Monday, May 12, 2025
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Oxford study reveals COVID-19 can cause memory loss

Charlotte Keys
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Oxford study reveals COVID-19 can cause memory loss

Researchers from Oxford University’s Department of Experimental Psychology and Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences have revealed that people who have had mild symptoms of COVID-19 can show ‘degraded attention and memory for up to 6-9 months’.

Whilst it had been understood from previous studies conducted that people have suffered from cognitive symptoms including difficulties in concentrating, forgetfulness and fatigue, from an acute infection of COVID-19, these findings had not been proven amongst milder symptoms of COVID-19. Now researchers have found that this memory loss is consistent amongst people who have shown no other symptoms of long covid and have had asymptomatic to moderate symptoms.

155 participants were recruited for this study of which 136 were included in further analysis. 64 had contracted COVID-19 whilst 91 reported that they have not. Whilst none of the participants had received treatment in intensive care, three participants had been hospitalised and seven had displayed severe COVID-19 symptoms that had affected their ability to carry out day-to-day activities.

Stephen Burgess of the MRC Biostatistics Unit at the University of Cambridge highlighted the small number of people included in the study, also adding that it was not randomised. Despite this he said, “differences between the COVID and non-COVID groups in terms of several specific measures of cognitive ability looked at in this study were striking” and “despite the limitations of non-randomised research, it seems unlikely that these results can be explained by systematic differences between the groups unrelated to COVID infection”.

The study asked participants to complete a number of exercises which would test their memory and cognitive ability. The exercises had a particular focus on cognitive functions considered critical for daily life, such as sustaining attention, memory, planning and semantic reasoning.

A control group on factors including fatigue, forgetfulness, sleep patterns and anxiety were tested against all of the participants who had previously been infected with COVID-19, but they were not significantly different.

The study found that the participants performed well in most of the exercises. Their abilities including working memory and planning showed good results. However, participants performed significantly worse in their episodic memory abilities (up to six months post-COVID infection) and a greater decline in their ability to sustain attention over time (for up to nine months) against those who had not been infected.

Dr Sijia Zhao of the Department of Experimental Psychology said: “What is surprising is that although our COVID-19 survivors did not feel any more symptomatic at the time of testing, they showed degraded attention and memory. Our findings reveal that people can experience some chronic cognitive consequences for months”.

Overall, the results prove that specific cognitive abilities are affected by COVID-19 infection but that after 6-9 months these abilities are not significantly different than normal which demonstrates evidence of recovery over time.

However, it seems that these symptoms do wear off as Professor Masud Hussain has stated, “we still do not understand the mechanisms that cause these cognitive deficits, but it is very encouraging to see that these attention and memory impairments return largely to normal in most people we tested by 6-9 months after infection, who demonstrated good recovery over time”.

Image: Viktor Forgacs via Unsplash

Oxford researchers crack sweet potato mystery

Matthew Clark
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Oxford researchers crack sweet potato mystery

For over a century, the evolution of the sweet potato has been a huge mystery. New research from Oxford’s Plant Sciences department has revealed a key missing link that completely changes the prevailing understanding of not only this crop, but also migratory history of early humans.

Oxford Professor Robert Scotland, the leader of the team says, ‘How the sweet potato evolved has always been a mystery. Now, we have found this new species in Ecuador that is the closest wild relative of sweet potato known to date and is a fundamental piece of the puzzle to understand the origin and evolution of this top-ten global food crop.’

Sweet potatoes are ‘hexaploid’ with 6 copies of the chromosomes. Understanding when their genetic duplication event took place helps researchers to reveal when the sweet potato first evolved and became available to early human farmers.

Yet, researchers have long been plagued by a perplexing dilemma. The closest known ancestor of the hexaploidic sweet potato was only a diploid, with only 2 copies of the chromosomes. A new study by the Oxford team and collaborators, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the International Potato might have cracked the code: a tetraploid called Ipomoea aequatoriensis.

Genetics are a complicated subject that require very difficult research to make sense of. The numbers of genetics vary widely between organisms, with human beings having 46 chromosomes, resulting from a pair of twenty-three chromosomes, and ferns having 1,440 chromosomes.

Unlike mutations of single DNA letters, polyploidy is ‘obvious’ looking so it can be a great way for researchers to trace the evolutionary history of organisms and compare when the duplication events occurred. Especially for crops – it is estimated that up to 80% of plant species has undergone it at some point.

A quirky jump from two to more chromosomal pairs is not unprecedented. Multiple times throughout genetic history, organisms have jumped from two to four or more chromosomal copies. The sugar cane, for example, has experienced this phenomenon many times over, resulting in up to 12 copies.

Image: Llez / CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The politics of pink: A brief history of pink

Anna Mayer
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The politics of pink: A brief history of pink

As a Pembrokian, I have an affinity for the colour pink – our college is, affectionately, the ‘House of Pink’. I remember commenting that the horde of Pembroke Freshers meandering down Park End Street on the first Bridge Thursday of Michaelmas, donning our pink freshers t-shirts, resembled a kind of ‘pink tide’. My comment certainly invoked the rich, dare I say colourful, history that pink has, socially and politically. From various feminist causes to centre-left polity, the colour pink calls forth almost a century of political turmoil and turbulence.

