Episode 3: How to engage with a City of Culture

Hello, and welcome to Warwick Voices, bringing you news views and conversation directly from your colleagues across the University of Warwick. In this episode we'll be discussing everything around public engagement and how the Warwick Institute of engagement came about and how this links with our city’s City of Culture, talking to Helen Wheatley and Michael Scott.

Coventry has been named the UK is next city of culture for 2021, beating Paisley, Stoke on Trent, Sunderland and Swansea to the title. The people leading Coventry’s bid say winning will have a huge economic impact not just on the city, but also on the West Midlands. This city's rich heritage will be under the spotlight for a year. It's the birthplace of Philip Larkin, a poet and of the two tone scar movement. But this is its chance to show the world everything that it has to offer on culture.

Lovely to be speaking with both of you today. I'm Helen Thorn from the marketing and communications team. And we're here to find out more about public engagement, the city of culture and Warwick’s very own Resonate Festival.

HELEN: Hi, I'm Helen Wheatley, I'm director of the resonate festival for the University of Warwick city of culture offering this year.

MICHAEL: Hi, my name is Michael Scott. And I work as the Director of the Warwick Institute of Engagement, who alongside Helen is helping bring the Resonate Festival to the University of Warwick and Coventry this year.

Okay, so let's start with a really high level question. What actually is public engagement?

MICHAEL: So what does public engagement look like? And I think the simple answer is it is any attempt in any format in any way to communicate and involve any kind of public in discussion and debate and communication about the work that goes on within the university. Now, that sounds like a really, really broad definition. And I think it's right that it should be right, because the joy of public engagement. And your question in terms of what does it look like within the university, the joy of Public Engagement is that it can take so many different forms, and occur in so many different environments. And now, in our wonderfully wacky digital world of the 21st century, occur both online and in person.

HELEN: I think it's also, there has been a bit of a shift from thinking about public engagement, as our researchers or staff, communicating their research to a public to a much broader conception, which also includes that, but might also include producing research with publics or working in a collaborative way, in some way. So we think about public engagement as collaboration, communication, conversation, all of those things.

MICHAEL: And I think that's really nice, and important, to mention isn't that really, public engagement can happen at any stage of the process of the genesis of ideas and understanding isn't as you say, it can happen right at the beginning, in the actual kind of coming together of ideas, and in the generation of research questions. And in the generation of the research themselves. It can happen during the project, it can happen at the end of the project. And for years afterwards,

Pretty obviously, we're all very invested in the work and the value of research and education given that we all work for university, but thinking of public engagement, who is it that benefits from the university actually being good at public engagement?

MICHAEL: For me, I think the really important thing to understand is that actually, public engagement brings benefits for everyone involved in it, right? We might think about benefits to a particular set of publics Be it the local region, or the wider national, regional or internationally, in terms of the communication of knowledge, but also, as we've said, the involvement in the generation of knowledge. But crucially, it also we think, brings benefits to the researcher, and to the people working more widely in the university. So that could be anything from actually training you how to explain a really complex topic or collaborate and discuss a very complex topic in a succinct way, which is actually a much more difficult technique and skill than I think most people give it credit for, all the way through to actually giving you ideas, questions, suggestions, research - lines of research - that you wouldn't ever have come up with, kind of on your own. And, and more generally, I think both can enjoy and benefit from the very, very just pure joy in the sharing of research, knowledge and understanding. And, of course, there are also benefits for the university as a whole in terms of how the university relates to its immediate regional community and more widely, nationally and internationally.

HELEN Public engaging in public engagement also gives us the opportunity to understand what matters to people beyond the university. So we get to understand what are the kind of burning issues, research problems, ideas, critical, critical issues that our wider publics want to engage with, and want us to, as experts, explore with them. So it's really, it's really, really important that we just, we don't just kind of proceed along the lines of telling people what the agendas are, but working with communities, working with our publics to figure out what their agendas are to bring those two things together.

That's a really broad definition of public engagement, it actually sounds like public engagement is something that anybody, no matter what your role is, at the university, could be a part of and benefit from.

MICHAEL: I think that's really important. Everyone who wants to should have the opportunity to and feel like they have something to contribute to the business of engaging with the public about what happens and goes on at the university. And that's why we've taken the view that with the Institute of engagement, that we really want every staff member and every student of the university to feel they have a role within the Institute. So our fellows, our fellows at the institute are made up of research staff, teaching staff, professional services, staff, and students from across the university, because we all have something to bring and something to gain from doing this work.

