New Scots Ceilidh

We believe in the importance of culture in the widest sense to connect people.

Our New Scots programme supports the sharing arts, sciences, crafts, music, research and stories for, with and by New Scots, including the Syrian refugees and wider migrant communities who live, work and share their talents in Scotland.

Current Projects

We are currently collaborating with Multicultural Family Base to link their long-established Syrian Men’s Group to peer researchers, academics and professionals to share insights of what’s going on in science, technology, engineering and mathematical industries in Scotland, exchange experiences and ideas, along with science and cultural activities with their youth club.

We remain a part of the New Scots Steering Group supporting cultural exchange and welcoming events year round too.

History & Aims of the New Scots Project

The programme began in 2017 with a series of “culture jam” workshops, leading to a large New Scots Ceilidh as part of British Science Week with kind support from the British Science Association, Fun Palaces and Edinburgh Napier, and partnering with the Welcoming, the Edinburgh and Lothians Regional Equality Council. Following on from this event, a steering group involving both New Scots themselves and support organisations and volunteers including the Welcoming, Scots Faith Action, St Paul’s and St George’s Churches was established and continues to coordinate cultural events over the year with voluntary support from Science Ceilidh team members including supporting music, science activities and games. Events have included religious events along with welcoming “Fun Palace” event for other asylum seekers.

Since then we have run several larger events including being part of the EU Researchers Night - Explorathon - in September 2018 and ran a sell-out New Scots Ceilidh in partnership with the Welcoming. This involved a mix between self-identified refugees, migrants, New Scots, europeans, Scots and Brits as well as those from other parts of the world. We shared research around singing and wellbeing, bilingualism and physics amongst the dances. 55% of participants either weren’t usually interested in research or didn’t go out of their way to engage. Our monitoring of postcodes also suggest we reached a broadly representative group of people from around Edinburgh! You can see photos on our facebook page here.

We also ran small activities linking creativity with researchers as part of the Welcoming’s Creative Space including looking at Scottish music, the link between bilingualism and healthy ageing beforehand.

We are excited to build on this relationship further and will be running future workshops. If you have any ideas, or would like to be involved, please do get in touch!

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