The Curiosity Carnival: Oxford European Researchers’ Night 2017

ended

By capitalising on the University of Oxford’s world-class European-funded research base, together with our outstanding museums, libraries, gardens and woods, education programmes and public engagement expertise, we will create a truly inspirational multi-venue multi-disciplinary European Research night in 2017 on the theme of ‘People and Planet'. The event itself will be a city-wide programme of high quality and innovative activities utilising both University of Oxford venues in addition to busking-type activities taking place in shopping centre locations. Each venue will have its own ‘flavour’ – focusing on specific research topics and encompassing different activities - so that there will be ‘something for everyone’. By focusing on quantity and quality, we will create a much bigger impact on the audiences and participating researchers and create a long lasting legacy. Objectives: a) Organise an inspirational large-scale public engagement with research event at 8 different venues and locations that engages 10,000+ people via the live activities and 250,000+ via digital and media activities. b) Increase awareness of research and its impact on society to an audience of young people and their influencers. c) Enable at least 200 researchers, including a significant proportion of female researchers, to take part. d) Inspire young people to consider a career in research e) Share our challenges, successes and lessons learnt. Activities will include interactive stalls; games; mass experiments; science ‘demos’; a ‘living library’ for the public to take out a researcher 'on loan' and two grand finales with musical performances. The awareness campaign will facilitate even greater public-researcher engagement across digital and media platforms. This will include a fun and educational online activity for school pupils to interact with researchers. The in-depth impact assessment will utilise baseline data and both quantitative and qualitative methods.