Festival of Cultures in the University of Oulu

The Festival of Cultures is one of the biggest international events organized at the UniOulu’s Linnanmaa campus regularly since 2017. The event offers a unique possibility to experience dozens of cultures and meet people from all over the world without travelling abroad. It celebrates our University's diversity, multiculturalism, and wide partnership network by bringing hundreds of members of our academic community – domestic and international – together. The event underscores the importance of human connection, global awareness, and tolerance. During the event, the teams represent their native cultures in ways that feel the most authentic to them. The event is free and open for all. The Festival programme is different every year. Generally, it includes performances (live music, traditional dances, martial arts, etc), country presentations, language courses, workshops, food tasting sessions, photo exhibitions, traditional clothes try-outs, and much more. The importance of the Festival of Cultures stretches way beyond having fun, learning languages and trying food from other countries. Festival of Cultures is one of our key Internationalization at Home (IaH) efforts. IaH is the purposeful integration of international and intercultural dimensions into the formal and informal curriculum for all students within domestic learning environments (Beelen & Jones, 2015). Providing all the members of our academic community with equal opportunities to develop the international and intercultural competences and offering global perspectives, IaH practices contribute to the general awareness that both the work and the studies at the University of Oulu happen in the multicultural environment. The beneficiaries of IaH practices are all students and staff of the University regardless of whether they participate in mobility opportunities or not. Professional promotional videos created during the Festival of Cultures 2017 and 2018 respectively can be found at the University's YouTube channel here and here. In 2020, the Festival was organized virtually and produced as a series of culture-specific episodes. For the first time in the Festival history, people participated remotely from abroad and the University of Oulu’s partners from the UNIC alliance were involved. All the episodes (minus live workshops) are still available online and you can watch them all here.