Near and Far Festival

Participate in the 2025 Near and Far Festival

We are inviting students to take part in our Near and Far Festival. The festival is an opportunity to showcase your culture to staff and students. We are looking for students to deliver stalls, performances and workshops.

The details

Between Mon 28 April and Thurs 1 May the festival will run as follows:

Monday 28 April

Parade along the dockside at Docklands campus to open the festival.

Tuesday 29 April

Fair-style event at Stratford. Groups will have a stall where they will engage attendees in discussions about their culture.

Wednesday 30 April

Cultural performance event. These could include traditional dances, folk songs and other performance-based art that links directly to your culture. Note that only students can perform.

Thursday 1 May

Fair-style event repeated at Docklands campus.

Carnival-themed party in the Underground Bar to round up the celebrations. This is open to everyone to attend and does not require any specific support from student groups outside of promoting to your members. We are also looking for student groups to deliver workshops across all 4 days of the festival. We may also ask you to contribute photos and quotes for our event round-up communications.

As Friday 2 May is the last day of term, we won’t be delivering any activity on this day due to lower campus attendance.

The aims for our festival are:

To showcase one another’s cultures and their traditions.

To enable attendees to learn about cultures and traditions other than their own.

To share (historic or contemporary) culturally specific entertainment activities and have fun.

To encourage staff and students to integrate with other cultures.

To bring people of different cultures together.

To develop attendees’ cultural intelligence.

The Students’ Union will support the delivery of your activities by:

Providing funding where appropriate.

Creating an overall schedule for delivery of activity across the week.

Promoting your activity including creating marketing assets.

Overseeing risks.

Providing logistical support.

How to get involved

If you’re interested in taking part, the next steps for you are:

Complete the registration of interest form here and sign up to one of our briefing sessions. Briefing sessions will be held on the Monday 17 March and Thursday 20 March. Please also read through the additional information about expectations for the week.
The deadline to register interest is Friday 21 March at 12:00.
Once you’ve attended a briefing, you will be given access to a form where you will be able to submit event proposal ideas. You need to complete a separate submission for each different event you will be delivering. The deadline to submit your activity ideas will be midday on Friday 28 March.
All submissions should receive a response from the Students’ Union by the end of the working day on the Friday 21 March. Submissions received within the deadline on the 21 Mar might take slightly longer.
Make sure your submissions include as much information as possible and that you’ve carefully considered everything required. All submissions are final and those that are not up to standard will be declined.

We will inform you of further steps and deadlines once we have completed the above.

If your university or work schedules mean that you’ll not be able to attend a briefing session, then please fill out the form and note this on the appropriate question. We will be in contact to discuss alternative options for you. If you do not attend a session and do not follow up on any alternative actions, then you will miss out crucial information that you need to know about to plan your activity.

Activity proposals that do not meet our guidelines or that appear to have been written by AI will be denied. It is better to attend the in-person session where possible as you’ll have the opportunity to ask questions of the SU’s programme planning team.