‘Learning to Live with My Elephant’
Location: Ocean Room, National Waterfront Museum, Oystermouth Road, Maritime Quarter, SA1 3RD.
After a car crash threw her into life as a disabled woman during her Junior Doctor training, Dr Georgina Budd had to navigate an entirely new life with a new 'elephant' in the room. As a full-time wheelchair user Georgie will share her experiences of the challenges of disability and mental health struggles, how we come to terms with traumatic life change, and how any future society not only should have accessibility at its core, but can benefit from it.
This event is suitable for ages 18 and over, as there will be some discussion of challenging life events and mental health struggles. Audience participation will take the form of visualisation exercises and discussion.
In partnership with ADAPT Gateway
‘Climate Adventures in Forgotten Realms’
Location: Cinema & Co, Swansea
This workshop will explore how to use climate as a motivator for an adventure. Come along to see how medieval narratives can help create lively and breathing narrative worlds - and start your own climate adventure. When April comes with its sweet showers, medieval storytellers know time is ripe for travel and love-making. The Canterbury Tales start when spring comes and brings about the pilgrimage season. Medieval romances use the seasons and the weather to influence the story, either using the danger of a stormy sea or posing a dragon in the place of environmental danger.
Please bring along a notepad and pen or a mobile device so you can start writing your very story!
In Partnership with Cinema & Co
‘New Beginnings: the hope of the lotus flower'
Location: Egypt Centre, Swansea University, Singleton Campus, SA2 8PP
The lotus flower is one of the most enduring symbols from ancient Egypt and was associated with rebirth and new beginnings. As we slowly return to some form of normality following the challenges of the COVID-19 Pandemic, this event will be marking the occasion with some exciting activities at the Egypt Centre. These events will include a craft workshop for children (aged 8+) and families to create lotus flower themed bunting, which will be displayed in the Egypt Centre to mark its official reopening.
Object handling sessions will be available for children and adults to handle ancient artefacts, while wreath making will be organised for adults. Come along to these free events and celebrate this new beginning with the Egypt Centre. The morning session is for families and children aged 8+ (bunting making and object handling); the afternoon session is for adults (wreath making and object handling).
‘Making Light Work: Recalling Fun and Humour in the Workplace’
Online Event
The history books don’t always capture the human side of work. Historians and archivists at Swansea would like to learn more about this from you. Come along to this ‘talk and record’ session to share memories of things you did in your working life to brighten up the everyday routine. Your stories could help renew the way we understand workplace experiences in the past. There will be an opportunity to find out more about how working lives are documented in local archive collections. You will also get to take part in the creation of a new audio resource – a podcast about workplace experiences which will include recorded clips from the discussions.
Suitable for adults currently or formerly employed in industrial or manufacturing jobs.
In partnership with the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea.
'You and CO2'
Online event
Are you a teenager interested in creating your own digital story about the Earth’s climate system? Then this event is just for you!
Join us for a live online interactive event where you’ll get to make your very own digital narrative about climate change using a simple coding language. Your story could focus on the technical, inspire hope, re-imagine the past and present or engineer a brighter future!
No coding experience necessary! All you need is access to a desktop, laptop or tablet.
In Partnershop with Dr Lyle Skains, Bournemouth University https://staffprofiles.bournemouth.ac.uk/display/lskains
'Human Beings: Rachael Llewellyn in conversation with Alan Bilton'
Location: Taliesin Create, Ground Floor - Taliesin Arts Centre, Swansea University
In this collection of thrilling short stories, Rachael Llewellyn adeptly traverses the outer edges of human experience and the horror that often comes with it. Twisting between the disturbing, the humorous, and the heartbreaking, Human Beings will forever change the way you look at your neighbour, how you treat your coworker, and even make you second guess the person lying next to you in bed. Because real monsters aren't what you see on late night television . . . the real monsters live just around the corner.
'A Pretty Pickle: A Roman’s Country Recipes for Preserves'
Online Event
The Latin author Columella, who lived around the time of the Emperor Nero in the 60s AD, wrote what appears to be a training manual covering all aspects of agriculture. In this session, join Dr Ian Goh for an online cook-a-long to explore some of Columella’s food-based precepts from the last of the twelve books of his manual. They are addressed to a ‘bailiff’s wife’, and look at preservation techniques for (among other foods) lettuces and turnips. At this event, you'll be taking Columella’s instructions seriously both as recipes and as expressions of identity and authority, to uncover some of the humbler, unglamorous foodstuffs that the ancient Romans ate. See just how similar their home economy and eating habits were to your own.
Registered attendees will be provided with recipe cards so you can create your own at home.
'Waste of Our time: Renewing Pictures of a Changing Valley' - documentary screening
Location: Onllwyn Welfare Hall, Wembley Avenue, Onllwyn, SA10 9HL
In 1983, Swansea's South Wales Miners' Library produced a documentary film featuring community members from the Dulais Valley. In Waste of Our Time: Pictures of a Changing Valley, local residents discussed the villages of Banwen, Onllwyn and Seven Sisters and the effects coal mining had had on the landscape, people and wildlife. But how has life and landscape in the Dulais Valley changed since 1983? In the months leading up to Being Human 2021, local residents and school children will work together to create a new documentary to be premiered during the festival. Using the original documentary as a starting point and through a range of interactive artistic workshops, they will consider the changes to landscape, wildlife and community life since 1983 and the social and environmental legacy of fossil fuels. ‘Waste of Our Time: Renewing Pictures of a Changing Valley’ will be screened for the very first time at Onllwyn Welfare Hall, followed by a Q&A session with some of our documentary filmmakers.
Families and children aged 8+ are all welcome.
In Partnership with DOVE Workshop, Cwm Dulais Historical Society, Onllwyn Welfare Hall.
'Beyond Total E-Fabulous: Reflections on Learning in a Pandemic'
Professor Martin Stringer, PVC (Education)
When we entered the pandemic, almost two years ago now, my colleague Phil Newton brought together a training programme for our staff called total e-fabulous. This was essential to the way Swansea University adapted to the new context and provided a solid basis for learning and teaching through the last eighteen months. I now want to lead a workshop that will help us look forward, beyond the pandemic, beyond total e-fabulous.
What have we learnt? Is there a fundamental shift in the tectonic plates of teaching? Are we at last going to be able to fulfil a promise, made to me when I began teaching at Birmingham University in the early 1990s, that technology will transform our teaching forever? What about other uses of the digital? Are we able to fulfil the potential of all those learning analytics programmes? Can we really predict when students are falling behind on their learning? Should we? What does it mean to individualise, or personalise, learning and student interaction? Do we have the technology to do this effectively, and if we do, should we be using it? Can we honestly say that, following the pandemic, ‘every student matters’?
There are so many questions, but I fear very few real answers. Come along and explore what we do and don’t know, what we can and cannot do. Whatever else, it will be a totally fabulous conversation!
'Croeso Cymraeg / A Welsh Welcome (Welsh Medium Events)'
Come along to a fun and interactive 'learn Welsh' session with tutors from Learn Welsh Swansea Bay Region. This taster session, specifically aimed at welcoming asylum seekers and refugees, hopes to introduce the Welsh language and culture to you and your family as you adjust to life in south-west Wales. These sessions are suitable for adults and children.
Partners: Academi Hywel Teifi; IAITH Cyf Rhieni dros Addysg Gymraeg (Parents for Welsh-medium education); Learn Welsh Swansea Bay Area
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Children and staff of the OSE children's home in Taverny. 
Dancing on the Silos at Greenham Common, 1 Jan 1983 / Copyright Adrianne Jones. Courtesy of The Richard Burton Archives, Swansea University
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