Actor, activist and disability rights campaigner Samantha Renke was back on campus recently to receive her Outstanding Alumni Award. Samantha is one of four outstanding Lancaster alumni to receive an Alumni Award. The awards recognise Lancaster graduates who have made a substantial contribution in their field and have developed an outstanding national or international reputation amongst their peers.

After graduating in 2008 with a degree in Area Studies (German), Samantha undertook teacher training and worked as a Modern Languages teacher. There followed a move into the world of acting and into motivational speaking as well as disability rights consultancy. Samantha is in high demand as a patron or ambassador for many organisations and charities, including ADD International (Action on Disability and Development) and made it onto the UK’s ‘Powerlist of 100 Most Influential Disabled People’.

Samantha was born with the condition called ‘osteogenesis imperfecta’ (or brittle bones) but has never let her condition – or anyone else’s uninformed attitudes – get in her way. She has recently published a hugely inspiring memoir entitled You are the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread (Ebury Spotlights, 2022) and has media credits that include Celebrity Antiques Road Trip, Rip Off Britain, Sunday Morning Live, Loose Women, Jeremy Vine on 5, The Disability Paradox, Front Row and Word of Mouth.

Samantha returned to campus to receive her award and join in the Bowland College graduation ceremony. She took time to visit the department and to reminisce with us about some of her courses and tutors at Lancaster University. Professor Fiddler describes Samantha as a ‘trailblazing student who helped Lancaster to think more about how to accommodate diverse needs, both in the tangible sense of improvements to buildings as well as in the realm of teaching and learning practices’.