The colour has long had a volatile meaning. Up until the end of the nineteenth century, it was a colour of youth; largely genderless, perhaps only slightly masculine by its association with red’s connotations of violence, anger and agression. By turns pink has been associated with luxury, the working class, prostitution, socialists. Indeed, according to Bloomberg, pink only became associated with femininity after the end of World War II, when canny advertisers began directing pastel pink appliances and upholstery towards women as an antidote to the military-inspired fashions and textile rationing of wartime. This was part of a postwar effort to remove women from the workforce and reestablish their traditional homemaker roles, marking out the feminine territories of the domestic and domiciliary and symbolising it within a self-contained pink universe of womanhood. It indicated a specific stratum of feminine experience.

This connotation was extended to baby girls in the 1980s when ultrasound technology was first used. Since then, using colour to mark out identity has become a distinctly 20th and 21st century obsession – take, for example, our preoccupation with the visual symbolisms of gender reveal parties and their perpetuation of blue and pink as gender signifiers. This theme is sustained by its multitude of gendered cultural associations, from the lazy stereotyping of Barbie memorabilia and stuffed Care Bears to y2k chick-lit and Mean Girls. At the same time, though, the 21st century has embarked on projects of subversion and, ultimately, destruction of the constraints of such binaries with only more seriousness. The global lexicon has stretched beyond such reductive gender-binary terms. Certainly, pink has been reclaimed as the unlikely hero of various feminist and LGBTQ+ movements, freed of its gender-normative shackles and given the power to challenge social constructs and existing paradigms. 

Following Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, the pink pussycat hat became a key piece of visual imagery employed by the Women’s March that opposed him – defiant and dissenting creations of knitted protest against Trump’s misogyny, namely his infamous ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’ comment. The march, which ended up being the largest single-day demonstration in US history, was an expanse of pink. The colour symbolised a story of sisterhood and solidarity in the face of a multitude of threats to women’s rights. Pink had staked its claim in the most divisive US election in living memory. 

The story of pink continued with Nancy Pelosi’s pale pink ‘mask-to-pantsuit colour-coordination’, to borrow the words of Hilary Clinton on twitter. Still the colour maintained its grip on the twitterverse, with the hashtag #AmbitionSuitsYou accompanying the motif of the hot pink pantsuit as part of a 2020 campaign to mobilise American women to vote. A number of celebrities unapologetically donned the pantsuit – Kerry Washington, Zoe Saldhana, Mandy Moore and Amy Schumer among them. One twitter user coined it ‘pink power’. The Guardian named pink ‘the colour of activism’ in an article published in the same year. Pink’s road to reinvention was driven by its reclamation and reappropriation within feminist politics.

Outside the arena of gender politics, the colour pink certainly gives a subtle nod to the ‘new left’ governments of early 21st century Latin America. Left-of-centre administrations in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela formed what the media coined the ‘pink tide’. Pink was adopted as a softer, more muted version of the socialist and communist red, in the same way that the pink tide’s social democracy was slightly more centrist and capitalistic than its radically Marxist counterparts and predecessors. A distinct turn towards progressive social and economic policies, the pink tide saw Latin American politics radicalised and their governments populated with former activists and trade union leaders. It was a resolute move away from the neoliberal model that persisted at the start of the century.

Ultimately, while this turn to the left resulted in significant reforms that worked to lift millions of people out of abject poverty, the leadership of these regimes were unable, in the face of the assault from vested interests, to sustain their hold on power to carry out the more radical changes necessary to realise a more equitable social order. That is not to say that the pink tide didn’t leave a pink shadow. It fundamentally changed the location of the centre of Latin America’s political spectrum, forcing right-wing candidates and succeeding governments to adopt more socially-conscious administrations. In many ways, it challenged the prevailing free-market fundamentalist Washington consensus. Once again, the colour pink functioned as a vehicle for powerful social and political change.

Indeed, as Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director of the Pantone Color Institute asserted, ‘our use of colour is connected to the cultural mood.’ ‘Colours that celebrate our desire to break boundaries satisfy our fervent need for playful creativity and unconstrained visual expression’ she said. Colours don’t have intrinsic meanings – they simply soak up the meanings that we project on them. They exist both within cultural, social and political categories, and across them. In this sense, the ever-changing significance of the colour pink has worked to define and redefine its own politics.

Image Credit: Wales Arts Review/ CC BY 2.0

In Conversation with Lynn Enright

Issy Kenney-Herbert
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In Conversation with Lynn Enright

I came across Lynne Enright’s book, Vagina A Re-Education whilst working in Waterstones after my A-levels. Initially, it was shelved alongside brand-new releases, however it soon joined the few other books with such titles like Women’s Health A to Z or Naomi Wolf’s Vagina, in the section titled ‘Illnesses and Conditions’. This bothered me – it seemed indicative that these sections had been designed by a man and books by, and for, women and other marginalised genders were being simply fit into whichever category was deemed least offensive. 

I tell Lynn Enright this when we logged onto zoom.

