Humanities Enrichment

During Opportunities Week, students across a number of disciplines participated in a Humanities and Super-curricular Enrichment session, offering them the opportunity to examine how narratives construct and perpetuate social/cultural conventions and why certain writers seek to deconstruct them.

The first part of the event was a collaborative workshop entitled: ‘Stories and Subversion: Exploring how and why writers undermine cultural norms’. This session was a rollercoaster ride through a diverse array of written and visual texts. Starting by decoding subversive messages on T-shirts, students then identified common tropes across fairy tales in a bid to determine what these repeated motifs suggested about societal norms and whether those ideologies are still important in modern life.

Students went on to look at how a Guardian advert cleverly demonstrated that the story of The Three Little Pigs might not be as straightforward as it seems, before considering why the writers of Shrek made the decision to move away from sugar-coating typical fairytale messages.

In the second part of the session, students listened to a lecture entitled: ‘The Function of Fairytale: It’s not all just ‘happily ever after’. This built upon knowledge accrued in the initial workshop and investigated how the familiar fairy tales we know and love have a more fundamental social function than we sometimes experience in sanitised, Disneyfied variants. It also explored how some writers have sought to craft evolutions of this much-loved genre via an analysis of specific literary texts.

The students really pushed themselves to articulate responses to challenging questions and to develop their thoughts throughout the day, rounding the day off by contemplating the function of subversion and its significance in society, as well as offering insight into the idea that all texts, no matter how short, can be political in nature.