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Exploring Cultural Memory Through Creativity

How can theatre and creative practice help us to see history differently?

Santi and Naz

Our digital lives theme

What’s on offer?

This 45-minute workshop combines dramatic activities with historical research to explore how we understand the relationship between family and general history. Through guided exercises participants will have the chance to build a creative archive of their family’s history while thinking about where and how this fits with, and challenges, traditional historical perspectives.

What’s it about?

This workshop has been developed as part of a collaboration between Dr. Eleanor Newbigin, and her work on intergenerational memorialisation of the history of the 1947 Partition, and Gulerana Mir, Executive Director of The Thelmas and co-writer of their current production Santi and Naz.  

The aim of the workshop is to support students who are non-native English speakers studying in London to explore how they understand their own personal and family history, and how they see it to connect, or not, to different historical narratives.  

Through a series of interactive and creative exercises, the workshop will guide students to map and curate the different historical narratives that shape their sense of self, and the wider world. We will think together about what happens when we bring different narratives together, and how we might challenge and rethink accounts of the past to create a new sense of belonging, and inclusion in the present and future.  

Attendees should be ready to re-think their perceptions about the nature of historical research and the role that performance skills can play in excavating new ways of thinking about the past.  

Who’s leading the event?

Gulerana Mir (Executive Director – The Thelmas) 

Eleanor Newbigin (Senior Lecturer in History, HRP, SOAS) 

Open to

Young people with English as an additional language aged 11-17 

Of particular interest to

The event has been specifically designed for young people with English as an additional language aged 11-17