Out, Attitude and Advocate are three of the biggest magazines aimed at gay men. Over the past five years they have each had so few cover models who are not white that straight, cisgender men have outnumbered people of colour by nearly five times, as the pop culture website Fusion reported.

The gay community is not some sort of progressive paradise, and queer people of colour are widely erased and treated poorly. The horrible and paradoxical message LGBTQ media largely sends out is that queer people of colour do not exist, and that even when we do exist, we don’t matter. It’s worth noting here the extent to which LGBTQ people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds have one of the highest rates of depression, suicide and self-harm of any demographic.

Oxford’s gay scene is not miraculously better: if you talk to queer students of colour, you quickly rack up stories about feeling unwelcome and othered in queer spaces. The LGBTQ Society’s weekly drinks is one of the whitest spaces in Oxford, and I’m sorry to say that. I’ve been lucky in Oxford and I’m normally pretty comfortable in being a different ethnicity to the norm, but those drinks made me look at my skin colour and feel truly unwelcome.

Gay men – and I suspect not just men – have internalised and promulgate racism as much as any other group does. Telling me that I’m your friend’s ‘type’ because I’m brown, however you phrase that or joke about how problematic it is, is flat out unacceptable. As much as I welcome the break from being seen through the all too common (trust me) lens of ‘desexualised South Asian man’, objectifying someone via the skin colour that marginalises them in our society is unquestionably harmful on a wider level and, to be frank, personally.

The current president of the LGBTQ Soc is a woman of colour, and it’s great that she and anyone else finds that space to be theirs or manages to make it theirs. What’s not great is that her feeling of belonging is limited to such a small number of individual people of colour, and only the boldest and most outgoing ones. She admits that “not enough” has been done but hopes to move forwards productively over the coming year, and I, for one, have great confidence in her.

Being queer and happening not to be white runs not only against mainstream cultural expectations, but also against the supposedly rebellious and accepting gay scene. There’s a reason early queer liberationists picked the rainbow flag, but the LGBTQ scene in Oxford right now is a little less colourful.

As the Brexit debate waffles on and European governments show increasing panic and confusion over how to react to the sheer scale of human movement towards the continent, it’s worth asking what a ‘border’ actually is. What is their physical presence, since there are no red lines in the dirt or floating out at sea? What does ‘strengthening’ one actually involve, given they aren’t some impenetrable force field? Borders are political entities, and one of places this is most apparent is at Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre in Kidlington; a place where various types of migrant are detained pending deportation or decisions on their case, often indefinitely.

On and off for the past few years I have visited people inside. Here is a collection of some of my experiences.

Campsfield House is a long way out of town. Unlike the prison in my hometown, a big castle-like building ten minutes’ walk from the station, detention centres tend to be tucked away, easy to overlook or forget. Immigrants are essentially stored away from the public eye, hidden along with the practices the state uses to protect our borders from people who have already crossed them. On the last Saturday of every month since it opened in 1993, the Campaign to Close Campsfield has held a demonstration outside the centre. A group of us have got a dedicated phone, and painted the number on a bedsheet. We stretch this out between a lamppost and a chain-link fence using washing line and bungee cords, so it is visible from the front windows, and shout the number through a megaphone, asking people to call and offering visits.

Firstly, the ways these men (it’s an all-male centre) arrived in Britain, and then the detention system, does not always neatly fit the conventional categories within which many place migrants. I have met international students who took the opportunity to study abroad to escape trouble in their home country. One attended a ‘scam’ college, one of the ‘visa factories’ the government occasionally cracks down on, which threatened to cancel his visa if he didn’t pay £ 200 for a textbook. I have met a man whose spousal visa expired when his marriage to a British woman fell apart. Another man’s immigration status (“I’m not going to lie, I got here illegally”) came to the attention of the authorities when a business rival reported him for a fictitious terror plot. One detainee, with a distinctive Brummie accent, didn’t even know he wasn’t a British citizen until he started to get in trouble. Another, who I talked to on the bus back after he’d just been released, felt a weird nostalgia driving through north Oxford, as he’d been here for his Master’s. I have met a man who made enemies back home by working as an interpreter for British and American forces, and one who fled smugglers after reporting them for supplying a group widely recognised as a terrorist organisation. Another promptly and correctly filled in all his visa renewal forms, but only found out his solicitor had forgotten to post a letter when men arrived at his door to arrest him.

Secondly, life in detention takes a toll. Of a pair of friends I visited, one chattered anxiously all through the visits, while the other, who had spent his first few days just lying on the floor, became increasingly silent, at one point too anxious to attend the visit at all. He eventually took advantage of the ‘voluntary return’ programme, hoping the danger to his life back home had blown over. Another spoke in dull monotone, having been prescribed a higher dose of antidepressants than anyone I’ve ever met. One was essentially having a midlife crisis in there. A large proportion of detainees, almost all, suffer from mental health issues. Sometimes this originates before they reached the UK (‘Rule 35’, prohibiting detention of victims of torture, is routinely ignored or sidestepped); sometimes it is brought on or compounded by the indefinite nature of detention.

