Thursday 17th July 2025
Blog Page 593

Spectacle of Suffering

Aine Kennedy
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Spectacle of Suffering

The culmination of Enlightenment thought, the Encylopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné, defined torture as “an inexplicable phenomenon that the extension of man’s imagination creates out of the barbarous and cruel”. Before the 18th century, torture was essential to social order, with a theatrical function reflected by gleefully macabre representations in verse. The changing depictions in literature parallel radical shifts in Western attitudes. From original Biblical narratives of divine punishment, atrocity, used to stir fear or repulsion and threaten its audience away from offensive behaviour has developed into a means of expressing the irrational and incomprehensible cruelty of humanity and human experience. Yet today’s desensitised society looks complacently upon once-shocking images, from Aylan Kurdi to Oscar Ramirez and his daughter Valeria; in many respects, our indifferent consumption of the spectacle of suffering has progressed little from the days of the public hanging.

            Atrocity’s original function was a practical one: to retain the order of power by discouraging disobedience. The most seminal depiction of “the ritual of armed law, in which the prince (shows) himself both as head of justice and head of war” comes in form of the Old Testament. God is judge, jury, and executioner in what Foucault aptly termed the “liturgy of punishment”; he is also the ‘prince’, the institution whose principles have been offended. The emotional volatility of this self-proclaimed “jealous God” leads him to acts of methodical and stylised cruelty which set a precedent for human imitators. His punishment of original sin- the original punishment- sees him curse the serpent with an emphasis on both physicality and the vicious pettiness that will characterise torture for centuries to come:

“On your belly will you go, and dust you will eat, all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel…”

            An eternity of eating dust is a creative punishment- it combines mutilation (the loss of the serpent’s legs) with humiliation. The serpent could thus be the original torture victim. In any case, Original Sin is met with Original Consequences, a precedent continued throughout the Old Testament in exotic and gruesome fashion: the Ten Plagues, Sodom and Gomorrah, two bears mauling 42 children to death for mocking a bald guy (4 Kings 2:23-24). Dante picks up this baton with glee in Purgatorio, elucidating equally creative punishments for a variety of sins in the nine circles of hell. Of all the beautiful pieces of music, art, and poetry inspired by the Christian faith, this verse is surely a standout:

“Reaching that point and looking down, we saw
that all of them were plunged in diarrhoea
flowing, it seemed, from human cubicles…
I noticed one whose head was foul with shit…

But he screamed out at me: ‘Why gawp like that?’
‘Because,’ I said, ‘if I remember well,
I’ve seen you once before, with drier coiffure.
You are from Lucca. Alessio Interminei.’

            Dante’s dramatic persona is as the passive observer, merely reporting on the fate that God has in store for flatterers like Alessio; in reality, the punishment and scenario are of the author’s own devising. In this case, God provides not only the template but the excuse for torture- although Dante committed no physical violence against Interminei, he is torturing a real person in the fictional domain, “(making) the guilty man the herald of his own condemnation”, as Foucault would put it. Dante’s Hell is the apogee of the ‘action and reaction’ atrocity narrative: while earthly suffering may be meted out as punishment by mortals, God has the power to inflict eternal suffering. While on the one hand this doctrine is tempered in the New Testament, with Jesus taking on physical and spiritual agony so that the real culprits might not suffer, this new ideology turns more closely instead to the theatrical aspect of torture: the emphasis on physical mutilation is translated into the literal theatre of the Eucharist, constantly reenacting elements of betrayal, murder and cannibalism.

            Outrages against Christian morality, and their equally outrageous punishments, formed the basis of pre-Enlightenment literature from the morality play to its successor, the Jacobean revenge tragedy. The latter provided a typically gruesome and highly stylised investigation into cause and effect, showcasing the ever-popular element of ritualistic mutilation as an answer to moral atrocity. ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore ticks all these boxes, centering on an incestuous sibling relationship and taking the audience on a whistle-stop tour from cast out eyes and letters written in the author’s blood to a climax of the main character bounding on stage with his sister’s heart kebabbed on a dagger. Yet it might also be viewed as an early attempt to develop the use of torture from simple condemnation to more complex moral questioning; the controversy that dogged the play into the 20th century derived not so much from the subject matter as from the author’s failure to condemn his protagonist, instead portraying him as a virtuous man overcome by irresistible, sinful passion.

