Today began with an introduction talk to Challenging Europe from Eszter Tarsóly, who introduced the content of the strand and discussed ideas about what it means to be a global citizen. She asked what Europe means to us and it was interesting to see the variety of individual interpretations in the answers, from ‘freedom of movement’ to ‘home’. The thought of Europe as home really stood out to us as it was such a personal view. After this we headed over to the welcome talk where we learned a little about the other strands on the programme and got to see how many people are involved. We returned for our first skill session, on portrait photography, held by Richard Morgan, a photographer and former UCL PhD student. He was very enthusiastic about photography and provoked discussions about various portraits to show us how many stories and how much information can be perceived and portrayed from one image, wether the photographer meant it deliberately or not. The lecture was very thought provoking and finished with portrait photography tips we will use later this week.
In the afternoon we met for our project tutorial. We discussed the morning lectures and what we are most interested in doing before distributing the outputs. The primary focus was figuring out where we might meet Polish people in London. Some of us reached out to Polish friends in London while others researched online for things such as Polish restaurants, bars and shops, the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum and UCL’s Polish Society and began contacting them and making plans for future field trips. Our Language teacher, Dagmara, arrived during this discussion and offered some helpful suggestions and advice. During our first language session we learned about pronunciation and some basic dialogue and Dagmara practised speaking, listening, reading and writing Polish with us. Our group felt today was refreshing, especially after the recent election, to see that it’s not all politics.
European London 