Tuesday 22nd July 2025
Blog Page 299

Alice in Wonderland themed campaign launched to support Oxford local businesses

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In the run-up to Christmas, Alice from Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland will be appearing on the streets of Oxford as part of a City Council campaign. The campaign, launched on November 15th, aims to encourage shoppers to return to the streets and support independent businesses. 

The six-week project is designed to showcase the city as a hub of tourist activities, from shopping to fine-dining, in a bid to increase visitors during the festive season. 

The high volume of independent businesses and small boutiques in the city centre are expected to profit from the campaign, which is hoped to increase footfall during a crucial month. 

In November of 2019, a similar campaign was launched. The Council filled the Covered Market with sculptures of the White Rabbit, Gryphon, Mock Turtle, Cheshire Cat, Caterpillar and Dormouse, all of which were taken from Carrol’s novel. 

Lewis Caroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland studied at Christchurch and composed his famous novel whilst living in Oxford. Carrol’s characters have long been used to bring magic to the city. Now, the Covered Market is once again decorated with fantastical figurines. 

Between 2019 and 2021, the Covid-19 virus stunted many celebrations. The restrictions on in-person shopping have had severe impacts on the independent shops that rely on tourism and holiday trade.

Oxford City Councillor Susan Brown told the Oxford Mail: “The pandemic has seen a big reduction in the number of international visitors to our city and we are keen to continue to support businesses across our city to recover. Oxford is particularly magical at this time of year and I would encourage everyone to enjoy our city and remember to support the local businesses that make it so vibrant when planning your Christmas shopping and entertainment.” 

Funded by the Government’s Contain Outbreak Management Fund, established to support businesses at a crucial time of year, the campaign will feature a range of interactive elements to encourage shopping locally. These will include digital adverts on county-wide bus shelters and on-board Thames Travel buses in the south of Oxfordshire, as well as posters in local media including the Oxford Mail. 

Extensive content filmed by Independent Oxford and Fortitude Communication will highlight the broad range of entertainment the city has to offer, from the independent businesses of the Covered Market to the attractions of Westgate. All businesses will be encouraged to promote the campaign by tagging #VisitOxford on their social media channels.

The event will be further promoted by the Oxford Mail, with editor Pete Gavan emphasising the need for the Oxford community to rally around its local businesses after a very challenging year and a half. Other partners will be collaborating with the Council to deliver a multi-channel marketing campaign in the hopes that tourists from both inside and outside Oxfordshire will choose to do their Christmas shopping in the city.

An abundance of other activities are running parallel to the Wonderland theme to encourage even more interest. The Robin Hood pantomime, Christmas Arts Market, Christmas Carols, and Narnia Story Walk are just a few features in a line-up sure to get Oxford’s streets buzzing with festivity. 

The campaign is intended to reach students, locals, and tourists. The City Council seems hopeful that Alice in Wonderland will be able help make the Christmas season truly “magical” for its independent businesses. 

Image credit: Meg Lintern

Oxford University and the alienation of working students

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The cliché goes that working in customer service will teach you a lot about people. The key thing I’ve noticed is that a few lines in the sand will define who you are and who you can be. At Oxford University, this set of lines is everything. Not just that, but the bar of privilege is so highly raised here that being ‘average’, or even above average, seems to translate into disadvantage.

It’s hardly original to accuse Oxford of being disproportionately tailored to the most privileged in our society – private school students, white students, cishet students. That is pretty much the first thing people will rush to tell you when you apply here. In recent years, Oxford has theoretically diversified its intake (whether sufficiently or not is pretty controversial): but is the system that’s in place actually equipped to support this apparently changing demographic of students?

One of the many, and potentially more subtle, inequalities in privilege we encounter here is the divide between those students who have to maintain jobs to support themselves financially, either during term time or in the holidays, and those who don’t (a divide which admittedly sounds relatively banal compared to the reputation of -isms and -phobias that Oxford already boasts, but is real nonetheless).

Students working jobs is not something out of the ordinary anywhere else, and most working- and middle-class students must take on a part-time job at some point. As a bottom line, having a job as a student should not be a problem, and is much less of a problem at most other universities that do not adhere to our term structure. So why is it so hard to handle here?

The University website states that no student may exceed 20 hours of paid work per week. We are also told that a minimum of 40 hours of our week must be dedicated to academic study. On top of this, we are  encouraged to take on extracurricular activities, internships, and leadership roles within our colleges, as well as attending formal events and of course our actual teaching hours, which for me amounted to 16 hours per week in first year.

Let’s be utopian for a moment and suppose that we survive all of this and somehow also manage to eat three meals a day and sleep eight hours a night. Even if this was sustainable, the national minimum wage for 18-20 year olds is £6.56 per hour. So working for this at maximum capacity during term time, according to University rules, you could earn £131.20 per week. According to the University website, living costs at Oxford vary between £14,100 and £20,520 for 12 months, so between £271.15 and £394.62 weekly on average. Thus, the maximum amount of working hours permitted would not be financially viable for a student who has to support themselves on a minimum wage job. 