Lynne acknowledges that her book isn’t one easily categorised: “It’s not something you seek out during a specific bout of illness, it’s more about wellness – that wellness has become so associated with something other, but it should just be part of the everyday life and education.”

This was Lynne Enright’s first book; yet it wasn’t her first ingress into these subjects. She has written regularly regarding topics of health: “I am really interested in health and I love that as a subject. I wasn’t ever a health journalist per se, I started out in fashion.” Lynn categorises herself more as a feature writer, writing on a range of topics that interest her.

The genesis of this book is in her time as a journalist, specifically working for The Pool. Lynne was Head of News and Content when she worked there and noticed a trend: “whenever we did stories about fertility, infertility, pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, even smear tests, there was a really big response. I think information regarding those topics traditionally considered as ‘women’s issues’, have been neglected elsewhere in the regular media. And more widely in society, there are taboos around miscarriage, abortion, major infertility. So these pieces did well, and even the stories that didn’t get huge numbers you could see people on social media who were very engaged, and starting their own discussions – I think they felt heard and listened to and it was something that was obviously important to people.”

Lynne talks about how she could see this happening, set against the backdrop of her home in Ireland: “I have always been very involved in and passionate about the repeal movement in Ireland. We all knew it was coming for quite a while, but it happened around that same time though speaking about this book, and it just felt like a lot of those things were connected to, the bigger almost philosophical questions about consent or how we talk about sex. They connected to the reality of women and people in Ireland – that they weren’t allowed to access abortion and that was fundamentally connected with a lack of basic information about our bodies, so it was those things together that made me realise there was a book in it and that it was something worth doing.”

Her book also generated some personal revelations once she started to do the research: “I realised that I was learning stuff that I’d never known or been taught, and I was in my thirties writing this and had been through lots of things, had an abortion, was starting to receive fertility treatment, had been having sex for fifteen years and still there were things that I didn’t know. Realising that, whilst being very enlightening, was also troubling…”

Lynn’s personal experience informed her writing, however through the process of talking to people to further research her book, she was astounded by the universality of her own experience: “I grew up in Ireland, and I was in the state school system which the vast majority of people are. And here most state schools are run by the Catholic Church and so sex education was really lacking, but I was really surprised as I was interviewing people for research for this book, to realise it’s basically lacking everywhere.”

She goes on: “You know, it’s very rare to come across a country that has really nailed sex education, and you can come across schools, individual schools that have done very well but that’s almost random, it is usually down to the head teacher in the school or if there is a teacher that feels passionately about the subject and would like to take it on.”

Lynne further remarks on the absurdity of sex education being regularly outsourced: “in Ireland it is often outsourced to a Catholic campaigning group – it’s bizarre that we allow that aspect of education to be so unregulated, it’s not as if we’d let a campaigning group just come in and teach any other subject, but that happens with sex education.”

Lynne has said “it’s time for quite a revolutionary shake up of sex ed” – I now wish I’d asked her what she thought of the series Sex Education!  

The conversation moves forward, as Lynn creates a persuasive argument for sex education needing to continue past the point of our school lives: “there’s only so much that you can teach in school and it has to be age appropriate, and then you’re out in the world.”

 She talks about an article that she wrote regarding the controversy about the blood clots caused by the vaccine and the pill: “I don’t think that it’s really a fair comparison as there are different types of clots, factors etc. However, I think it was connected to the fact that women feel like they’re prescribed the pill, without really much consultation, they’re not told about the side effects or the risks. In the UK and in Ireland we have a health system that’s quite like paternalistic, that presents the authority of doctors, and we don’t often feel that we can have an open two way conversation about our health or our bodies.”

We voyage into a discussion about the issues with the Conservative government stripping back funding of the NHS, which has left people without having a two-way conversation because you need to get in and get out “and this conversation can’t be done in 10 minutes”.

Lynne articulates her gratitude towards the NHS, especially in comparison to other health systems globally, yet she highlights the issues including often it being challenging to seek a second opinion: “And it’s not impossible, and you can do it but it’s not made easy for people, and, and you know I think doctors do point out that you need to advocate for yourself. I feel like I didn’t really know that you should until recently, I think it’s more a part of American culture, but not so much in British culture. I don’t think we really think about self-advocacy and we don’t go to the doctor having necessarily engaged with what we think is wrong with our own bodies. We should continue to have an ongoing conversation and relationship with our own bodies.”

We need to recognise how institutions have a role to play in this. I reflect to Lynn on the circumstances of my own arrival at university, having been an avid reader of feminist literature since fourteen. I’d read a myriad of books including Lynn’s, finding myself surprised by just how many people didn’t know basic information regarding sex, contraception or how to even discuss their own sexual pleasure. I truly believe that universities have a bigger role to play than they currently accept in helping to provide key health services and educate more widely. Lynn and I find ourselves in agreement, however she goes further: “I think as we grow and enter into different institutions, they need to take on the mantle of education. I saw that Channel 4 introduced a menopause policy, but recently they introduced a pregnancy loss policy as well. Institutions throughout our lives have a role – in some cases to educate, and in some cases to facilitate and to acknowledge that there will be challenges and circumstances that people will face like illness or like menopause and miscarriage, which aren’t illness but need that same sort of framework to be dealt with in a workplace environment.”

