Opinion

'Impossible to choose' Leah Mitchell We’ve had so many great articles this term that I found it impossible to choose just one! My particular highlights were...

"Working a job during university, it’s easy to become dissociated from both: always slightly excluded from the freedoms of non-working students, but never able to fully relate to the lives of coworkers."

"The Global Day of Action, the People’s Summit, and other actions in Glasgow over these two weeks demonstrate the anger and love that empower change."

"We can’t help but ask ourselves whether leaders care about leaving a planet behind on which the next generations can live."

"It’s taken a while, but I’m slowly coming to terms with the idea that even if I do change my mind in the end, there is nothing inherently wrong with taking the time to explore one’s identity."

Stories about the rise and fall of online scammers and their extravagant lifestyles in Nigeria can still be expertly told without making any reference to hushpuppi in particular. 

In my opinion, both sides make the same mistake here. They obsess over the leading man, either worrying that the holiday leaves us stranded or that it is necessary for him to rest before single-handedly facing the battles ahead. All of it leads to propping up the cult of personality that separates Boris from his party infrastructure.

I hope that the teachers and other academic staff of this university will see this article as an olive branch. We can work together. We can share solidarity for the betterment of all. We can unite the disparate popular classes of the university for the common good.

"While it is saddening that their work is necessary, Women’s Street Watch has become a way for women to seize control against a tide of news that they often feel they are helplessly swimming against."

When I was asked to write this piece I initially refused. I refused because now, five years since my first Gender Identity Clinic (GIC)...

My main concern now is, if exams are going to be in-person, how are they going to support us? The faculty has promised that we will have adequate time and means of preparing for our finals that are now in a different format to the one we have prepared for entire two years we have spent at Oxford. Is this task going to fall on individual tutors at each college? If so, not only is this extra work for them, but students may receive different levels of support and exam practice depending on their college. 

Zara Arif explores whether Oxford students should continue to wear sub-fusc following a year of online exams.

The Oxford Word of the Year award, run by Oxford Languages, is intended to be a word that ‘reflects the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance’. It is decided through various means, including individual social media suggestions, and high-tech software which scans millions of words from online publications over the past twelve months.

Rashford understands how tough life can be for people, while Boris seems to think it’s a bit like classical music -- he’s sure it’s all worthy of attention and so on, but just pretends to be interested in it so he doesn’t look bad in front of his dinner party guests.

Jo Cox’s murder in Leeds in June 2016 shocked the nation.  For the first time in since the 1990, when Ian Gow was killed by the IRA, a sitting British MP was brutally murdered for doing their job.  There were 26 years between those two tragic incidents, and now British politics is left facing a second deadly attack in five years.  But what steps can we possibly take to ensure that this violence ends?

Imagine working reduced hours over a four-day week and having a three day weekend, every week.   It seems like a radical idea, one that is...

My views here may be shaded by the fact that sailing events are generally mixed-gender, and women regularly out-compete men, especially at the university level. The SCEG suggests that trans women should be excluded from any sport they legally can be, by assuming that they hold some unfair physical advantage. The policy is overbroad and lacks nuance. The guidance does make one point I do agree with, that a "one-size-fits-all" approach is folly, and the only people that can really make this judgment are specific sporting bodies themselves. It would be a mistake, in my view, to rob trans women of the incredible adventure of competitive sport because of an assumption of advantage. Women's sports are not overrun with trans women; in fact, trans athletes are underrepresented in sport at all levels.

"The solution cannot be simply equality. It must be the dissolution of gender as we know it."

"Germans can expect that with Olaf Scholz ahead and a Green Party that despite its setbacks has never been so strong, they will have a government and a parliament that is more than ever preoccupied with climate change, and which will undoubtedly trigger important changes in German industry."

"Covid is ripping apart public confidence in institutions globally: at least in Canada, we tell ourselves, we still get to speak our conscience. But what if my conscience tells me that these institutions need to be rebuilt from the ground up?"