In my experience, owing to the structure of the intense eight-week Oxford terms, students that need to make money have two options: either to find a late-night job in something like a nightclub and accept that they will never sleep, watching from one side of the bar while the rest of their cohort enjoy themselves on the other side, or to work extra time in the holidays. Having done both, I would suggest that neither is going to give you a great relationship with your degree, or with anything else for that matter. There is also an underestimated disconnect between university life (and the social expectations that come with that), and the atmosphere and demands of the working world.  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. A sticky, vodka-soaked bar becomes symbolic of a line we always feel like we’re on the wrong side of. 

For a student obligated to earn that cannot during term time, the amount they have to work during the holidays to compensate for not earning for eight weeks at a time (supposing that, according to the National Minimum Wage and Oxford’s 20 hours a week policy, they have lost at least £1049.60 per term) inevitably amounts to burnout. They also have less time to pursue internships and unpaid opportunities for their CV, less time to socialise, and less time to do pre-reading or revision for their degree. Not to mention the feeling of isolation, scrolling through festival posts and holiday pictures in between shifts, knowing that if you work overtime you might almost get out of overdraft by the time term begins. This is before even acknowledging that working full-time in most manual labour or so-called ‘low skilled’ jobs requires an enormous amount of physical exertion that can lead to long-term health issues that are constantly undermined by those who have not experienced them. Being unable to evenly distribute manual work and academic study at Oxford is fundamentally incompatible with functioning mental and physical health. 

Thus, the structure of the term means that even outside of Oxford term time, working students are placed at a disadvantage when they do return to read for their subjects, already behind academically and burnt out during a period when they are expected to rest and revise. 

So, as much as Oxford can claim inclusivity by extending and diversifying their intake, what good is half-hearted representation if you cannot take care of these students or allow them to take care of themselves? If you change the type of students at the University, but maintain the system of education that was devised specifically for the most privileged in society, all you are doing is propagating these disadvantages in an altered setting.

This also doesn’t just apply to those from traditional working-class backgrounds. Regardless of their household income, many students simply cannot rely on their families for financial help. Considering that student loans are based on the parents’ earnings, without consideration of actual disposable income, even the students eligible only for minimum student loan may not have access to financial support from their families. Studies have also shown that financial manipulation is a primary mode of control for an abusive parent. Not just that, but regardless of the student loan someone is entitled to, the anxiety surrounding paying it off is, for many, enough to force them to find extra money. Fundamentally, there are so many reasons why a student may choose to supplement their finances with a job which can’t always be inferred. By disfiguring this element of choice, Oxford is not just excluding the disadvantaged, but solely catering for the extremes of privilege. Change is required for the structure of teaching to be ever truly accessible. 

Something we also commonly hear is that Oxford students shouldn’t have to work during term-time because they can get hardship funding from their college. While there are a few options available (some more useful than others), this doesn’t acknowledge some of the glaring holes in Oxford welfare that might make students unwilling to approach them, given that pursuing hardship grants usually requires a certain level of personal disclosure that many would not be comfortable with, given the staff in question. Many students also do not feel that they qualify for ‘hardship’ for the reasons stated above. For many, working is a way of securing a necessary financial independence, something which should not be held from us as autonomous adults. Furthermore, hardship funds are often offered in the form of loans which must be paid back the following term, an assumption being made that the student will be able to return home and find a way to pay it back. This kind of blanket approach to funding is just another aspect of Oxford’s frankly ignorant attitude towards less advantaged students. 

The purpose of this article is not only to help students who can relate feel less alone, and not at all out of bitterness towards those who can’t, but to insist that we review Oxford’s traditional system of teaching and expectations of students. Oxford must either create allowances for those students who have to work, rather than punishing them, or restructure learning to be more flexible. It must also provide specialised welfare and more financial support. Changing the student intake doesn’t actually fix the problem; we are being invited into a system that was not made for us. And to those who tell us that being within Oxford is an opportunity to exploit the system positively, consider that it becomes impossible to take advantage of an institution when you barely have time in a day to breathe. Many people will rush to pat you on the head and say that it will be worth it, because in the long term you will gain opportunities as a member of  Oxford’s prestigious alumni, but if that means years of burnout, alienation, and long-term issues for some and not others, then that can never equate to accessibility or equality.

Image Credit: Billy Wilson / CC BY-NC 2.0

New College tortoise, ‘Tessa’, actually male

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After an eventful trip to the vet, it was discovered by New College students that Tessa the tortoise is in fact male. 

Not only that, but he is anywhere up to 40 years older than the students initially thought. 

Tessa the tortoise was gifted to New College in 2013, at which point it was assumed that the tortoise was an 18 month old female. 

