The Power of Connection, Compassion and Creativity: Reflections on Oxford Human Rights Festival 2025
By Jacqueline Kearney, Coordinator OxHRF
Nearly two months on from the Oxford Human Rights Festival (OXHRF) 2025, the world feels as fraught, disconnected, and heavy as ever. Conflicts rage, climate breakdown accelerates, communities fracture under political upheaval, and the endless churn of crisis in the news and our social media feeds risks making us desensitised and paralysed. It’s easy to feel powerless. It’s easy to disconnect from it all.
Despite all of this, looking back at the festival, I am reminded that there are other ways to respond.
For me, the power of spaces like OxHRF lies in creating room for connection: connection to issues that often feel overwhelming, distant, or too abstract to grasp; and connection to each other as we reflect, learn, and act together. By pulling these vast challenges out of our screens and into real, human conversations - often channelled through the arts, through collective expression and creativity - we find ways not just to understand the world, but to remain actively, compassionately engaged with it.
This year, the festival’s theme of “The Power of the People” felt more urgent than ever. In choosing it, the student organising committee wanted to highlight not only the scale of the challenges we face, but also the power of collective action, solidarity, and creativity in confronting them. We hoped to create spaces where complex, painful issues could be explored in ways that empower rather than overwhelm - spaces for connection, reflection, and action.
Throughout the festival, we saw and felt how vital these spaces are.
At our Crafting Change: What Does Home Mean to You? craftivism event, strangers gathered in a quiet studio space at The Old Fire Station to stitch, share, and think about the meaning of home - a concept at the heart of human rights. Experienced crafters and complete beginners sat side by side, threading together reflections on displacement, shelter, and belonging. The pieces crafted together in this event formed a collaborative artwork piece, the frame of which was constructed to follow the minimum sizing guidelines for humanitarian shelter, grounding the artwork in a global context of displacement and emergency housing. Meanwhile, the stitched fabric walls reflected diverse, personal reflections from across the Oxford community, exploring themes of homelessness, family, belonging, and safety. The resulting piece, which was then exhibited at Westgate Shopping Centre, is not just beautiful, it is also a visible, public reminder of how creativity can weave the global and the local together, sparking community conversations that reach far beyond the festival walls.
Our open mic poetry night Rights in Rhyme provided another powerful example of creative expression uniting the global and the local. Students, activists, and community members stood up to read poems about justice, identity, exile, and hope with many participants sharing deeply personal and moving words written from personal experience. The room felt electric with honesty and vulnerability, and a shared recognition that speaking these truths aloud is itself a brave, and often political act.
Our afternoon event Palestine: Power in Culture brought the festival's themes of resilience and celebration to life. In collaboration with the Oxford Ramallah Friendship Association, with support from the Palestinian History Tapestry and Multaka Oxford, the event explored Palestinian history and identity through embroidery, poetry, film, and dance. We heard from residents of Al Am’ari refugee camp via short films and live conversation, sharing their lived experiences under occupation and exploring the work of UNRWA in the West Bank today. The event’s location - the Pitt Rivers Museum - was particularly powerful, given that only a year ago it had been the site of controversial student encampments in solidarity with Gaza. To return to this space with an afternoon of cultural celebration, community dialogue, and joyful Dabke dancing (a traditional Palestinian dance symbolising resistance and resilience) felt like a reclamation: a reminder that solidarity does not just live in protest, but also in the ongoing sharing of culture, history, and hope.
The festival’s theme “The Power of the People” encouraged us to reflect on our own role in creating change. The Uncomfortable Oxford walking tour exposed hidden histories of empire, race, class, and gender across the city, challenging participants to see Oxford not simply as a historic city, but as a space shaped by struggles for justice - past and present. We are a live part of this historic landscape, and facing these uncomfortable truths is an essential first step toward more conscious action. This movement from critical reflection to purposeful action was echoed in the Nabeel Hamdi Lecture, where architect and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Alison Killing shared her groundbreaking work using open-source technology to expose mass detention of Uyghurs in China. Working remotely through satellite imagery and digital tools, her team showed that even when distant from the sites of injustice, individuals can harness technology to demand accountability. This weaving of reflection and action came through again during the screening of Are You Proud?, tracing the history of LGBTQIA+ activism in the UK. In a moving post-film discussion, an international student bravely shared their experience of being queer in a country where it is criminalised - a powerful moment made even more moving by the practical response received from an Oxford Brookes staff member involved in the University's journey as a University of Sanctuary. She left with a commitment to improving support for similarly vulnerable students, a vivid reminder that real change often begins with listening, compassion, and using our position to act.
Across the week, seeds were planted: future Dabke sessions, new community craft groups, follow up poetry evenings, and fundraising initiatives supporting Palestinian-led projects are now underway.
Spaces like the Oxford Human Rights Festival remind us that connection is not a soft thing. It is a radical act. In times when the world pushes us toward desensitisation and despair, coming together, to talk, to make, to reflect and to act, is how we resist, and how we create something better.
If the festival inspired you, and you would like to get involved next year, make sure to follow us and sign up for our newsletter to hear about opportunities to participate, collaborate, and contribute.
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