So what does public engagement look like at the moment at work? Is it something that we're comfortable with and confident in as an institution?

MICHAEL: The Institute of engagement is very young, right? We just celebrated our six-month anniversary, since our birth, last week. But actually, I think the idea about engaging with collaborating with the public goes much, much further back in Warwick's DNA, I think it's really there right back at the very outset of when war it was created and envisioned as a university and what it should be all about. And I think kind of it's always as a result been something bubbling under the surface that has been important to the university. But I think there have been some big changes that have occurred, particularly over the last decade or so, that have contributed to really bringing public engagement now to the fore, in, in university thinking, and particularly leading to the creation of the Institute of engagement. One is, I think, nationally universities have been asked to take a long, hard look at kind of how they sit within their regional communities and how they sit and deliver to their regions and indeed, nationally. Secondly, universities and academics within universities have been asked to think about how they communicate and collaborate with the public as part of their research work. And that's been driven by a series of government agendas. And I think also, we've you know, as a result of those two things, and as a result of a much more general kind of direction of travel, which is the idea of breaking down the ivory towers of universities, we all want to communicate more about what it is we've decided to dedicate our lives to study and communicating and collaborating on these things that we find so fascinating.

HELEN: A really important element of the recent KEF (Knowledge Exchange Framework) exercise was to look at how we are performing regionally and the role that we play regionally, in engaging with regional partners, as well as communities. And Warwick seems to be doing a really good job at this. And one of the one of the ways in which we are, has been about responding to the challenge that our imminent City of Culture year, has brought to us. So I think we all saw on the horizon. As soon as we knew that tissue culture was occurring, that this was a real opportunity to embed the work of the university really broadly, in our local and regional communities. So it's been recognised in our recent success in their KEF assessments. But I think we've still got work to do. We still are doing work, as we'll hear in a moment in relation to our city's cultural projects. But sort of thinking about the role that the university plays in our local area in our city in the West Midlands has become much more significant for us over the last few years, and I think it ever was.

MICHAEL: I think the message is very much that in it while we were in the top 10% of universities in England, in the KEF exercise led by government, for public and community engagement, we are not resting on our laurels in any way, shape, or form. And we want to go much, much further and we really want to be I think Warwick now kind of really sees itself as leading the charge in this area across the nation.

Okay, let's talk a little bit more about the Warwick Institute of engagement. So it's been up and running for six months now, how did it come about? What's it here to do?

MICHAEL: Well, I mean, Helens day job is in the film and TV Studies Department, right kind of as an academic minds in the Classics and Ancient history department. And we have for many years, like many of our colleagues across the university across all the different faculties and disciplines, been doing public engagement as an integral part of our work. And we've been loving it. The problem has been that that's often ended up with lots of academics and working as individuals, so siloed, not being able to come together and as a result be more than the sum of our individual parts. And I think that's the crucial driving force behind the creation of the Institute of engagement. It's trying to create a pan University hub, where everyone interested in doing this work can come together, and as a result, discuss and debate and think about the best ways of doing public engagement, collaborate together on great events and opportunities to engage with the public. And also, as a result, strategize and lead and the way that the university does it as a whole. So that's the the Institute of Engagement is responding to that need for a place where we can all come together and as a result, do it better than we could ever each do it just individually on our own.

Is there anything similar to the Institute at other universities? Or is it more looking to stand out and try something a bit new?

MICHAEL: So I think it's been it's been a normal thing over the past decade, as universities across the UK have responded to the changing kind of world and of public engagement to establish public engagement teams. Right. So you know, I think that would be a pretty normal thing to see, in most universities across the country. Where I think the institute really stands apart is in two ways. One is it that the institute seeks to be a collaborative endeavour, between all different staff at the university. So bringing together academic and professional services teams from across all the different disciplines, faculties, and backgrounds to work together to collaborate to be more than the sum of our parts. That's what makes it stand out for the first point. The second area in which I think it stands out, is that we also want to involve our students in this work, we see students as being fundamental, engaged, public engagers in their own right, not just in terms of it's a great skill set for our students to have, as they go out into whatever field they choose to go into in the future. But that actually, as members of the university, they should be learning about public engagement, and working with us and alongside us in doing so the institute is fundamentally there not only to bring everyone together from across the university, but from the student level, right up to the top of the university as well.