Tortoises are a common pet for Oxford Colleges, with Corpus Christi holding an annual Tortoise Race in Trinity Term. 

It is notoriously difficult to tell the difference between male and female tortoises until they are mature. Even then, the characteristics of each sex can be difficult to distinguish. 

However, students at the college have been left wondering how Tessa’s age and sex were both wrongly determined. 

As a result of this revelation, Tessa will experience change to his care, which is administered by students on a rota basis.  

This includes no longer adding Calci-Dust to the tortoise’s food, as he is a mature tortoise who is unlikely to grow anymore. 

Tessa will also now have wildflowers and weeds integrated into his diet.

After discussions with Tessa’s original owner, it was decided that Tessa should retain his given name. 

The vet’s trip that caused this revelation also revealed, thankfully, that Tessa is fit and healthy. Perhaps we will even see him competing in the Tortoise Race next year!

Image: @newcollegetortoise via Instagram. Used with the permission of the page’s owner.

Michael-Akolade Ayodeji elected President of the Oxford Union, Connect slate wins all other major positions

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Michael-Akolade Ayodeji of the INSPIRE slate has been elected President of the Oxford Union for Trinity 2022, winning 486 first preferences and 52% of the vote. Ayodeji was the Librarian of the Oxford Union in Michaelmas 2021. The results were announced in the early hours of Saturday morning, as a return to physical ballots increased the challenge that the Returning Officers faced. Candidates on the ground told Cherwell that the mood was tense but excited, as they and members prepared to hear the results of the election. 1039 votes were cast, compared to 819 in the online election the term before.

The three other officerships were won by the following candidates:

Librarian: Charlie Mackintosh (CONNECT) with 460 first preferences

Treasurer: Naman Gupta (CONNECT) with 434 first preferences

Secretary: Anjali Ramanathan (CONNECT) with 502 first preferences

The results were a victory for the CONNECT slate, although their presidential candidate Ambika Seghal lost her race. The election itself was a rarity, with the presidency being contested by the librarian in Michaelmas term and a member of the Standing Committee. Anvee Bhutani, president of the Student Union, stood for Secretary’s Committee for Michael-Akolade’s slate.

Those elected to Standing Committee are: 

Jacobus Petersen (CONNECT) with 101 first preferences

Josh Chima with 108 first preferences

Larissa Koerber (CONNECT) with 131 first preferences

Daniel Dipper (INSPIRE) with 133 first preferences

Alex Fish (RESILIENCE) with 209 first preferences

Those elected to Secretary’s Committee, in ascending order, are:

Nicole Reid (CONNECT), Anvee Bhutani (INSPIRE), Matthew Dick (CONNECT), Disha Hegde (INSPIRE), Lukas Seifert (CONNECT), Jana Everett, Alex Garcia (INSPIRE), Victor Lamotte (CONNECT), Emma Zinkin (RESILIENCE), Jenny Grehan-Bradley (RESILIENCE) and Justin Hayto

Image Credit: Nato on flickr.com

This article was corrected at 9:17:58AM, November 27th to reflect that Josh Chima is not a an official member of the INSPIRE slate due to an administrative technicality.

This article was corrected at 18:33:45PM, November 28th to reflect that the Secretary’s Committee members are elected in ascending, not descending, order.

2 billion doses of Oxford vaccine delivered

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AstraZeneca announced that the vaccine they jointly produced with researchers at the University of Oxford had reached its 2 billionth jab. 

Additionally, a new paper, published in collaboration with AstraZeneca in Biotechnology and Bioengineering, tells the story of how a key discovery just before the start of the pandemic unlocked the possibility of large-scale manufacturing. 

AstraZeneca has faced some setbacks in the last year, from slow deliveries in Europe to rare side effects and lower efficacies than mRNA counterparts, leaving regulators in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe hesitant to scale up its delivery. As demand for vaccines in Western countries has waned, AstraZeneca have delivered more jabs overseas. 

Today, the vaccine is produced in fifteen different countries, with jabs having been delivered in over 170 countries. The Anglo-Swedish drugmaker initially rebuffed pressures to make a profit on its 2 billion vaccines, while its rivals netted billions in revenues. This year, AstraZeneca is set to make a loss on the vaccine of 3 cents per share, according to the Financial Times. They recently announced they would transition to obtaining a “modest” profit from sales of the vaccine.

Despite its extensive experience of vaccine development, the University had never manufactured more than a few thousand doses of any single vaccine until 2020. The Oxford team, headed by Dr. Sandy Douglas, followed a three-step process to take the vaccine out of the laboratory and into the arms of hundreds of millions in need.