I shift the conversation to a question I’ve been wondering since reading her book – why call it Vagina A Re-Education? A lot of the issues regarding the lack of sex education and issues surrounding sexual pleasure can be boiled down to the vagina/vulva divergence.  Most people use the term ‘vagina’ to refer to the female genitals, when the vagina is technically the muscular tube leading from the external orifice to the cervix of the uterus. The vulva encompasses the exterior female genitals including the clitoris, and thus is incredibly important when discussing issues such as female pleasure. Lynn says: “Really the title is because vagina is still what most people say, and, and that’s that.”

She elaborates a bit: “I didn’t really grasp that point but I started researching and even in the early drafts of the first chapters I was talking about the vagina. Then actually I read a theorist who makes the point that by not naming the vulva we’re doing it a disservice that rang true and it suddenly made me realise that we don’t talk about the vulva.”

Lynne and I further voyage into a discussion over the importance of names, and that how the names we are comfortable using in society are informed by this patriarchal lens of childbirth and heterosexual sex: “We don’t think about, you know as uncomfortable as we are talking about vaginas, we’re more comfortable talking about them because they facilitate childbirth.” And this is what Lynn Enright plays with in the title of her book– that comfort level that we have with the word, and the fact that we regularly mean the vulva when saying vagina is emblematic of how far sex education and our social understanding still have to go.

We’ve discussed at this point sex education and its various flaws, so I enquire if there is an ideal sex education that she would like to see?

Lynne pauses before saying: “Around the time I was writing this book, I spoke to people from Australia, Lebanon, Ireland and the UK, and what everybody has in common was that pleasure was never mentioned. I think that it’s quite tricky because, you know, that not necessarily the point of school, like school isn’t there to teach kids about the pleasures of sex, but at the same time if it’s never mentioned, then you are doing students a disservice.”

“When you have an education that focuses on sex as something to be sort of avoided for women, it often then positions them as the basic gatekeeper. The women I spoke to, when they were teenagers, sex had been positioned as something that men would want from them, and that it was their job to protect themselves against pregnancy but also male desire. The male desire was positioned as a more forceful, more powerful desire than female desire which wasn’t mentioned. I don’t think that you can really have a have a good interesting robust conversation about consent, without talking about or at least acknowledging pleasure, and the fact that female pleasure exists.”

“That’s what I mean we have to be quite revolutionary and radical – I think it’s still quite bound up in gender norms and it’s still a little too squeamish”

She is willing to conceded that there are certain priorities in the sex education that should remain: “Of course, the main things you are going to have to focus on are preventing teenage pregnancy, girls, women and people with vaginas needs to know about their periods and those are completely valid.” However, she wants it said that sex education “shouldn’t just be scary. And so many of the women I spoke to felt honestly quite scared after their sex ed classes and that’s not right.”

We discuss how divisions in schools between boys and girls and the patriarchal value placed on boys’ sex education versus girls’ further facilitate this fear: “periods become something that only girls have to learn about – it makes them quite private and it continues that taboo – they are engrained into the education system that protects boys from hearing about those things.”

“I knew all about wet dreams. Firstly, I felt that like they were really common and everybody got them and that’s actually not the case, but also wet dreams, they’re not particularly relevant to me as like a teenage girl, you know? But I feel like that was comprehensively referred to in my sex education, and I think there is a disparity there.”

I enquire further about the thread in her book regarding damaging myths, in particular the hymen. She entitles her chapter on this topic ‘The Hymen, a Useless Symbol’: “You know, the way we talk about the hymen is particularly dangerous, because whilst other myths are damaging, this myth – the definition itself – is not correct. The hymen as a ‘seal that’s broken’ – that’s untrue. I think it’s really interesting that we’ve come to understand a piece of our bodies, a physical thing, completely according to patriarchal values – that’s just quite striking.”

She sits back for a second, before continuing: “I went on this kind of journey of realising the extent of the harms that those myths can cause and the ramifications of them – how every time you’re told a lie or not told the whole truth about your body, it disempowers you and that can have devastating consequences.”

I ask her a final question: ‘it’s now two years since you published Vagina A Re-Education, is there anything that you think you would include now that you didn’t include at the time?”

She pauses before saying: “The discussion about trans rights is more relevant than ever and sadly the situation for trans people has become even worse, so that is still something we’re really fighting for.” In the introduction of her book, she acknowledges that “not everyone who has a vagina is a woman. I know that there are women who do not have a vagina. I recognize that we are living in a time when there is, especially among young people, an increased reluctance to see sexuality and gender as fixed and binary. I think this will only be a good thing for vaginas and people who have them … this book generally refers to cisgender girls and women when it says girls and women, largely because I am constrained by the currently available data and research.”

She goes on to state that: “When I was writing actually, I had to rely on data from the US about black women’s maternal health because there wasn’t the data to discuss the situation in the UK. And now since I’ve written a book, figures have been released that show the UK is even worse – the outcomes are even more dramatically different in the UK. Also, there’s more and more information coming out about fertility and infertility and the disparities within communities, accessing that treatment in the UK, but also about the success rates. So, I think those are all things that I would have liked to have looked at and this illustrates there is still work to do.”

