southampton Solent University)

  • Music festivals – famously disorganised
  • Resistance to students at many levels – don't know what they can offer
  • Show festivals the financial value of the time that students bring
  • Reciprocal arrangements – creating space for students to perform. Lots of negotiation on the other stuff we can offer, in order to achieve this.

Getting nationally known performers in:

  • Using personal contacts
  • Use "fellowships" (to bribe people!)
  • Need to be prepared to invest a lot of time in this.

Start small: Music festivals is only area of cultural economy that is growing. Find your small local festival to engage with. Look for opportunities to collaborate with other universities.

Develop a team:

  • Someone good at schmoozing!
  • Get a researcher with good analytical skills, spot emerging trends

Professional roles that students can undertake:

  • Artist liaison
  • Reputation management
  • Shadowing event manager
  • Assistant managers on stages
  • TV/radio broadcast – documentary crews
  • Student promotion – internet/social media campaigns
  • Creating programmes / advertising

Managing expectations – what if students don't deliver? Select students according to ability – interview / pitch for job. Students sign a contract with university and festival organiser.

Posters and Exhibits

(Adrian Penrose, Medical Research Council)

  • Audience
  • Bullet points on what a poster is meant to convey.
  • Content / design
  • Don't have to put everything on the wall – handouts/giveaways popular with teachers
  • Get inspiration from attending a Royal Society Summer Science or look at student entries to BA perspectives festival
  • Posters can help attract people to your stand – but engaging with scientist/exhibit more important
  • Write a walk through plan for your stand
  • Can't control how people engage with stand – every activity has to stand alone
  • Choose scaleable activities – so can engage small number of people or huge group
  • Make activities watchable
  • Run quiz aimed at children – to encourage discussions with scientists
  • Be interactive with audience, eg. loiter outside of stand, interact with potential audience to draw them in
  • Training really important to ensure maximise engagement
  • Giveaways? Prizes for quizzes etc. Helpful incentive. Stickers: can be useful to 'count' visitors to stand. Make something relevant to topic – which can then keep, eg. DNA bracelet. Pencils made of recycled cups – "how many cups made this?"
  • Stand etiquette: people look identifiable to your organisations, eg. t-shirts
  • Evaluation – improvements for next year...
  • Thank people who took part personally...

Talks and Discussions

(Dane Comerford, University of Bristol)

Facilitation:

  • Vital to bring alive topic / speakers
  • Guidance to speakers
    • Screening / meeting them
    • Giving guidance and guidelines
    • Discussing the narrative with experts

Range of expertise / questions:

  • Expect lowbrow and highbrow Qs
  • Public are ignorant not stupid – need to create entry level for audiences to understand and engage
  • Raise level of public debate – look for controversy and debating issues to get audiences really going!

Logistics:

  • Free / not free: ~30% / ~10% drop-out
  • Overbook ~30% (~15% with wine)

Promotion of talk within event – is the talk the main event? Or subordinate to the festival?

Why?

  • Fun
  • Training (experiential / formal)
  • Leading by example
  • Giving creative ideas
  • PR / messaging opportunity

"Festival of ..."

  • Means fun / outward-facing
  • Provides a theme for attention

Location:

  • External / university
  • Formal (hall) / informal (shopping centre)
  • Multi-sited