First, in January and February 2020, researchers experimented with a simple process to manufacture large amounts of the vaccine. Second, they persuaded manufacturers in the UK, India, China, and Europe to start prepping the vaccine, well before the first clinical volunteer had even been approved. They “franchised” the vaccine, which meant they outsourced production to different sites throughout the world to ensure vast distribution across multiple countries in need. Third, researchers forged a vital partnership with AstraZenaca in May 2020, which allowed them to tap into the pharmaceutical giant’s immense resources and ramp up production at an industrial scale.

The researchers believe the success of the “franchise” strategy provides a template for remedying global vaccine shortages in future pandemics. The same process can be applied to other adenovirus-based vaccines, helping to close gaps in equitable access to vaccines.

Image: Marco Verch Professional/CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

145 looted Benin artefacts identified by Oxford

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Oxford University has identified 145 artefacts under the stewardship of the Pitt Rivers Museum which had been plundered during a 1897 assault on Benin, and has committed to working with the Nigerian government to repatriate the artefacts.

In February 1897, British forces released a salvo of rockets, shells, and gunfire on the then-Kingdom of Benin’s capital city. The British burned the city to the ground, and built a golf course on the ruins to celebrate their victory. Subsequently, they grabbed the Benin Bronze artefacts to take back to London and line the halls of museums and private residences.

The findings and conclusion come against the backdrop of a global debate over the obligations that formerly colonizing nations, such as the United Kingdom, have to return artefacts taken from Africa, Asia, and the Americas during colonialism. In 2020, an advisory committee in the Netherlands recommended that the Dutch government return items taken without consent from Indonesia, Suriname, and many Caribbean islands. In the United States, indigenous people have used legal routes and activism to advocate for the repatriation of ancestral objects swiped by the American military and collectors.

In a statement from earlier this year, Oxford University said the Pitt Rivers Museum was “working with Nigerian stakeholders… to identify best ways forward regarding the care and return of these objects”. The work is part of the Museum’s programme to research the origins of its collections and identify those objects that were “taken as part of military violence or looting, or otherwise contentious circumstances”.

“We acknowledge the profound loss the 1897 looting of Benin City caused and, alongside our partners of the Benin Dialogue Group, we aim to work with stakeholders in Nigeria to be part of a process of redress,” concluded the University’s statement.

The Pitt Rivers Museum website describes the looting of the Benin Bronze artefacts as “one of the most explicit examples of British colonial power removing art by force… in the interests of imperial expansion.” Delegates from the Royal Court of Benin have visited the Pitt Rivers Museum twice, and representatives from the Pitt Rivers Museum visited Nigeria in 2019 as part of a Benin Dialogue Group.

The Group, along with the Digital Benin Project, brings together museum directors and researchers from Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, with representatives from the Edo State government, the Royal Court of Benin, and the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria.

The 145 objects in the Pitt Rivers Museum comprised less than 1.5% of all of the items looted in the attack. A further 10,000 objects taken during the raid are spread across 165 museums and private collections throughout the world.

The objects remain on display in the Pitt Rivers Museum today.

 “The Museum has received confirmation from the Oba and Royal Court of Benin that they would prefer the Bronzes to remain on display,” reads a statement on the Pitt River’s Museum website.

Image: Jorge Royan/ CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons 

Bouncer’s rejection: it’s not you, it’s him.

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Just a quick disclaimer that this is definitely in no way based on any personal, ego-related trauma or inner wound from a recent real event. I simply just wish to provide some hypothetical guidance to those who may have gone through this randomly-imagined humiliating situation. Not that I know what this must feel like or anything, but when a French bald 6,4ft man with the arms the size of two bouncy castles looks you up and down and in front of about 500 people tells you that you are an underserving speck of insignificant scum who should never leave their house again and should never have left in the first place (not in so many words maybe, but a look can convey potent sentiments, trust) it must not be the crème de la crèmiest feeling on planet Earth. (I can only imagine of course). 

So, here is the purely hypothetical situation at hand: It’s Halloween. You’ve queued for the club for an hour and a half, and you are getting your ticket ready while your friends in front of you go in. It takes about half a second longer for you to yank that little unrelenting piece of paper out of your unnecessarily packed wallet, but finally there it is. You hand it over, having made the bouncer wait half a second longer. He, him, the man, the total stranger in front of you gives you a look (the look, communicative of potent sentiments previously detailed), shakes his brick head in quasi-imperceptible movement and that’s that. Finito. Your fate has been decided. You are not going to give the crying drunk girl in the toilet fake consoling compliments. It’s ciao ciao babycakes. And you have only two choices here: to start sobbing uncontrollably like an 8-year-old whose Nintendo has been confiscated for the evening, or to simply stoically accept that 3 hours of your time and 3 ounces of your nearly-finished foundation and now-substanceless Chloe perfume (& 3 stomach-defeating vodka shots) were all in vain. Pour rien. But can you imagine sobbing uncontrollably like a Ninento-ridden child in front of 500 people? Christ. Could never be me…

