"Not only was the research able to tell us way more than a Google search could ever do but also the relevance to everyday life was demonstrated."
- Audience comment
Being Human Festival is an annual humanities festival that takes place across the UK and internationally in November each year. We work year round, from our base at the University of London's School of Advanced Study, to bring the festival to life. We also work with researchers to develop their skills and opportunities for sharing their work with non-specialist audiences.
Being Human Festival’s purpose is to demonstrate why humanities research is vital to society and directly relevant to the lives and interests of people across the UK. Through the festival we encourage researchers to move away from traditional academic methods of lecture or classroom presentation and incentivise creative, informal and interactive events and activities. Festival events include everything from talks and tours to comedy nights, museum lates, performances and more.
The core festival objectives are to:
Throughout our application process, we seek innovative, exciting programming that has been designed with the needs of audiences firmly in mind.
We actively welcome applications for festival content which celebrates inclusivity, equality and diversity. We are particularly keen to receive applications which engage with underrepresented groups in researcher's community, and/or groups who share a particular protected characteristic (defined under the Equality Act 2010). We encourage applicants to be specific about intended audiences in their applications and when developing public engagement activities. We will not knowingly accept applications for events which include speaker line-ups that lack appropriate diversity, including all-male or ‘about us, without us’ panels – where a subject is explored without representation from those affected by it.
We endeavour to keep learning and improving our processes, so please contact us at beinghuman@sas.ac.uk if you have any feedback or would like to discuss this with us.
We are particularly keen to receive applications for festival activities which demonstrate capacity to do one or more of the following things:
The Being Human team are currently working to improve our processes and guidance on equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI). As part of this process, we have worked with an external consultant to create a series of resources, which will offer guidance on how to plan and deliver public engagement activities which have EDI considerations at their core. These include:
In addition, Being Human workshops provide training and guidance for festival organisers and for those developing humanities public engagement initiatives. This year our training has had an increased emphasis on EDI considerations, and we will continue to develop this provision for 2023.