Finally, we discussed how the categorisation of her book inspired a change in Waterstones – we introduced a Women’s Health section. Lynn’s face lit up, and our interview concluded talking about the importance of change: “The thing about change is that you have to keep going. This book involved realising something that all feminists realise – that there have been women doing this work for literally centuries. Change isn’t linear, and you have to keep going and keep building off the work that has been done before.”

Image Credit: Lynn Enright

Wearing the colour pink

Clementine Scott
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Wearing the colour pink

Every year of my Oxford degree so far I’ve optimistically bought a ticket to the Pink Night fundraiser, and every year I’ve arrived at the same quandary a few weeks later: what to wear. I know it isn’t particularly sustainable to be buying new pink outfits every year with little repeat wear potential, even if they’re thrifted, but I am occasionally too weak to resist the promise of a fresh Instagram post, and so I have become well-acquainted with the pitfalls of wearing pink. Every possible shade of the colour seems to come with its own potential issues — pastel can feel a bit fairy princess, or worse, bridesmaid, coral makes it seem like you didn’t think you could pull off a ‘proper’ pink, and Schiaparelli-esque fuchsia is such a domineering shade that it threatens to wear you rather than you wearing it. 

I also think that part of the reason why pink can be such a difficult colour to wear is found in its diverse usage in popular culture. Much has been made of the mid-20th century shift from pink as a ‘boy colour’ to a ‘girl colour’, through landmark hyperfeminine iterations of the colour worn by Mamie Eisenhower on Inauguration Day 1953 and Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but less is made of how pink was now the definitive colour not just for girls, but for every type of girl. No other colour has had quite such a range of iconic female characters in film clad in it. While white and black-based looks still adhered to the Madonna-Whore dichotomy, pink was the definitive colour for every section of the spectrum of female archetypes from toxic feminine mean girl icons like the Pink Ladies and Regina George, to Molly Ringwald’s ingenues, to genuine role models like Elle Woods. In the words of the Lebanese designers Azzi & Osta, pink “represents the softer or the wilder side of a…woman”.

Yet this universal palette of pinks provided to women across the board has inspired some reactionary approaches to the colour. The mid-2010s were the age of ‘millennial pink’ as the subject of derisive Guardian articles, and pastel manicures clasping rose gold iPhones, and more than ever before pink was associated with a particularly delicate brand of femininity. At the same time, to a certain group of people born between 1999 and 2003, a certain shade of pink brings flashbacks to Tumblrs filled with sunsets and bubblegum pink cigarette lighters overlaid with Lana Del Rey lyrics or questionable takes on mental health — here, suddenly, was pink gone grunge. The point is, people wanted pink femininity but without any hangups about being bad feminists, and the result was an aesthetic that seemed more regressive than any cinematic rich bitch’s go-to pink blazer. By the time Jodie Comer’s Villanelle made her debut in pink tulle in 2018, and stars from Gemma Chan to Dakota Johnson took cues from her at the Oscars the following year, the idea of an edgy, ‘not like other girls’ girl in head-to-toe pink felt a bit passé.

So where next for pink? Who What Wear forecasts a step away from millennial pink and soft pastels, and towards hot pink, via Zendaya power suits and ubiquitous Jacquemus bags. However, just as paler pinks bring to mind troubling questions about our femininity and how we express it, brighter pinks can tread a fine line between feminine power and caricature. As long as pink has its cultural and political baggage, there will be few colours through which one can express oneself in a wider variety of ways. With the problematic versatility of pink uppermost in our minds, let the annual Pink Night outfit search commence.

Image Credit: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Trailer

Oxford researchers to lead 4-day work week trials

Humza Jilani
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Oxford researchers to lead 4-day work week trials

After a year that has seen skyrocketing numbers of resignations, the surging popularity of working from home, and corporate rethinks during the COVID-19 pandemic, employers are scrambling to hold onto talent and avert the worst of the so-called Great Resignation. 

Researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge might have found a solution: a 4-day work week, which is set to be piloted at up to 30 companies throughout the United Kingdom. Similar tests are expected in the United States and elsewhere.

Participating companies will slash work hours from 40 hours a week to 32, and will closely monitor any changes in productivity and employee satisfaction. The trials will launch in June 2022 and last for six-months. The trial is also expected to cover issues such as corporate environmental footprints and gender equality, reflecting a feeling from companies that the growing concerns of employees and activists have to be addressed. 

The U.K. version of the trial is overseen by 4 Day Week Global, a nonprofit pushing for shorter work weeks and improved labor rights, in partnership with researchers from Oxford, Cambridge, and Boston College. Researchers will analyze data about productivity, interview participating companies, and think of metrics to measure the overall success of the program. 

Researchers and advocates hope that the trials will produce an informed report that can be used as a template for companies thinking of making the switch. They also hope to use the report to sway the opinions of policymakers. Already, France is pondering a 32-hour work week, which would be a reduction from the country’s 35-hour work week.  