So you've mentioned students and staff, and obviously, the public, our local community in there. How is the Institute of engagement actually structured, then who's involved in the running of it.

MICHAEL: So we structure our work across three different areas. And if you look at our website, so warwick.ac.uk/wie, you will see that we do work in what we call the staff engage, the students engage, and the work engages kind of envelopes, if you like. In the staff engage, we're thinking principally about the training that we offer to our staff about how best to do engagement. And that's where our fellows sit of our staff fellows, who all come together in a series of learning circles, who work on and think about and make strategic recommendations about different areas and arenas of doing public engagement. And then in students engage, as it says on the tin, that's where our students can get access to training about public engagement, but our student fellows also then contribute to our learning circles. And we're also then helping staff across the university develop actual taught modules that will be official assessed parts of our students degree programmes focused on public engagement, potentially within their particular specialist subject areas. And then work engages is where we deliver the opportunities, both face to face and digital for actually engaging with collaborating with and communicating with the public in all those different forms and over the last six months of the institute's operation we're really proud that within the kind of staff engage, we now have 100 fellows at the Institute, which shows there's a huge enthusiasm amongst the staff at the University of Warwick to get him to work with us on this in this area. In the student engage area. We've got the university's research scholarship scheme, which enables students do undertake a research project with staff over the summer and pays them to do so. We put public engagement projects in there for the first time ever, and a quarter of this year's applications have been for our students for public engagement projects. So we're really pleased to see that enthusiastic response there as well. And in the Warwick Engages section in the last six months alone, 22,000 people have engaged with us through the different events and opportunities that we've organised. And we have only just kicked off our Coventry City of Culture Resonate Festival, which will be going on for the next year, and which will no doubt send those numbers rocketing much, much higher.

For 22,000 people having engaged with the with your work over the first six months is really incredible achievement. It's a brilliant point for us to move the conversation on to some real life examples of public engagement. So let's start with the City of Culture. How is work involved in the City of Culture? And would you describe it as public engagement in action?

HELEN: We've been working on towards the city of culture project for the last three years perhaps. And initially that came in the guise of often co funding with our sister University in the city, Coventry, co funding collaborative research projects that took place all around the city and involved working our academics working with community partners on small scale individual research projects. So that continued over three years and we saw there was a real opportunity to kind of capitalise on the relationships that have been built the research that had been done the inroads into the community that had been made, and to bring all of that together. And under the auspices of the Resonate Festival, which is a 12 month, ongoing, public engagement festival that's going to run throughout our city of culture year. So we moved from funding for small scale research projects, before the institute was established through various GRPs through the research team here at Warwick, to thinking about how do we kind of extend these, bring these to the public bring these to light, find new opportunities to talk to people about the research at the University in the context of the city of culture. A city of culture year is an opportunity to open up so I talked to colleagues at the University of Hull about their city of culture year and what they done to kind of open up their campus during during the year. And the person that basically do my job at Harlan lead on their cultural programme for the year said, it was that absolute opportunity to break down the invisible forcefield that surrounded their camper Michael mentioned earlier breaking down the the ivory tower, precisely what we want to do when we think we can do that in two ways. The first way is to get our researchers off campus to community venues, working with community organisations and collaborators around the city kind of sitting back and waiting for people to come to words but going out there and kind of engaging with people in a really proactive way, being a good neighbour having conversations over the kind of metaphorical garden wall. And then we really hoping that through the process of doing that throughout the year, when it comes to April and we have our big on campus festival as the kind of culmination of the resume festival that people will feel much more secure welcome and able to come back to our place and come and engage with us in on campus. Hopefully they'll have been doing that all year anyway in relation to the brilliant programme that the Art Centre is is planning for example. But yeah, we kind of building networks and making friends building relationships I guess across the city finding out what what what are the issues that our communities wants wants us to work on, and how we might work collaboratively on those specific festival sounds so exciting. Tell us a little bit more about that. What are some of the highlights that we have to look forward to every month for is bringing highlight for me what our programme is theme monthly. So each each month has a theme. We start in May with the theme of invention which looks at the work that we do in a kind of making space in the university from kind of inventing the latest car technology to art making as a form of invention. We move on in in June to think about Sanctuary and onwards each varmint code that has a has a really interesting theme that allows a whole variety of researchers across the university to kind of engage with the programme. In May we’re starting, for example with a fantastic project on sustainability in the community, which is a collaboration with goals and creates and the artists Katie Cole, who's working with our researchers that looking at new sustainable materials for greener city centres, and they're going to come up with a fantastic large scale piece of artwork out of that work together. We have colleagues from WMG working on the stitch time project, which is a series of school and family workshops, which link Coventry's textile past to modern computer aided design and embroidery. And that's a joint project with the Herbert Art Gallery. So schools and families all across the city are going to be working on their own designs, which will then come together for another big piece of art that will be shown in the Herbet later in the year. There's also a really interesting event coming up about transport in the city and about driverless vehicles. So there's there's going to be a really lively I think online discussion about the developments that are made, being made with intelligent and connected vehicles and whether we can trust automated or driverless cars in the city, how they might change the safe shape of the city in the future, how these technologies might transform our lives. So Mays all about making but also talking about change further ahead. The Sanctuary Movement is part of the Coventry welcomes programme working with refugees and asylum seekers across a whole number of projects and exhibitions including work at the Belgrade theatre and with many local artists. We're working with our neighbours in Canley on their Carnival in July as part of our community month. And I'm really excited about a couple of projects in November for our Coventry in the world month, including the screening rights Film Festival, which will take place in venues across the city and it's a film festival that explores social justice filmmaking, and the word prize for women in translation, which we're bringing back to the city this year. And it's going to be held in a new part of the Coventry Cathedral. And it's a fantastic moment for celebrating the work of our translators and translators more broadly in the world too.