However, I urge you to not be superficial in taking the rejection at face value. Just like the boy in school who used to kick you in the shins definitely had a life-consuming crush on you, the droid-faced bouncer standing in the way of you and your alcoholic sweaty mosh pit-induced dreams must be hiding a secret form of infatuation. Hear me out. Your figure is looking the best it ever has and your dress is hugging it like they’re two reunited BFFs who have not seen each other in over four years. Your eyes are so foxy and lifted that aliens would be jealous and your lips are a shinier than the Eiffel tower in the rain. So, you have definitely not been rejected on the basis of your appearance. And as much as I do think that sometimes one can engage in some form of telepathic communication (like on the metro, when you are connected to a stranger through mutual identification of a sudden disagreeable stench permeating from the man that just walked in) there is no way you and robot-faced bouncer man have communicated mentally on any level. So, this is clearly very much a him problem. 

Here are the only four possible explanations for the rejection:

  1. 1. (The obvious one) He has a sudden love-at-first-sight crush: You are his exact type. Everything he’s ever wanted. So you’re distracting him and he already needed the toilet but now because of you he’s literally about to wet himself. 
  2. 2. He is colour blind: This would make a lot of sense. Your blue Brats Doll Halloween wig isn’t resonating as to him it is red, and because your dress is pink he does not enjoy the pink and red outfit clash (although, if he were to get up to scratch with Vogue’s latest he’d know red and pink are a deeply sophisticated mix). Just a pearls before swine situation.
  3. 3. You look like his ex-girlfriend: Not much to say here. His out-of-his-league hot girlfriend cheated on him with his best friend and that is not your fault. Nor is the resultant blend of your parent’s chromosomes.  
  4. 4. He is gay: Just like Leo in the year above was unfortunately definitely gay because he didn’t get with you at Ella’s house party, similar case here. And as much as you may have sexuality-transcending sex-appeal, it can’t work on everyone.

Listen, I know it’s gutting. Especially when you’ve just listened to a 50-minute positivity podcast about not comparing yourself to others and being happy in your own skin. A bit difficult to trust you though, Ms Positivity Adrienne, after watching all your fellow Brats Dolls strut towards their sweaty mosh pit dreams and being denied the same strut. Unfortunately, you cannot control what human (pri*k) was plopped in front of you at that very moment. You can, however, control whether or not you will choose to emit the mousy squeaky voice of despair (which exists somewhere within us all, alongside the Karen). And as much as I understand (and validate) the urge to let him know you hope he gets a papercut in between his fingers and a truck doesn’t fully run him over but just his toes, we must supress our inner squeaky Ninento-ridden voice. Especially when there are 500-odd spectators. 

All jokes aside, it was disgusting to leave a drunken girl in a skimpy outfit outside on her own and let all of her friends in. I’d go as far as to say slightly sadistic. A perverse power trip. But here are 2 reasons I thank him:

  1. 1. Just like I learnt from my awful ex, and would actually relive that relationship just for the colossal subsequent glow-up that ensued, I thank Bouncer for prompting an imminent new one. (Still waiting).
  • 2. I will never have a boring shower again. (They were getting quite mundane). Now each one is a new exhilarating opportunity to perform an (increasingly aggressive and improving) monologue. Funny how uncanny the resemblance between a human and a motionless shower tap can be. 

But ultimately, I wouldn’t stress too much because the French word for bouncer is “videur”, which means “emptier”, so it is literally his job title to extract the gems from the garbage. You are the gems.

The COP26 coalition: Politicians won’t save us, people will

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Following a link in a tweet three months ago, an email and a training session the same evening, a few texts, train tickets, months… and we were here, a friend and I, in Glasgow, for the middle weekend of COP26. A pink sign with a picture of an anonymous rural woman standing in a desert, the dry ground fissuring away from her feet like shattered glass, hung above us as we exited the station: “NO TIME FOR DELAY, LET’S GET TO WORK: THE WORLD IS LOOKING TO YOU COP26.”

We were here to volunteer with the COP26 Coalition, a coalition of groups and individuals organised around the principles of climate justice. For communities in the global South there has been “no time for delay” for decades. The initial economic growth of the global North depended on industrialisation powered by fossil fuels and displacement, murder, and theft of the global South, before a shift to economic policy that perpetuates  this dynamic. Climate justice identifies the planetary environmental crisis as being rooted in this divided political ecology and advocates solutions that address these root causes.

The Global Day of Action, organised by the COP26 Coalition for the middle Saturday of the conference, saw hundreds of thousands of people gather in cities around the world to rally for climate justice. In Glasgow alone we found ourselves in the company of more than 100,000 others, including other stewards in high-vis, friendly smiles, standing in the pouring rain. The march was organised into 13 blocs with different emphases, highlighting how the climate crisis intersects with different movements and systemic struggles. Leading the march was a bloc for Indigenous peoples, raising awareness about the urgent need to centre the leadership of Indigenous people in the climate and ecological crisis. Other blocs in the march focused on anti-racism and anti-oppression, farmers and land workers, as well as  climate justice generally. We were at the biodiversity bloc, marching under the wings of a giant puppet RSPB avocet.  rainbow emerged as the rain cleared and we chanted: “What do we want? CLIMATE JUSTICE. When do we want it? NOW.”