Advocates hope to show that reducing working hours to four days, without cutting pay, will result in the same productivity and economic returns for corporations. There is some anecdotal evidence that reducing hours can counterintuitively increase productivity and staff retention, thereby saving costs for companies, as well. 

Campaigners argue that cutting work hours can easily be achieved by cutting down on meetings and relying on technology to sort through workloads. One of the biggest hurdles that supporters hope to overcome is perception. Previous trials have had mixed results, owing to the different needs of specific sectors. There are also fears that shortening the work day would come with a cut in worker compensation, potentially creating new problems for workers and exacerbating burnout. 

The COVID-19 pandemic led to surging interest in their work, as the explosion of work-from-home policies led to a broader reconsideration of norms in the Western office culture. 

The trials are the culmination of four years of organizing and advocacy by the 4 Day Week Global, founded by Andrew Barnes and Charlotte Lockhart. According to their website, they’re committed to finding solutions to improve business productivity, worker health outcomes, strong families and communities, and promote gender equality. They claim that the five-day work week emerged from organizers seeking to reduce the previous six-day norm a century ago. They see their own work as the successor to that movement. 

Image: Israel Andrade

Jesus and New College announce support for “Thinking Black” creative writing prize

Elena Rotzokou
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Jesus and New College announce support for “Thinking Black” creative writing prize

Jesus College and New College have announced their intention to collaboratively support Thinking Black’s 2022 Creative Writing Prize.

The writing competition, which is part of Thinking Black’s Year 10 creative writing course, is launching in March 2022 and is targeted at Black British Year 10 students. Providing participants with a prompt, the course asks them to respond in the form of writing they engage with the most. This year’s prompts are:

Folk Tales – African and Caribbean Writing

Windrush – Post-War Migration Literature

The Diaspora – Contemporary Black British Writing

Writing Fundamentals – Poetry, Prose & Drama

Dr. Matt Williams, Jesus College’s Access Fellow, views the college’s sponsorship as an inroad into making higher education in Britain more equitable: “We are delighted to be working with Thinking Black and New College on this new creative writing. It is essential that the University of Oxford and its colleges work towards widening participation of Black British students in higher education. Thinking Black do such tremendous work with young students and it is our privilege to support them.”

Daniel Powell, New College’s Head of Outreach has stated: “We are very pleased to be supporting such an important initiative. We are proud to be a College that is fully committed to widening participation to university, and recognise the importance of these sorts of activities to increasing aspirations and ambitions of students from under-represented backgrounds.”

Thinking Black is a social enterprise founded in 2017 in an effort to equip young Black British people with transferable academic, communication, and leadership skills that allow them to evolve into successful leaders. It has supported over 200 Black British students over the years and is already being sponsored by Oxford’s Pembroke College. Its current administrative team consists of eight Oxford students and graduates.

At the moment, Thinking Black supports four programmes, each one tailored to a specific age group from Year 8 to Year 10 and focused on one of the following areas: art history, public speaking, essay writing, and creative writing.

As participants in the programmes, students enjoy access to lectures, discussion groups, and skill-oriented workshops, as well as a syllabus of books, articles, and music by Black thinkers. Black university students and graduates mentor participants to assist them in producing a researched piece of work on a topic of their choice, for which they can receive a cash prize or which they can get published. They also have the opportunity to attend a Celebration Day at Oxford University.

Hope Oloye, Director of Thinking Black and an alumna of Pembroke College at Oxford, has spoken about the Year 10 programme New and Jesus College support: “We’re so glad to be launching our new Creative Writing Prize in partnership with New College and Jesus College. The programme provides young Black students across the country with the opportunity to attend high-level lectures, access diverse works of Black literature, and formulate written responses. Students will be rewarded for their work with cash prizes and publication in an online anthology. We can’t wait to get started!”

Thinking Black’s website states that the programme aims to enable participants to “cultivate a more personal relationship with writing.”

Image: Bencherlite / CC BY-SA 3.0

John Evelyn: 3rd Week, Hilary Term 2022

John Evelyn
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John Evelyn: 3rd Week, Hilary Term 2022

It’s been a horny few weeks at the Union. With the termcard set, the excitement of the first few weeks abating, and the spectre of elections still just far enough over the horizon, your indefatigable committee members have been left with far too little to do and have begun shagging one another.

Nowhere has this been more true than on sex-retary’s committee, where current and former members alike simply can’t keep their hands off each other. On a particularly big night out, one member plucked up just a bit too much Dutch courage and found himself waking up East of the Cherwell in an unfamiliar bed, but next to a familiar face. 

Meanwhile, it’s been from one extreme to the other for the Univ Queen. Last time it was OULC. This time it was the attempted sex party by the Wannabee-Bullingdon Boys over at the Hayek Society. But our Queen and her consorts weren’t there for the sex. No, they were horny for some votes. Unfortunately, in their haste to attend every hackable event that evening, they forgot to abide by the dress code. Imagine showing up to a black tie Tory sex party in casual dress. My lord, the humiliation. No secret after-party orgy at the Randolph for you, tut-tut.

