The Open University opens the doors to its Walton Hall campus for a performance by The Open University Choir of the world première of A different kind of urban, the piece it has commissioned for Milton Keynes’ 50th birthday. Milton Keynes author Judi Moore’s lyrics celebrate the new town, its history, geography, diversity and culture. Her text is set to music by composer and Open University Associate Lecturer in Music Liz Lane, whose Antiphonary for brass and percussion is also included in the concert.

In the city’s 50th anniversary year, a day of family activities brings together leading FASS researchers to uncover and share it’s cultural life, including a literary treasure hunt, writing workshop, film, photograps, theatre, music, literary walking tours and public talks.

Fragments is a work-in-progress performance inspired by the surviving scraps of papyrus that are all we have left of a "lost" play from ancient Greece found by archaeologists in Egypt. These tattered lines and jumbled dialogue offer tantalising snapshots of a story. Fragments will use this as a jumping off point to explore how we piece our world view together from small scraps of information, leap to conclusions and are often blind to things that don't fit in with how we see the world.

Hosted by LSE IDEAS and The Open University, in this lecture, Luc-André Brunet explains continuities from the wartime Vichy regime to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the forerunner to today’s European Union, and what this means for current debates about Europe.

This workshop addresses the UK social science community's need to gain a better understanding of how participatory action research (PAR) approaches engage marginalised groups in research as co-producers of knowledge. The workshop combines methodological and practical experience of walking methods, participatory theatre methods and how we might combine them.

The Open University in collaboration with The University of Greenwich and The University of York are pleased to host an international multidisciplinary conference looking at how participatory and creative research methods create a space for exploring, sharing and documenting processes of belonging and place-making that is crucial to understanding migration, citizenship and belonging.