Blog 6 (Week 6)

Model United Nations and LARP (Live-Action Role-Play) Activity

A Model United Nation or MUN is an academic activity designed for students to act as ambassadors and represent countries and to engage and discuss, debate and create solutions on different issues on the UN agenda. The main motive of this is to imbibe certain leadership and public speaking qualities and make students understand the importance of international relations (McIntosh, 2001)

A LARP or a Live-Action Role-Play as it is called is an activity which encourages participants to engage in role-playing and acting in scenarios. This is done publicly to grab attention of the public in order to get the necessary message through and raise awareness among them (Davies, 2021)

This week’s lecture talked about these two ideas followed by a class activity of this sorts playing out later. The class was divided into two groups debating, discussing and presenting changes to work towards the UN SDG 13 Climate Action.

GROUP WORK

This week’s group work was inspired by the class affair that we did – creating a LARP or Model UN style activity for our chosen SDG. We started discussing about it in our group and it instantly caught our attention. It was because we thought our SDG Decent work and Economic Growth could not be better explained or worked upon than this types of activity. This also led us to finalize our third artefact for our group project – a LARP activity. We brainstormed many ideas and scenarios which we can convert in this form of discussions. There were two ideas – one (which I came up with) was about a ‘Youth Empowerment Programme’ where in the international students (who are our target audience) will be divided into three groups such as Startup or Local business owners, Corporate Employees and Labor workers and they will be asked to create an action plan like a business growth idea, a financial plan or come up with negotiating and networking deals amongst each other to tackle challenges and exist in a cooperative environment. The discussion of this would bring out similar ideas among these groups and can help to come up with common policy measures for all. The other idea (by Jelica) was about having different countries debating against the UK government about work and employment crisis in the country. Our whole group continued discussing about which idea is to be taken forward. The main takeaway from this conversation was how collaboratively we talked about each one’s ideas and put in efforts to listen, understand and create one complete focus. More will be considered over this. The lecture also helped us in shaping this.

References:

Daniel McIntosh, The Uses and Limits of the Model United Nations in an International Relations Classroom, International Studies Perspectives, Volume 2, Issue 3, August 2001, Pages 269-280, https://doi.org/10.1111/1528-3577.00057

Davies, R. (2021, January 31). Creating a LARP Part 1. LARPBook. https://larpbook.com/2020/07/creating-a-larp-part-1/