A detainee’s stay in Campsfield is often short, disrupting relationships. Since it’s one of the UK’s nicest detention centres, relatively speaking, and detention centres essentially function as an archipelago, people are moved there for good behaviour, often shortly before being bailed. Others will be transferred again to another centre or ‘removed’ (distinct from deportation) within a few weeks of arrival. Detainees may spend many months (two-and-a-half years for one man I met) moving between centres, but only spend a fraction of that time in Campsfield.

A former detainee who had been in a Category D (open) prison before was shocked by the level of security (you have to go through six locked doors or gates to reach the visiting area). Campsfield is run for profit by a PFI company, Mitie, which runs other centres, as well as outsourced cleaning services. Detainees can work in the centre, contributing to its upkeep, running the library, computer room, kitchen, and so on. This gives them something to do and earns them the princely sum of £1 an hour, which can be used along with any savings they might have to buy phone credit or other luxuries.

Meals are close together, and one detainee explained that after one you are usually still full by the next, and so end up eating less. One detainee carefully explained to me the differences between what you were actually given and the menus Mitie show the Home Office in official budgets and reports. Between dinner and breakfast, however, there are over thirteen hours, and detainees cannot take food, even a yoghurt, back to their rooms for later. The (detainee-run) tuck shop charges full retail price.

What do detainees want? All of them want out, obviously. Some want little else, and one of the most dispiriting parts of what we do is telling them we’re just students, not lawyers, and can’t really help their case, but thank you for calling us anyway. A lot, however, are startlingly grateful for visits, for the demo, for the solidarity, for the fact anyone even knows and cares that they exist. One started the phone call, joining in on our chant, by just shouting “freedom!” A couple suggest telling the papers about this place, and explaining the general sense of routineness and indifference around immigration detention is hard. This, after all, is hardly the first article in Cherwell about the place.

Yelling “freedom now!” back and forth across the fence is a simple, effective and honest demand, but it is not the only one. As well as unlocked doors and legal rights, detainees want recognition of their moral right to justice. The fight against immigration detention – and we unequivocally oppose all immigration detention – is not just about freedom, but also dignity and recognition of mutual humanity.

Nigel Warburton, best-selling British populariser of philosophy, gave an unexpected answer when asked which famous philosopher he would most like to sit with on a 10- hour plane flight. “I wouldn’t mind sitting next to Diogenes; he has some great jokes. He might be a bit unpleasant to sit next to: as far as we know he was prone to defecate and masturbate in public. That aside, he was one of the funniest philosophers in history, and there aren’t that many jokes in philosophy.”

Sat in Blackwell’s, home of Nigel’s monthly Philosophy in the Bookshop interviews, Nigel goes on to reflect that this apparent humour deficiency has not hindered philosophy’s popularisation over the last few decades. “It’s actually been quite effective recently. In about 1988 I had a book commissioned called Philosophy: The Basics, and went to bookshops to find what was available as an introductory book, and basically it was just Bertrand Russell’s Problems of Philosophy, published in 1912, and a really good book called Philosophy Made Simple, but there was nothing else.”

“Now, if you go into almost any bookshop, there’ll be books on a table with introductions to philosophy generally or a wacky take on philosophy, or biographies about particular historical figures. Some are terrible, but some are really good. It hasn’t had that huge flourishing biology had in the wake of The Selfish Gene, a major achievement in popularising very difficult thinking, but I don’t think we’ve had a particularly bad time. The internet has also been fantastic for philosophy and it’s flourishing online: philosophers are communicating through Twitter, Facebook, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and through blogs and podcasts, including some wonderful comedians of philosophy.”

In light of this flowering, is there perhaps room for an iconic television philosopher? “In my youth there were several: first of all Brian Magee, who in my view has not been surpassed in terms of his series he made where he interviewed philosophers, now Michael Sandel. On the other hand, it’s really difficult to persuade a TV producer to go with the philosophy rather than some kind of visual accompaniment. We can’t just talk about philosophy, it has to be a quiz show or a biography, we can’t actually go with Nietzsche’s ideas, we have to go where he lived, go up a mountain, we have to get sidetracked by the visuals. I was phoned up because someone wanted me to do drunk philosophy, where everyone had to have a drink before they went on the show, which was crazy. Philosophy is a very verbal subject and television is a very visual medium, and if you start putting interesting pictures, you lose the actual content very very quickly, so it may not be a very good medium for philosophy: audio may be far better for philosophy.”

What Nigel does think is missing are opportunities to debate philosophy in the flesh, engaging in the ancient tradition of dialectics. “There are plenty of opportunities to find discussion of philosophy, plenty of books, podcasts and magazines, but there is something special about face-to-face philosophy, a situation where you can ask questions and have a dialogue. Opportunities for that are few and far between, especially for non-students. I’m really delighted I’ve been able to have a number of conversations in this Philosophy in the Bookshop series I’ve been doing in Blackwell’s, which is free and open for everyone. We have Roger Scruton and Cecile Fabre coming, all really interesting people. You get a glimpse of how they think, and then there’s the possibility of interaction with the audience. That, I think, is the missing element in the popularisation: finding ways to meet and discuss face-to-face.”