It's interesting that resonate festival has been created around these key themes. So the University of Warwick is a principal partner of the City of Culture along with Coventry University and other organisations. How were the themes developed for Resonate Festival did we try to reflect Coventry's values and history?

HELEN: Our themes were made work develop to firstly responds to sometimes match but but sometimes complement the city of cultural trust themes. And they've been doing work. For some years, I'm thinking about what we identify as as Coventry and kind of what what the city means really, and what the key issues and concerns are about particular city. So we've we've developed our own things to respond to the trust things but if you look across our monthly themes, for example, our our June month is all about sanctuary. Coventry is and has always been a city of sanctuary. So absolutely, it's absolutely right that we should be thinking about sanctuary, what it means to need sanctuary, what it feels like to give sanctuary in that moment. And in this particular place. Our invention then may also reflect the fact that the Coventry has a really kind of rich heritage of of making an invention. It's a really important place for the country's transport industry, for example, amongst other things, so our themes absolutely do reflect our city. They also reflect our specialisms as a university so for example, in February next year, our focus is all on health work that people across the university do around health and well being. And I think none of us has ever been more aware of the need for research and research collaborations around health, well being, mental health, and so on, as we have been now. So February is going to be a really important month to hear about the work that's been done in this area in the university and also work collaboratively with our communities on on solutions to real health problems that real people in our city face today.

Sounds like there's a brilliant programme of activities we look forward to here, it's really exciting. You've touched on the COVID pandemic there, jow has the past year impacted on planning for the City of Culture and for Resonate Festival it can't have been easy.

HELEN: Obviously cities of culture are phenomenally complex beings anyway, throw COVID into the mix. And they become infinitely more complex and difficult partly because the context in which we're planning is constantly shifting. There has been so much uncertainty about the points at which we might be able to come together in a room to have a conversation with people that we've had to be really agile and innovative in developing kind of digital versions of what we might have once been considering only in delivering in real life in person. In a community centre or village hall, we had to be really, we've had to learn fast on our feet. So I think in terms of planning for our digital engagements, and you can see, just think just looking at May, you know, the idea that we're running workshops around computer assisted design for embroidery, and we're doing that online, blows my mind, we've also learned through the pandemic, I think that that digital platforms like team or zoom or whatever, can can also offer possibilities and opening up in terms of enabling people who might struggle to attend an event in person, think of parents who can't get out of house in the evening, but might really want to come along to it debate, now have the opportunity to do so we hope that what we're doing is is delivering an engaging programme, that means that people will really be able to get stuck in.

Michael, if it's okay, a similar question for you, how has the pandemic affected the development of the Institute of Engagement, you've launched smack in the middle of a pandemic, that must have been a real challenge?