The revenge play exemplifies not only the entanglement of human nature with the horrific, but the endurance of human obsession with this relationship. Thomas Pynchon parodies the genre in 1966’s Crying of Lot 49, where the fictional Jacobean ‘Courier’s Tragedy’ is used to link the barbarity of the pre-Enlightenment era with that of World War II, a technique viewed by American critic Sima Farshid as a “simulacrum”, after Jean Baudrillard’s theory of mirrored representations of reality. This is the postmodern face of the horrific: it is a nuanced and self-referential successor to the binary of action and consequence conveyed through extreme and visceral examples in the Bible, or at the 18th-century gibbet.

            Before the Enlightenment, daily life was saturated in and indeed thrived upon violence: upon the introduction of the guillotine, French crowds complained that they couldn’t see the execution, and began chants of “give us back our gibbet”. Literary depictions of violence were an effective means of social commentary, as they were grounded in a real-life understanding. In Foucault’s words, when witnessing “the spectacle of suffering truly endured, one could decipher crime and innocence, past and future, here below and eternal”. This connection with brutality died away along with the custom of ritualistic public mutilation, to the point where depictions of fictional violence, much less the real thing, could evoke shock and horror.

The return to extreme dehumanisation and brutality with the Second World War jolted the West out of its moral complacency, demanding a new language to account for an unprecedented kind of atrocity. Violence was stripped of its novelty; accounts which would have commanded the entire front page of a Victorian broadsheet were now innumerable, indistinguishable, stripped of their power to move.

Vasily Grossman with the Red Army in Schwerin, 1945

            Writing about the Holocaust, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Terror Famine in the Ukraine, Vasily Grossman was by definition writing about violence and atrocity; however, his response to the unfathomable scale of the horror was to recognise the futility of attempting an objective account of it, and his works are not centred around depictions of violence. In an effort to form a modern response to barbarity which did not belong to the modern day yet had come to define it, Grossman focuses on intimate accounts of the depth of individual human life and experience, contrasted with reminders of the scale on which these lives were wiped out. In An Armenian Sketchbook, he devotes a paragraph to the sufferings of his aunt, an uneducated, ordinary woman evacuated from Odessa via the Semyonov Pass, after losing her husband and children to state oppression, suicide, or war, and all her Jewish relatives to the Nazis.

“I asked my companions to tell me about the great men who had travelled this wonderful road. It didn’t occur to me to say, ‘You know, my aunt went along this same road in the winter of 1941. She was just one of many, an anchovy or sardine in a great shoal of anchovies or sardines. And, as you know, the biographical details of anchovies and sardines do not enter the pages of history.”

            The true story of Grossman’s aunt differs from this version; she was highly educated, and the deaths of her children are fictionalized. Grossman seems to have wished to emphasise not only her Jewishness but the ordinariness, during these years of what might otherwise seem an improbable intensity of tragedy. Repeated accounts of violence could never hope to provide an account of the Holocaust, and would ultimately cheapen it, partly due to humanity’s history of voyeuristic enjoyment in human suffering. Instead, Grossman turns to the accessible and universal to evoke the unimaginable scale of what was lost.

“The ewe had bright eyes, rather like glass grapes. There was something human about her- something Jewish. The inhabitants of a Jewish ghetto would probably have looked at their Gestapo jailers with the same alienated disgust if the ghetto had existed for millennia, if day after day for five thousand years the Gestapo had been taking old women and children away to be destroyed in gas chambers.

Oh God, how desperately mankind needs to atone, to beg for forgiveness. How long mankind needs to beg the sheep for forgiveness.”

            Foucault sees humanity as overeager to celebrate its ‘humanisation’, to congratulate itself on moral advances from the 18th century onwards which have civilised away a long history of cruelty and indifference. One has only to look at the current debate over the definition of ‘concentration camp’ to see that we are now in another period of moral complacency: Enlightenment questions of atrocity committed “with scandalous openness or secret cunning” are particularly pertinent in the internet age, where anyone with a mobile phone can instantly watch victims of human trafficking in violent porn, or footage of strangers’ last moments on the Watch People Die subreddit.