Asked whether the demographic interested in philosophy is changing with the times, Nigel pauses for thought. “I don’t know, it’s interesting. There’s certainly a lot of interest worldwide: the podcast Philosophy Bites has had over 28 million downloads, and has had episodes in the top ten of American iTunes, ahead of very famous podcasts. Whether it’s new or not I don’t know, maybe there are different ways of satisfying and measuring people’s interests. Michael Sandel fills football stadia in Korea, that’s quite remarkable. I wrote a book, A Little History of Philosophy, and the Turkish translation is in its 14th imprint. Internationally, I suppose, there are unexpected pockets of interest.”

Nigel also points out that the content of popular philosophy is diversifying at pace, but philosophy departments are often struggling to keep up. “What we’ve been talking about the last few months is a lot of interest in Chinese philosophy, and why it is not taught very much in American Universities; there have been a lot of articles online about Chinese philosophers, arguing that they merit inclusion in a Western syllabus. Philosophy is also starting to address its sexist past, and there is also more women’s philosophy coming through, as well as interest in finding lost female philosophers of the past. What I don’t see is philosophy departments seriously addressing diversity and the lack of representation, and many people would say that be shouldn’t, we should just employ the best philosopher, it’s just that the best philosopher always seems to look and sound a bit like the person who’s already in the job.”

Each month, Nigel Warburton interviews a fellow philosopher at Blackwell’s in a series of events entitled ‘Philosophy in the Bookshop’

Saints dominated early medieval Europe. They had the power to heal the sick and punish the sinful. They were judge, doctor and patron all in one. However, our knowledge of this phenomenon is woefully incomplete, something which Oxford professor Bryan Ward-Perkins is trying to change, in collaboration with colleagues from as far away as Warsaw and as a close to home as Reading. Ultimately, he aspires to create an online searchable database of all the obscure European saints that existed before 700 AD, accessible to any member of the public.

Yet, none of this would have been possible without funding to the tune of €2.5 million over five years from the European Research Council. Indeed, this project is just one of the more than 5,000 projects funded by the ERC since 2007. In amongst the grandstanding about sovereignty and the free trade debates, it is easy to forget the impact Brexit would have on academia.

Suffice to say, the EU currently plays a fundamental role in supporting UK universities, providing 16 per cent of its total research funding. Furthermore, the UK gets considerable bang for its buck: whilst it contributes just over 11 per cent to the EU budget, its academics were awarded 15.5 per cent (£5 billion) of the available money from the FP7, the EU’s last seven year research spending programme.

The key question is how to secure funding for future academic research, especially if Britain leaves the EU. Organisations supporting Brexit like UKIP Students are optimistic, arguing that leaving the EU would allow the UK to increase university funding using the money saved from stopping contributions to Brussels. In addition, Brexit campaigners suggest that it would be relatively easy to buy back into EU research programmes through bilateral deals, such as those enjoyed by Switzerland and Norway.

These suggestions have been ridiculed by ‘Scientists for EU’, a group set up to make the scientific case for remaining and supported by notable figures like Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal. The group’s Programme Director Dr Mike Galsworthy points out that Britain would not have an automatic entitlement to buy back into the EU Science programme, and suggests that there could potentially be substantial difficulties in doing so. He cites the example of Switzerland, which was prevented from competing for 70 per cent of the nearly €80 billion on off er in the EU’s current research programme, Horizon 2020, after it voted to restrict migration from the EU and thus violated the EU principle of free movement.

Moreover, the UK government’s record on science funding is mixed. The Chancellor’s commitment to real terms protection of the Science budget in the 2015 Spending Review was met with comparative sighs of relief from the academic community. They had feared a repeat of 2010, when funding was frozen in cash terms, or worse. In such a context, the idea that a government committed to considerable further public spending cuts would prove the panacea to the academic community’s funding woes is far-fetched.

Of course, the success of academic research depends not only on funding, but also on being stimulated by the right intellectual culture. The UK’s research success suggests that such a culture currently exists in the UK, enabling the country to produce 15.9 per cent of the world’s most highly cited scientific research articles whilst only accounting for 3.2 per cent of its research expenditure.

Many academics see this culture as under threat from Brexit, arguing that it would stop intellectual cross-fertilisation with the rest of Europe. They point out that it would threaten UK participation in programmes like Erasmus, which has enabled more than 200,000 UK students and 20,000 university academics to study at European universities. UK scientists would no longer be able to influence European science policy on the same scale, whilst non-UK students and researchers would be discouraged from working in a UK weakened by funding and cut off from Europe.

It is no wonder, then, that the academic community are anti-Brexit. It could only lead to their intellectual impoverishment.