It was not all in vain, however, as it has been reported that the Queen may have slated one of her very own Wannabee-Bullingdon Boys, none other than the Italian Stallion himself. Perhaps the future does hold a few Randolph after-parties. John Evelyn is not envious. Still, anything would beat going to the non-orgy after party that wound up in the  lair of a particular Greek God.

In even sexier news, the ROs are now in fisticuffs over exactly what system should be used to decide the order of precedence for replacing empty committee positions in the event that a committee member resigns or is removed. I guess that’s what they get up to when they have too little to do.

Finally, in the sexiest but saddest of news, the Union has eaten of the forbidden fruit and been ripped from the Garden of Eden. It shall be dearly missed.

Well, that’s been another two weeks in this veritable bone zone. John Evelyn apologises for the filthiness of his colleagues and promises his next entry will be more highbrow.

More to cum. John Evelyn x

Oxford Goes Underground: In Conversation with Komuna

Flynn Hallman
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Oxford Goes Underground: In Conversation with Komuna

Three Wednesdays away from Komuna’s launch event at Plush on the 16th of February, Deputy Editor, Flora Dyson and I sat down to chat with the group’s director, Adam Possener. 

The event is advertised as ‘an immersive night of Queer funk, jazz, contemporary classical and techno music’. It aims ‘to celebrate queer contribution to experimental music as part of Pride Month’. It’s the first project of Komuna, a collaborative group of musicians and artists, split between Oxford and London, and we wanted to get to know more about its origins. Adam explained that the idea for the project came from his experience attending the experimental Warsaw Autumn festival over the summer. “I’d never heard classical contemporary stuff in a club before,” he said, “I thought it was really cool, and something there’s not as much of in the UK”. He went on to talk of the underground nature of the festival, and its conduciveness as an environment for flourishing countercultures in musical experimentation and underrepresented artists and approaches. “I came back thinking ‘I want to do that here,’ so I got some people I know together”.

Shortly after its formation, the group agreed on the name, ‘Komuna’. “It’s a Polish word,” he explained, “It kind of translates as ‘to commune,’ or ‘have an intense conversation’”. The name neatly captures the atmosphere Adam associated with the Warsaw Autumn festival, promoting the interactivity of a music event with the intensity and energy of the underground scene. We asked how he hoped the Plush event would also achieve this. “There’s going to be such a variety of music styles,” he said “and the idea is to blend them seamlessly”. Rather than having one act after another, he spoke of different sounds, performances and approaches to genre “progressing into each other, hopefully to try and make the experience as immersive as possible”. “From funk to experimental jazz, you can trace a path,” he explained, “the more experimental the jazz is, that can then go into the classical, and then go into the more techno stuff” and so on. The intention is that “everything is amplified,” he said, there’s live music as well as DJ sets “so it should run seamlessly from DJ into string quartet.” In the spirit of the group’s creative experimentation, this blended approach extends beyond the event’s music. Textual recordings are incorporated into the set-lists, while all the group’s artwork (some of which has already been released on their instagram page) is done by their own artist and graphic designer. 

The topic of conversation then turned to Plush’s suitability as an underground setting capable of providing a similar sort of counterculture atmosphere to that of the Warsaw Autumn festival. “It’s a really cool space,” he said, “its underground, quite small and confined, they don’t normally have live music there but I think it will be quite an interesting environment for it.” 

We wondered how the night’s music would reflect this aesthetic, and particularly how he hoped it would celebrate queer contributions and experiments in music. “We’re trying to celebrate it but not completely separate it,” he said. “We didn’t want to ghettoise the music, it’s about focusing on underrepresented artists within those spheres.” He gave the example of one of the songs on the string quartet’s repertoire for the evening, ‘Gay Guerilla,’ by Julius Eastman. A late 20th-century minimalist composer, Eastman’s body of work has only recently begun to receive greater critical acclaim and public exposure, and Adam spoke enthusiastically of the process of hunting down his original, scrawling, handwritten score in order to adapt it for the string quartet ahead of rehearsals for the event. 

Asked about his views more generally on underrepresentation of queer artists in the music industry, he referenced techno as a prime example of a genre with popular heteronormative associations, with a tendency for queer contributions to be underrepresented and delimited. “You have to delve deeper into a genre to find different artists,” he said, “because they’re all there, but when it’s done it’s done separately, as only for the queer community”. In this sense he also spoke about his hopes for Komuna’s launch to bring something new in comparison to more mainstream pride events. Beyond (and by no means belittling) the Lady Gagas of the world, he outlined that “there’s so much more that also needs to be heard at these events.” In a similar vein, we wanted to hear more about his views on underrepresentation and a lack of choice in the Oxford music scene. “There’s a lot of the same music being played,” he said, especially with a lack of club venues playing things outside the repetitive Bridge and ATIK pop repertoire. “Even on the classical side, lots of it here is very samey,” he admitted, perhaps hinting at the immutable presence of Bach and Elgar billboards outside the Sheldonian. With this lack of musical range naturally comes a lack of representation, and in turn, a diminishment of opportunities for individual expression. As he went on to say: “what’s useful about having [the range of venues catering to different music genres] in London is that you have a scene, there’s a vibe and aesthetic, and you don’t have that here so you have to kind of make of it what you can.” This seems to be the key aim for Komuna’s launch on the 16th of February. “It’s about what you do with the space,” he said, not only hoping to bring respective music scenes to Oxford, but on the same night, at the same time, and in the same room. The hope is ultimately that by enabling these scenes to seamlessly interact with and inform each other, they will also inspire a different kind of interaction between those attending the event. In this sense the theme of ‘conversation’, evoked in group’s name, seems all the more apt. As Adam went on to explain, this also ties in to the dress code for the evening. Left as one word, ‘experimental,’ he explained that “the dress code is a way for people to relate to the event.” The genres or sounds people associate themselves more with will “feed into their style, and so that improves on the conversation idea, because by showing and wearing or performing an outfit they’re part of the night and its atmosphere”.

