The Resonate Festival of Social Science - Day Out!
On Saturday 26th October, we travelled to Leamington Spa and filled the library, gallery and museum of the Royal Pump Rooms with lots of fun activities and demonstrations for the Resonate Festival of Social Science Day Out - part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science.
Starting in the library, we were delighted to be joined by Nikita Asnani who shared her book The Girl Who Loved to Talk to Her Ideas in an exciting Storytime. She encouraged us to have a go at imagining what our own ideas playground would look like and we got creative designing them.
The Lego club joined us in the afternoon and we had a go at thinking what our future looks like by building what we want Leamington Spa to look like in 25 years, thanks to a take over by the Design Studies Team. By exploring regenerative cities, we had a go at infusing our future Leamington Spas with nature, happiness and health. Some ideas included building living roofs, where vegetation covers the top of our houses, and increasing the number of ice cream shops.
Attendees could also learn a little about Political Economics from the mini-documentary “Housing is a Circus”, based on the work of Dr Mareike Beck and kindly loaned to the Resonate team to play in the Foyer of the building. You can watch this video and other work from Dr Beck in the Social Sciences section of Resonate@Home.
Throughout the day, we also experienced our sweet tooth through different senses. Danel Zholzhanova showed us how virtual reality can give us a multisensory experience of chocolate! The smells and sight whilst using the VR set were so immersive that it was hard to imagine there wasn’t chocolate in front of us. We learned from Danel how technology can be used to explore our eating behaviours and how useful it will be for healthcare in the future. If we saw and smelt chocolate, would it change our perception if we were eating broccoli?
We then learnt about our history of coal mining in the 20th century through fascinating archives including coal mining poetry for children, how coal mining works in different countries and coal miner strikes. Helen Hopper from the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick helped us explore how our power project was once coal and made us think what our future power projects would be. How would you power the future?
In the museum we also had some exciting activities at hand. We learned that English is not the only language you can find in Leamington. Dr Andreana Pastena shared that, whilst walking through Leamington Spa, she found 11 different languages including Danish, Portuguese and Vietnamese. Listening with headphones, we found out how these different languages sounded. As we may have classmates, neighbours, or co-workers from different backgrounds, Andreana encouraged us to think how much we really know about their cultures and to share our own, adding local languages to a map together.
Another question in the gallery was brought by Dr Charlotte Woodhead who taught us of all things treasure. What happens if we find treasure and who gets to keep it? Historically, people buried treasure meaning we could find anything in our soils. We searched for treasures in her activity, and learnt that who we are and who’s land we are on can have a big impact on who keeps the treasure. We also learned some things we might expect to be treasure might not be treasure after all!
Whilst a lot of history is in our soils, we found out that there was a rich history in the pump rooms too. We saw archives where the Pump rooms were originally used for a swimming pool and a Turkish bath! Dr Rosemary Alexander-Jones guided us on the treatments people received and what hydrotherapy was used for. We also got a chance to dress up as medical staff and got a chance to act out the Pump rooms’ medicinal past!
Finally, we got our hands on some historic artefacts with the Leamington Museum and Art Gallery team. After putting on some gloves, we handled prehistoric flint tools and spent time understanding how much we can learn when we interact with these precious objects instead of just seeing them on a screen.
With thanks to the Royal Pump Rooms, Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum, Leamington Spa Library, and all the Students and Staff from the University of Warwick that made this possible!
