Nat spoke with Adrian and Alison, two Oxford Brookes students involved in organising the 13th annual Oxford Human Rights Festival.
Adrian is a first year MA Architecture student at Brookes. In terms of his work for the festival, he's been making sure everything looks nice, arranging posters, getting the website ready and trying to get people involved.
Alison has been working with George McBean, setting up and arranging his exhibition. They have both been setting up events. There has been interest from outside the architecture faculty and people have shared their knowledge and expertise on politics, women's rights and so on.
The New Internationalist is on board this year as well. They have been publicising it on their website and they cover a lot of the same topics in their magazine.
This year has been organised by topic. There are four days plus a special George McBean day, in which he will be giving a graphic workshop and a private showing of his exhibition. This is bound to be exciting for people interested in humanitarian art. Then other days will cover refugees, women's rights, and politics and revolution. This year the organisers have tried to make something different and more diverse to try to get more people interested.
The events are mainly at Brookes in the new John Henry Brookes building, the glass tank, or the Chakrabarti room, which is named after a chancellor of Brookes, who was very involved in fighting for human rights.
Alison and Adrian are both looking forward to the refugee day, to meeting everyone in person and listening to their experiences and what they have to say. Alison is also looking forward to the George McBean day. They have tried to make the festival as accessible as possible because human rights are something that everyone should be concerned about to some extent.
The festival takes contributions from the public and lots of the films and topics have come from people's suggestions.
Next year there will be a fresh new group of organisers. It's interesting to see the diversity of ideas each year. Alison and Adrian will be around next year to advise but will be handing over the reigns.
Alison says Oxford is a great city for this because it attracts people who are aware or who have some concern for these kinds of issues. It has a great legacy of having initiatives coming out of the city, out of the two universities and out of other institutions. She has no doubt that the festival will continue to grow.
You can hear the full interview on our Oxcast Extra Channel.