The event is marketed as unique for Oxford. Its tagline of ‘this is not your average club night’, full of the potential for platitude, actually feels genuine. Amidst your average Oxford term-table of late night kebab peregrinations, and reluctant, instantly regrettable, trips to Bridge or ATIK, Komuna’s launch in a few week’s time represents an attractive experiment in a means of escape. I mean, what’s not to like? It’s at once a club night and an underground festival, it will have multiple DJs and live music performed by a string quartet, all with the intention of celebrating pride month through an immersive interspersion of sounds, outfits, and influences.

We ended our chat by asking Adam how he would sum up the evening as an experience for those attending. He answered honestly: “it’s an experiment for everyone… maybe you’ll end the night at a kebab van, but you’ll have had an experience that’s a bit different”. Now there’s certainly no cynicism about kebab vans here, but to take his point a bit further, maybe it’s worth considering what journey you want to take to that famed destination of the Oxford night out a few weeks from now. Hopefully it will be after resurfacing from Plush after a new, interactive, underground experience of an Oxford music event, and not another Wednesday stuck in the ATIK.

Thanks to Adam Possener for the interview. 

Follow Komuna’s instagram page @komunacollective for event playlists and more info about the launch. 

Image credit: Gala Hills, graphic design: Kayanne Shaikh

Headington Shark at centre of heritage dispute

Daniel Moloney
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Headington Shark at centre of heritage dispute

The owner of Oxford’s Headington Shark house has become embroiled in an argument with Oxford City Council over the iconic landmark’s heritage status.

The sculpture, which was erected in 1986 by journalist and broadcaster Bill Heine, was the cause of a six-year planning row with Oxford City Council. Heine had submitted a planning application, which the council rejected. He appealed to the then-environment secretary, Michael Heseltine. The rejection attracted a wide audience who came to the shark’s defense. Peter Macdonald, Heseltine’s planning inspector, ultimately decided to allow the sculpture to remain. 

Now though, the Shark sculpture at 2 New High Street, Headington, is one of 17 proposed additions to the Oxford Heritage Asset Register. The position of the City Council is far different than its original attempts to remove the sculpture, and instead they intend to preserve it. 

The sculpture was constructed by John Buckley. He worked alongside a group of volunteers consisting of students and anti-war activists in what was a three month process before the shark was transported to its permanent location.  

Magnus Hanson-Heine, who inherited the house in 2016, is adamant he does not want it added to the city council’s list of important pieces of heritage. The quantum chemist, who works at Nottingham University, said there were two aspects to his objection to its inclusion on the heritage asset register.

Dr Hanson-Heine said he feared it was “a stepping stone” towards getting it listed on a national basis, meaning more planning controls, although “this is academic as I have no intention of removing it”. On top of this, if it was listed, it would go against the purpose of the sculpture, which was to protest planning restrictions and censorship.

He said: “I see what they are trying to do and I’m sure it’s very well intentioned. But they don’t view it now as what it is. You grow up with these things, they become part of the scenery and you lose focus of what they mean.”

“My father always resisted giving any conclusive answer to the question of what the meaning was of it as it was designed to make people think for themselves, and decide for themselves what is art.”

“But it was anti the bombing of Tripoli by the Americans, anti-nuclear proliferation, anti-censorship in the form of planning laws specifically.”

Dr Hanson-Heine qualified this statement when speaking to Cherwell stating, “Those were clearly reasons for putting the shark up, but the surreal shock of seeing something like that unexpectedly and having the chance to look again at your surroundings and the art work with “fresh eyes” to add your own meaning, I don’t think that’s an afterthought.”

Dr Hanson-Heine does not ‘resent’ the council for the years it spent trying to have the controversial sculpture removed or for finally approving of it. However, he has complained about the alleged restrictive nature of the public consultation on the addition of these landmarks.

He said: “The nomination forms have been, let’s say, lacking in that they do not really provide an option to object to the listing for listing’s sake.”

“They ask questions like ‘do you think it adds value to the area’ which most people would say, yes it does. They have not given the option to say no. They have not truly consulted in that sense.”

The consultation ends on January 26 after the deadline was extended from December.A decision will then be taken as to whether the nominations should be added to the register. Inclusion of a building or place on the register “helps to influence planning decisions in a way that conserves and enhances local character”. However, it does not place any extra legal requirements on owners.

Image: Eoin Hanlon

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