Festival of knowledge to come to Scottish capital

A series of talks and workshops on health, the creative arts and video games will be held during a festival on knowledge in September.

A myriad of issues – including personal data, the use of Scots language, future cities and a range of other social topics – will be discussed during the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s (RSE) Curious Festival of Knowledge.

Held from September 6-14, one of the free festival’s highlights is a talk on Scotland’s colonial past, led by PhD student Ash Charlton, who was recently a project researcher with the University of Edinburgh’s anatomical museum.

The talk, titled Taken, studied, displayed: readdressing the University of Edinburgh’s African skull collections – will explore a recent project to research and improve documentation of the museum’s skull collections as a basis for future repatriation requests.

Ms Charlton said: “This event will share the stories of the individuals whose skulls are in the collection, where they came from and how they became part of the museum’s collection.

“Unfortunately, very little is known about most of these individuals through historic erasure and lack of documentation, although through this talk I will discuss some of the few cases we know more about.

“Conversely a lot more is known about the ‘donors’ who presented these human remains to the university. Medical students, doctors, religious missionaries, geologists and botanists were all responsible for contributing to the growing anatomy collections.”

Also featuring at the festival is Play for Good, a video game exhibition on how they can help with health, wellbeing and social inclusion.

Event organiser Dr Andrew Reid, of Abertay University and member of the Young Academy of Scotland, said: “Simply put, designing games for good means thinking about how games can provide a positive outcome to various social or cultural environments.

“We’ve got a couple of projects here that are showing games to promote physical activity by using your body as an input, all the way through to exploring mental health as a topic.

“These are generally spaces that are quite difficult to deal with in any given context, but within games we create a safe space to explore some very challenging issues and very challenging conversations.”

While many of the Curious events are held within the RSE, this year’s programme also features an interactive walking tour around Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirkyard.

Led by Daria Tuhtar, the tour will explore the unique and intricate language of symbols and metaphors that many of the monuments in Greyfriars are decorated with, and how people’s attitudes towards death have changed with the passage of time.

The tour will uncover how ideas of death, immortality and resurrection coalesce in one of the most striking locations that Edinburgh boasts.

Royal Society of Edinburgh general secretary professor Jo Shaw said: “Today we announce the programme of the RSE’s Curious festival.

“Curious is an opportunity to throw open the door to the RSE, Scotland’s National Academy. We’re bringing together some of Scotland’s leading thinkers, covering a broad range of topics – from video games to UFOs – and starting important conversations around big ideas.

“Everyone is welcome, and you don’t need any prior knowledge to take part and learn something new. Most importantly, every event is free. Just bring yourself and your curiosity.”