That evening we attended a talk by climate representatives of QUNO (the Quaker United Nations Office) and Quakers in Britain which outlined the processes and challenges of COP26 in the context of previous COPs and climate justice principles. A key policy area that came up in the discussion was ‘loss and damage’ finance: a framework for industrialised nations to direct money to enable countries in the global South to cope with and recover from the immediate impacts of climate change that they are already experiencing. The moral dimension of this finance was emphasised – the global North is (in general terms) directly responsible for the death and destruction being experienced by the global South, and so the former must do all they can to help the latter cope.

This issue of loss and damage was first raised in 1991 by the Alliance of Small Island Nations, but was only included in international policy in the Paris Agreement of 2015, via the Warsaw Mechanism formulated two years prior, but this money has not materialised. At COP26, global South countries are still pushing up against resistance to loss and damage financing. A closely related issue is how much international finance is assigned to adaptation. Currently, about 20% of climate finance goes to adaptation, with the rest assigned to helping mitigate emissions. One of the primary aims of COP26 is to achieve the $100bn per year of climate finance directed from ‘developed’ nations to under-developed nations that was set as a target for 2020. Currently, it looks like the finance will not be achieved until 2023 and the Least Developed Countries negotiating bloc is still trying to secure assurances that 50% of the climate finance will go toward adaptation. Loss and damages and adaptation are the focus of Monday’s COP talks, ongoing as I travel from Glasgow.

Sunday saw the beginning of the COP26 Coalition’s People’s Summit, which comprises a huge range of events across the city and online, running till Wednesday. After a shift helping set up at some of the venues, I attended events ranging from workshops on transitioning to a non-growth-based economy and by the Collapse Total campaign – which is mobilising global action against the French fossil fuel company (one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters and still expanding operations in Africa and elsewhere) – to talks on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants. The final event we attended was ‘Indigenous Feminisms’, given by five Indigenous women and femmes from present-day Central and North America. This panel emphasised how the climate crisis affects the food, homes, and communities of Indigenous peoples, areas of life where femme people often have an integral role. They emphasised that Indigenous people are not a monolith, but represent a huge diversity of cosmologies and aspirations. The panellists agreed that respecting the sovereignty of these diverse communities through free, prior, and informed consent is a fundamental pre-requisite to upholding Indigenous rights and ensuring climate solutions (including nature-based solutions) do not perpetuate colonialism. 

Over the course of the weekend I met and talked with other young people advocating for climate justice and was energised and inspired. We shared our frustrations at not being taken seriously by people in power and at how when we are included it is often tokenistic and most of the time unpaid. With this in mind, I was pleased to see the release of Youth4Nature’s ‘Global Youth Position Statement on Nature-based Solutions’, which included a call that, “NbS implementation must follow strict binding social and environmental safeguards, with a focus on ecosystem integrity and functions, meaningful participation and free, prior, and informed consent from Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, human and Indigenous rights, and rights of nature.”

Those that contribute least to global greenhouse gas emissions are currently suffering the most, yet national and international policy frameworks do not go far enough to support them and instead pander to the influence of powerful extractive industries. 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. A grassroots, bottom-up movement founded on solidarity among oppressed groups is a vital compliment and antidote to top-down multilateral directive frameworks if we are to address the root causes of the climate crisis.

Image Credit: Dean Calma / CC BY 2.0

Paris Photo 2021: Getting All the Angles

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Thursday, November 11, 2:00 pm, picture this: bustling isles, shuttering cameras, and sales of thousands of dollars happening on the spot. A promising opening day to Paris Photo 2021. The Grand Palais Éphémère, so named because it stands in for the permanent exhibition hall situated across the Seine, appears the ideal location for the return of Paris Photo’s 24th edition, a celebration of an art form that captures the transient image. The largest international photography fair welcomes a community of collectors and photographers eager to abandon JPEGs and over 200 exhibitors ready to host in-person art experiences.

“Seeing images on a screen is not the same as the physical encounter with them in person. It gives another dimension to the image, it’s more alive,” Gosette Lubondo, a photographer from Congo and winner of the Maison Ruinart Prize, says discussing her series Manu Solerti (meaning “with an expert hand”). Lubondo is very much inspired by place, and when considering how to best capture Ruinart’s champagne estate she asked herself “why not render an image of the people who are as present in this space as the three-hundred-year-old caves themselves?” Her photographs pay homage to the unseen work of the women and men who produce Ruinart champagne. Lubondo superimposes images of her subjects, both opaque and nearly transparent, to “insist on the temporality of life, on the presence of one person at a specific time, in a specific location.”

