The World Transformed 2018

22nd - 25th September
Liverpool

About

The World Transformed is a project which grew out of Momentum, the movement formed in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s 2015 leadership campaign. Seeing the optimism, energy, and creativity that emerged from that campaign, as well as the thousands of young people joining the Labour Party for the first time, we thought it was a shame that it often wasn’t properly reflected in many left-wing events. Rather than just an endless parade of panel talks, with the same old speakers giving the same old speeches, we try to do things a bit differently.

Political events should be engaging and inclusive - ordinary people and grassroots activists should be active participants, sharing their own knowledge and experiences and leading the conversation, not just passively receiving the wisdom of ‘expert’ panellists. Traditional forms of political education should be combined with theatre, roleplay, games and more. Politics shouldn’t stand alone, but needs to be intimately linked with culture, art, music and film. And we need to be talking about the big ideas - not just how Labour can win the next election, but how we can transform the world!

Our first event was The World Transformed 2016 - a four day festival of politics, art and culture that took place alongside the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, 2016.Think of the Edinburgh Fringe, only more political. We think it went pretty well.

Over 5000 people attended more than 150 workshops, talks, gigs and exhibitions, making it the largest event that the Labour Party Conference’s fringe has ever seen. We also had a great reception from attendees, from Labour MPs and from journalists across the entire political spectrum. John Harris, writing for the Guardian, even called us “the future of the Labour party”.

In 2017, our second festival in Brighton was even bigger and better - spread across eleven different venues in the heart of the city, with more than thirty Labour MPs and headline speakers like Naomi Klein, Russell Brand, Lowkey, and David Harvey.

But we want The World Transformed to be much more than just a single event once a year. Political education needs to happen all year round, across the country, and we want to play our part in making that happen. Watch this space!