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Community recording studio opens new youth centre in Oxford

News Joshua McGillivray -
In-spire Sounds, a local recording studio and community group, has opened a new purpose-built youth centre in Oxford. The creative base, located at 9 Park End Street, is around 15 times larger than In-spire’s other studio on Aristotle Lane in Jericho. It includes classrooms, recording and rehearsal studios, and mentoring spaces, designed to accommodate aspiring young musicians. In-spire Sounds was established in 2018 by Kingsley Pratt-Boyden, a musician, producer, and youth project director. The organisation provides facilities for professional recording and mixing,...

Comment

Features

An offer is only half the story: The challenges facing college outreach

Leo Jones and Fin Dinnen -
Microsoft Forms and student satisfaction polls mark our email inboxes each year as the University-wide drive for tour guides, alumni testimonials, and the best college-branded pens and tote bags begins. From TikTok trends to...

Across the Atlantic: American academics are finding a new home at Oxford

Anish Vedantham -
As political and financial pressures mount across American higher education , a quiet migration is underway. A growing number of US academics are relocating elsewhere, and Oxford, with its collegiate community, institutional stability, and...

How to build a ball

Mair Andrews -
Students have started reaching out to Oxfess to solve the annual dilemma: which colleges are hosting balls, and which are the best to go to?  Within weeks of unpacking in Michaelmas, inboxes fill with calls...

(A call to) Action: Oxford’s clash of real and reel

Leo Jones -
Hogwarts students run up the Christ Church stairs. Saltburn’s stars roll cigarettes on a Brasenose College quad. And My Oxford Year’s Anna and Jamie wander up to Duke Humphrey’s Library.  Walking through Oxford, you’d be forgiven for thinking there are two levels of reality. First, the actual, which involves hungover...

Half the world away: How regional transport issues impact far-flung friendships

Frank Duffy -
Travelling cross-country has never been easy, but UK transport is, predictably, delayed in its arrival to the 21st century. Long journey times and sky-high train fares make travelling difficult, frustrating, and expensive. With friends spread across the country, students feel this acutely, but not always equally, as regional differences in...

‘A dangerous moment of repression’: How is the US higher education crisis affecting the UK?

Mary Huan -
Over the last year, universities have become flashpoints of protest and backlash. Student protest is nothing new, but the heavy-handed government response is notable. In the US, President Donald Trump’s administration has utilised the federal government’s power against higher education institutions, particularly those in the Ivy League. Spending cuts,...

Profiles

Richard Ovenden: “We are guardians of facts and truth, rights of citizens, and identities of communities”

Hattie Simpson -
From his office in the Clarendon building on Broad Street, Richard Ovenden calls libraries “the infrastructure of democracy.” These words are spoken with the authority of someone who clearly sees preservation not as nostalgia, but as a duty – a form of stewardship for knowledge itself. As the 25th...

Interview with Mishal Husain ahead of the Romanes Lecture

Conor Walsh -
Mishal Husain is an award-winning journalist, author, and broadcaster. She was a household name at the BBC for over two decades, working as the broadcaster’s Washington Correspondent and as a presenter on Radio 4’s Today Programme for eleven years. Husain is now Editor at Large at Bloomberg Weekend, and...

In Conversation with Cherry Vann, Archbishop of Wales

Magdalena Lacey-Hughes -
“I have a strongly-rooted faith that my gender and my sexuality is part of who I am and part of what God created, and that therefore is part of what I bring to my ministry.” The recent election of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullaly, was front-page news,...

In Conversation with Sathnam Sanghera

Hattie Simpson -
Sathnam Sanghera doesn’t believe in tidy or easy stories. Whether writing about empire in his award-winning books Empireland and Empireworld, or his own family in his 2009 memoir, The Boy With The Topknot, he seems most at home in the uncomfortable space where opposite things can be true at...

Culture

‘Controversial but compelling’: ‘Women Beware Women’ Reviewed

Abigail Lakeland -
CW: Sexual assault The Michael Pilch Studio might just have been the perfect venue for Women Beware Women. Intimate and beguiling, the audience were made to feel almost as naked as many characters onstage wanted to be. I attended the final Friday-night performance of the three-night run. Inside the black-box, pillars...

GCSE drama nostalgia: ‘The Detention’ review

Elyce Croker -
The Detention provided its fair share of giggles, but whether that was a result of humour or awkwardness is up for debate. There were undoubtedly many merits to this production: if looks could kill, then Liz Freeman’s mean girl character, Sasha, certainly slayed. Stanley Toyne’s portrayal of stern teacher Mr...

The power of the playlist

Sophie Hough -
"These ten precious songs ... will become a time capsule"

Ceilings, wives, and love letters to the city: The Pre Raphaelites in Oxford

Nancy Gittus -
It was in 1857, not long after the construction of the Oxford Union, that its architect, Benjamin Woodward, was visited by his close friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was this very visit that sparked the creation of the second Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood. Upon deciding to take on the painting...

Life

Quod review

Beatrix Arnold -
A landmark of the High Street, Quod boasts an opulent facade, its name reminding me of my doom on the way to my Latin lectures. And so, when they extended an invitation to review the restaurant, I welcomed the chance to dispel its previous negative associations. On a gloomy...

Never safe again: Consent and the college campus

Anonymous -
CW: Sexual assault; mention of suicide. When you walk into college on the first day, you experience community, a sense of stepping into belonging. Consent talks are delivered between icebreakers; there’s a seemingly endless cycle of club nights and coffee trips for people to get to know each other. Everyone...

Girlhood will not save you

Lilly Law -
I spent a good deal of time last summer trying to work out why bows made me so irrationally angry. Twice, walking while on the phone to my mum, I burst into a rant after just seeing one. To have one bow-induced word vomit on Cornmarket Street is a...

Grieving in Oxford: Tips from a bereaved student

Eve Ryder -
Grief touches all of us, and yet none of us in quite the same way. My grief is different to yours, to his, to hers, and to theirs. This can make it feel isolating at times. At Oxford, the relentless pace of academic output, the churning mill of essays...

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