On location

At Paris Photo, the importance of physical presence cannot be overstated. Valerie Whitacre, sales director of Hamiltons Gallery in London, notes “photographs bring groups together to discuss in the present, while also serving as artifacts of a time and place, of a person and a project they completed.”

Indeed, gallerists took into great consideration the in-person viewing experience of exhibited works. Hamiltons turns its stall into a dark room with exposed light bulbs, with the result akin to a camera obscura effect on the works displayed. In the dim-lit stall, the subjects positioned against white backgrounds in Richard Avedon’s series In The American West almost demand face to face confrontation. The dramatic scale of the photographer’s work calls upon visitors to pass the threshold of the image and glimpse their own humanity in the sitters’ raw emotions. While at Pace Gallery, curators take care to give equal attention to master photographers as well as emerging artists. The stall lures visitors with bright, white-washed walls that feature a single photograph without regard to the image’s size. Erin Sigoloff, sales assistant at Pace, explains, “The way the booth is organized is not something you can get on the Internet.”

Changing the Focus

Despite the massive overwhelming presentation of images what makes Pairs Photo special is encounters with photographers. At THE PLATFORM, new artistic perspectives and ideas are exchanged on the hour. It’s here that Zora J Murff discusses the inspiration behind his images that depict construction spaces. The artist photographed the work-in-progress structures during lockdown because “everything was so quiet, but construction kept going.” He was inspired by the way in which temporary infrastructure held the walls in place. The series coincided with the tragic death of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man killed by three white men because when Arbery stopped on his jog at a construction site, his assailants believed he stole something and “found him suspicious.” Arbery’s death prompted Murff to reflect on how easily he could have been marked as “suspicious” for merely pursuing his art as he examined the foundations of construction sites.

As visitors jostle in Curiosa, the emerging artists sector of the fair, rushing to get to the next book signing or critical conversation, many pause at the stand of one of this year’s Carte Blanche Student 2021 laureates, Francesca Hummler. The twenty-four-year-old photographer embodies the value of sharing artistic experiences in person. Hummler holds hands with her mother as she describes the inspiration for her Unsere Puppenstube (Our Dollhouse) series. For Hummler, the photos of her younger sister Masantu, adopted from Ethiopia by her German-American parents, evoke, “something really personal.” She uses her camera as a vehicle for strengthening the relationship between her and her sister. “It is the culmination of all our identities.”

Where identity has an intimate expression in Hummler’s work, it has a wider focus at Silk Road Gallery, the only booth from Iran. While Western galleries fill the aisles, the stands representing the Middle East and Asia are far less numerous. Silk Road’s chief curator, Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, notes that “What’s important to us is that there is content, not just an image that may or may not appeal to the aesthetic side. All the photographers in this booth are talking about real issues – immigration, the proliferation of suburbs all over the outskirts of big cities – the photographers are by Iranian artists but the subjects of immigration, depression, isolation, are not local subjects.” She says that one of the roles of her gallery’s presence at Paris Photo is to change “the negative image of Iran with the brilliant work of our photographers. We try to inform people about the art that is circulating in Iran.”

The stall for Paris-based Bonne Espérance (Good Hope) hosts a space for South African creativity. This year, it presents a monographic exhibit of Jürgen Shadeberg’s works, an artist famously invited by Nelson Mandela to photograph his return to Robben Island in 1994. Shadeburg is also known for documenting the National Party’s destruction of Sophiatown as an implementation of the apartheid regime. The photographer’s captivating images are not only a testament to his keen eye but to the powerful jazz and resistance figures who changed the cultural, social, and political fabric of the country in the 1950s.

Bonne Espérance was set to do a retrospective of Shadeberg’s works in 2020 but, due to the pandemic, the show never took place. Given that Shadeberg passed away later that year, the gallery sees Paris Photo as an opportunity to display a retrospective of the photographer’s works worthy of an exhibit in a museum. According to Claudia Tennant, a representative of the gallery, the name not only conjures the spirit of South Africa but of hope, a thread that connects Shadeberg’s powerful images throughout his career. Tennant admires the works on the walls as she says, “The exhibit is a real experience for visitors. The work is from the past, but it touches them in the present.”

A New Lens

For Lubondo and Hummler, this is their first time attending Paris Photo (although Lubondo has shown her work in previous editions of the exhibition). Lubondo adjusts her face mask and smiles, “It’s nice after taking the photos to get to interact with people, to see how people receive this work and share it.” And Hummler has a similar view: it’s an exciting time to be a photographer, “you can feel in the room a newfound energy and enthusiasm for the arts.”

