Collaborative partnerships

In the School of Arts, Media and Communication, we recognise the place our subjects hold within the wider community. Our University was founded with a clear civic mission and we proudly embrace serving the wider community through our disciplines and through our partnerships. From Literary Leicester and the Heritage Hub, to connections with the Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare, our School actively demonstrates the application of the Humanities beyond the classroom.

Media and Communication Studies and National Health Service Collaboration

Since 2023, our Dr Gabi Zogall, and Dr Ed Vollans have ensured students have gained real-world experience working with the Leicestershire NHS Partnership Trust to design and deliver meaningful health communications. This collaboration combines offering work experience in media practice, managing external client relationships, while delivering creative output that meets both the client’s and the industry’s expectations. Within this collaboration, we use our ALBERT (BAFTA) sustainability accreditation to map and account for the carbon output of content production. Modules that engage with this partnership have been shortlisted for the 2025 Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS) employability awards.

Our collaboration highlights the different career pathways our graduates may pursue, and enables contact with industry professionals as they develop real-world skills and experience while studying at Leicester. Alongside this, the collaboration highlights the many impactful ways in which creative decisions and content benefit society, from the impact of choices made upon the environment, to the best use of tone and address to cover sensitive topics.

Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare

The School has a long tradition of interdisciplinary work between literature and medicine. Most recently, Dr Felicity James was in 2023 appointed to teach in the Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare, exploring how English literature, shared reading and creative writing can help embed empathic skills into the medical school curriculum. Through writing, reading, and reflection, medical students have been encouraged to engage with close reading and imaginative perspective-taking. Recent interventions include establishing a book group with the foundation-year students, reading a memoir by NHS psychiatrist Dr Benji Waterhouse across a semester and analysing it together before putting their questions to the author. Creative writing workshops have helped MSci midwifery students deal with professional transitions, and introduced final year medical students to the joy of performance poetry and therapeutic creative groups in the community, as well as exploring the long history of empathic reading. Our collaboration seeks to integrate literature into medical education to support both personal and professional development in medical students – and to develop rich interdisciplinary dialogues.