Being Human is a national forum for public engagement with humanities research.
The theme for the 2018 edition of Being Human is New Worlds and a range of different activities have been planned around this topic.
In light of this year's extraordinary circumstances, for the first time ever the festival programme contains a range of online events including digital exhibitions, workshops, quizzes, talks and debates as well as socially distanced in-person events.
New Worlds
Queen Mary has contributed to several exhibitions and online initiatives as part of the 2020 festival. The first event, Covid-19 in 2020: Apart but Together, will take place on 12 November. This physical magnet exhibition will be held outside at Queen Mary University of London for those that want to visit an exhibition in person.
An online exhibition of Covid-19 themed art will also be released throughout the festival, alongside an evening of online storytelling on Friday 20 November where people will share their stories of this new world.
Visions of Reproduction, an online event will see historians, artists, and sociologists explore the meaning, making and circulation of biomedical and artistic representations of reproduction. They will discuss how images emerge from particular social, cultural, and historical contexts.
Histories of colonialism
On 14 November, an interactive online workshop, Many Hands, will take place. Including poets and historians, weavers and dancers, it unravel the histories of weavers in Bengal and their treatment under British rule.
All That Glisters is Queen Mary's contribution on 15 November. In this interactive online event, participants can learn about the complex histories of gold mining and artistry in Ghana and the UKs role in importing gold, its use in currency and art, the role of the Goldsmiths Company in the past and future. This event is part of the series Poetry Versus Colonialism which is part of Queen Mary's Being Human series.
On 21 November Queen Mary's Professor Nick Ridout will host an online event called Smoke Screen. This event will introduce participants to the pungent history of tobacco cultivation and trade, slavery and colonialism. It will provide an opportunity for attendees to experience the aromas involved in the brutal tobacco trade and discover how creating poems helps process and articulate complex emotions about identity and our relationship to this aromatic and addictive product with a problematic past and future. Queen Mary's final event, Sugar Sugar, will take place on 22 November and explore the role that sugar played in the history of slavery.
About Being Human
Being Human is an annual festival which highlights the ways in which the humanities can inspire and help us to understand ourselves, our relationships with others, and the challenges we face in a changing world.
Led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy, Being Human is a national forum for public engagement with humanities research.