Close up, the photographs capture in a single frame the vibrancy, diversity, and depth of the human experience. Zooming out, the exposition invites visitors to stop and glimpse the sheen of a mounted image, to take in the length and breadth of a picture, to engage with a moment in time. Paris Photo 2021 unites an international audience with snapshots of where we’ve been, who we are, and where we’re going.

Will Neill’s Real Deal: The Decline and Fall of Boris Johnson

This has been a bizarre week for Boris Johnson. I appreciate that this is an evergreen statement, applicable to basically any week in the past two decades. But this week was a particularly strange one for our Prime Minister. With a self-inflicted corruption scandal, his party plunging in the opinion polls, and his MPs gathering against him; it seems that the Tory Crown Prince’s clown is beginning to rust. Perhaps Bojo has finally lost his mojo.

The annual speech to the Confederation of British Industry is a typical affair for the Prime Minister, an opportunity to lay out their economic vision for the country and hit upon the usual soundbites and buzzwords. Instead, our glorious leader Boris floundered around on stage like a kipper; stumbling and stuttering, losing his place, and at one point literally imitating car noises. In one neurotic moment, Johnson started referring to himself in the third person and even compared himself to Moses – the expected humility from a child who grew up demanding to be World King. Instead of producing a plan to tackle Britain’s food shortages or prevent a future energy crisis, the Prime Minister went on a bizarre tangent praising Peppa Pig World. Boris heaped praise on the Hampshire theme park, concluding that ‘Peppa Pig World is very much my kind of place’ – that makes sense because right now it clearly isn’t reality. The sad conclusion to the speech was Johnson losing his place mid-speech, stumbling for forty seconds and repeatedly muttering ‘forgive me’. Perhaps he thought this was charming or sincere, but it came across like Lady MacBeth desperately washing her blood-stained hands. 

This speech dominated the news agenda for the following day precisely because it is symptomatic of the crisis at the heart of the Johnson government. Waffle, mockery and digression all pointing to the black hole of leadership in this administration. Laura Kuenssberg reported that a ‘Senior Downing Street Source’ noted the ‘concern…about the PM’,  calling for the Cabinet to ‘demand serious changes’. This tweet was one example of the growing choir within the Conservative party expressing frustration with Johnson’s style of governing. But as the old adage goes: elect a clown, expect a circus. 

Consider the Tory corruption scandal that has been a political whirlpool engulfing the party in the last two weeks. From Johnson’s position, all this turmoil was not just unnecessary but utterly avoidable. If Owen Paterson had simply served his suspension not only would he still be an MP but all the numerous Tory skeletons would be sitting comfortably in the closet, and one could expect that Johnson’s party would remain sailing happily in the polls. Johnson’s pitiful attempt to defend Paterson has unleashed weeks of political chaos. The Tory leader may be a ruthless opportunist, but he is far from an effective political operator as the last few weeks have proved. 

This is also a politically risky moment for Johnson, with the leader flanked on both sides. Plotting in No. 11 is long-popular media golden boy Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, waiting eagerly in the wings. But even more troublesome was Johnson’s recent appointment of Liz Truss as Foreign Secretary, darling of the Tory right and someone who would no doubt seize the opportunity if the ball came loose from the back of the scrum, so to speak. Johnson’s Cabinet are as angry with his governing style as they are ambitious. Even key Johnson loyalist and Brexit negotiator Lord Frosh is upping the heat on Johnson, stating that he was aligned with the Chancellor in the ‘goal… to reduce taxes’, blatantly challenging the Prime Minister’s interventionist policies. 

Nonetheless, for all the hopes and cross-fingers amongst Johnson’s numerous enemies that the end may be nye, I think it would be wise to hold steady. As Mark Twain once wrote about himself, reports of Johnson’s demise may be greatly exaggerated. Boris Johnson is the definition of a teflon politician: nothing sticks to him and he has an almost supernatural ability to bounce back. His numerous affairs, his failed post-Brexit coup, his shambolic Foreign Secretaryship, his poor handling of the Coronavirus outbreak; all instances where political journalists have deemed this to be the final end to his streak and yet every time he has defined his political termination. Boris not only has the appearance of the balloon, his political career has also floated continuously and unfathomably upward. A mixture of opportunism, selfishness, and cunning has ensured his continuous ascension. But much like Margaret Thatcher’s usage of the royal ‘we’ in 1989, perhaps the self-aggrandising comparisons to Moses and usage of the third person in his CBI speech prove  too much. The ever-rising ascension of Boris the Balloon could finally pop. 

However, there is a reason the Conservatives hold the title of the world’s most successful political party. They are ruthless. Johnson may have won the 2019 election and been essential in providing Brexit, but if he proves to be a liability they will rid themselves of him as ruthlessly they vacated Mrs Thatcher. For now Johnson is a winner, but every streak ends, and no one is bigger than the party. As Keir Starmer said last week, in reference to Morrissey’s famous song, perhaps the joke simply isn’t funny anymore. 

Image credit: Number 10 via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).