MICHAEL: I think you're absolutely right that the institute has launched at a very strange time, but also one in which the question of how do we do public engagement has never been more pressing or more important. And so I think on the one hand, it's it is it is ironic, right? That the Institute of engagement team represented here by Helen and I today, have never actually met in a room in person ever since the inception of the Institute. And yet, we've embraced that entirely and got on with the job of rethinking not just the events and opportunities directly in front of us, but also starting to do that thinking that Helen was alluding to earlier about what the future of Public Engagement is going to look like. And that's really been, you know, it's a big focus for our learning circles, and for our fellows at the Institute, taking the tools that are increasingly available, learning what works, what doesn't work, what we miss from the face to face, what we gain from the digital, and thinking about how these will all combine in the future. And we want the Institute to be able to be the place where that conversation happens, where the strategic kind of recommendations and ideas come from about how to how to continue doing public engagement in the future. And for the Institute, then to be there to support people, whether it's crisis, because this digital platform, I can't get it to work all the way through to, you know, I really want to develop a cutting edge project with public engagement built in from the beginning and working with the public to develop the research questions through the process of research and out the other side. And we want to be there to support people within the university, and in our community doing that. And I think one of the things that I'm most proud of from the Institute of Engagement perspective, in its first six months, alongside all the things you've already heard about is that we've also launched a series of community Partnership Grants. So we've actually said, Look, we want to encourage people in our regional community to come and work with us in the university. We want to fund institutions and organisations out there in the community, you have got great ideas to come and work with us on stuff. And I think that is a that's a whole new level of engagement that we see as being fundamental to our approach going forward in the future.

HELEN: Traditionally, academics have come to us and said, I'd like somebody to go and work with this community organisation or that community organisation. And we've completely reversed that and said, to the community organisations, what do you need come and talk to us about the collaborations that will really help push you on. And we'll match make, we'll fund you. And we'll help make things happen.

MICHAEL: I think the other thing that we really want to do in the institute is is shout loudly about the great stuff that is going on and make sure that is heard, as you know, as widely and as loudly as possible. Obviously, this podcast today is one aspect of that, but we're also through our website, doing monthly spotlights of the projects that our staff, our communities and our students are working together on. So do always also check back on the website for the monthly spotlights. And you'll be able to read more about the great projects that the institute is involved with.

So after a tough year, we have an awful lot to look forward to really don't we with all of this. What is there that we can all get stuck into and involved with for Resonate Festival and the word constitutive engagement? How should we go about doing that?

HELEN: There’s so much that people can get involved with in terms of the Resonate Festival, in our plans for city of culture. The first thing to do is to keep an eye on our web pages which are evolving daily. So that www.warwick.ac.uk/resonate, and about how our listings guide on the, links to book tickets for things to book yourself and your family friends into activities. But also, we releasing regular call outs for participation in our roadshow programme in in activities and events where we really need academics across the university to kind of recognise this opportunity and come and join in and get involved. And we'll send that out through the usual channels as well as through the Institute of Engagement’s, regular mailouts.

MICHAEL: If you're a member of the public listening to this podcast, then do sign up for the Institute of engagements public newsletter, that we'll be telling you about all the exciting things that you can come and listen to participate in, get involved with. If you're a member of the university community, then do also sign up for the Institute’s, sort of internal – if you like - Warwick newsletter mailing list, where you can hear also about the calls, as Helen was mentioning, to get involved in a number of our projects. And think if you're a student, think about signing up for one of the courses that are being run focused on public engagement in your particular field or join us in our interdisciplinary module on public engagement, which is run through IATL, the Institute of Advanced Teaching and Learning at the University of all sign up for one of our training programmes. And as a member of for members of staff out there, think about getting involved with our training programmes, thinking it think about just coming to talk to us at one of our regular drop in sessions, about the kind of projects that you might have in mind, the kind of ways you can get involved. And then ultimately, also, we'll be opening the calls again, for fellowship, probably towards the end of this year end of 2021. So it would be great to see people applying to become a fellow of the Institute where they can really then contribute towards its future strategic direction.

HELEN: Resonate Festival is everything from poetry slams to walking tours, to Q&A sessions, to practical workshops to performances. It's sort of everything. And so I do believe that there's something for everyone with it. Throughout the programme.

MICHAEL: I think fundamentally, we are all better the more we're in discussion, communication, debate and discourse with one another. I think that helps us in every aspect of our lives. And, you know, we at the University of Warwick stand ready and willing and wanting to have as many of those conversations as possible.