Written by The Nigerian Society, Gerardo Serra, and Steven Pierce Nigeria is a country with a rich and multi-faceted history stretching long before colonial times, during which kingdoms and city-states thrived. During colonial rule, the Northern and Southern...
Category: Engagement and outreach

Bilingualism Series – ‘No Child Left Monolingual’
Written by Dr Julio Villa-GarcíaThe Bilingualism series at the Instituto Cervantes of Manchester & Leeds is a forum on bilingualism and multilingualism targeting a broad audience. Of great interest to parents, students, language learners, and the general public,...
When the World’s on Fire
The aims of this project include developing partnerships with creative or cultural organisations/practitioners such as Ebonit Sax Quartet, and creating new relationships with XR and its ally ActionNetwork. The project also seeks to extend their reach to Leeds through...
DNA Day
The following activity is a work-in-progress and currently on hold due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The description below reflects the aims of the project and its proposed framework. A day of events celebrating and investigating genetics on DNA day, the anniversary of...
Sexuality Summer School (SSS) 2020: Queering the Archive
The following activity is a work-in-progress and currently on hold due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The description below reflects the aims of the project and its proposed framework. The Sexuality Summer School (SSS) is organised within the framework of the Greater...
School Poetry Competition
The Centre for New Writing has organised the annual schools’ poetry competition for the past 3 years, working in collaboration with local high schools. The Centre has established a sustainable model, to ensure this competition can be an annual initiative run in...
Deaf Education & Audiology: a journey through artefacts, archives and creativity
The histories and lived experiences of D/deafness are rich and complex. Extraordinary technological advances have been made in the exploration of hearing, alongside a better appreciation of the social and psychological impact of sensory perception on learning. The...
Beyond Belief Archive
The Beyond Belief archive is currently an under used public resource that provides a wide range of communities across the UK the opportunity to learn about issues in the study and practice of religions, about cultural and religious diversity, and about the...

Congolese Women Speak
Blog post written by Siobhan Brownlie, March 2020Since February 2019 I had been doing volunteer work with three Congolese asylum seekers, encouraging them to write about their homeland. The culmination of the project was an evening at the Alliance Française where the...
Teaching creative writing in hospital
Blog post written by Horatio Clare.I have been working with staff and patients - known as 'service users' - on a secure ward in a psychiatric hospital in Wakefield in order to identify and develop ways in which creative writing may be used to aid recovery from mental...