Image rights: Phillip Medhurst / CC-BY-SA-3.00 – Noah’s Ark and the Deluge, Genesis cap. 7

Byron, Elvis and Kim: Celebrity Now

George Rushton
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Byron, Elvis and Kim: Celebrity Now

Here are some things that some people have said about Elvis:

“I wasn’t just a fan, I was his brother.” —James Brown

“It was like he came along and whispered some dream in everybody’s ear, and somehow we all dreamed it.” —Bruce Springsteen

Did they really know Elvis? Funnily enough, they might have done. I wonder, though, whether in their own fame, and after having actually met him, they would still say they feel the same. As the man himself said:

“The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.” ― Elvis Presley

There’s a fundamental difference between the way that people perceive the man, and the way the man perceives the people. This is not a reciprocal relationship—it’s one-way. We can see that there’s an illusion of connection: this is the driving force behind the phenomenon of celebrity. Only now, celebrity has met with the technology that allows it to reach its full commercial and social potential.

The reason we’re so interested in celebrity is quite simple: we aren’t one.
They illuminate the central conflict of experience: though we know we are insignificant in the grand scheme of things (sorry for the reminder), we have no way of observing the world in a way which reflects that fact. We only know the world in first person; the ‘subjective centrality’ of our lives is in direct opposition with our objective insignificance. Celebrities are a way of managing this troubling truth, because the illusion of connection makes us feel we know them intimately as no other does—but, in the back of our minds, we know that everybody thinks this.

The figure of the celebrity shapes, on the one hand, the social consciousness: it is both a product of and producer of the society of which it is a part. That is to say, it is born of the media and, once born, sustains that very same media by the content it produces as it vies for relevance. Though I’m sceptical of blindly following Marshall McLuhan’s dictum ‘the medium is the message’ (well, yes, but come on, people do say things, don’t they? There’s content in what they say?), I think in this case it might hold. The very existence of an article about a celebrity demonstrates their presence – and that we should talk about them. McLuhan exemplifies this through the idea of a public opinion poll, which both gauges what that opinion is, but also proves that there is a public opinion in the first place. A magazine article does the same thing for celebrity.

The celebrity also sustains the individual, with what, in some cases, may be false nourishment. People absorbing media —believing in both the idea of media and in what it says— is what sustains it. A young girl might think: “if that video says this about Miley Cyrus, it must be true, and I ought to copy her because everyone likes her—otherwise the video wouldn’t have been made— and that’ll help me to fit in with everyone else”. She would then keep absorbing media in order to get more information, and the cycle continues because the media outlet will fabricate content which matches the image of the star to keep selling. As she absorbs it, she changes her behaviour: in this way celebrity becomes a yardstick, an ‘other’ around which to construct ourselves.

Byron brooding ‘George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron’ by Richard Westall

There used to be a subtle depth to celebrity: take Byron, for instance, or Liszt—essentially the rockstars of their ages, known from afar. People talked about them; they speculated, word of mouth and rumour accumulated with the force of avalanches, and their legends spread. But the modes of reproduction couldn’t circulate masses of information about them; media was limited in time, space, and, through censors, even in content. Thus, it was always a one-way connection, which allowed no mistake: you couldn’t really imagine Byron was talking back to you or played any role in your life. He was merely a symbol. He may as well have been fictional.

Technology developed, and these mediated representations of a person drew closer and closer to what looked like reality—but was actually a rather a meagre construction of it. The illusion of connectivity grew and where there is a feeling of emotional investment, so come the Omnipotent Forces of Moneys to profit from that emotion. America, predictably, led the way in this, and Hollywood became a factory of images.

Now we come back to Elvis. If we note, though, the past tense, the sort of wistful tone of Brown and Springsteen, we see that they’re reliving what they used to think. Any magic that used to hang over Elvis like a halo has dissipated to some extent, because at this point, they too are famous.

They were once like us. (I say ‘us’ assuming you’re not famous.) When they become like Elvis, the intoxicating thing about him—the strange oscillation between his distance and his closeness to them—loses its power. The twentieth century, a time of exploding advancement, of television, of broadcasting, was a breeding ground for feelings of closeness with people who existed worlds away. So frequent and intense did intrusions of media into daily life become that, I would argue, an illusion of ‘two-way’ connection emerged. This connection needs to be illusory; if you actually become friends with a celebrity, and develop a real two-way connection, then you become interested in them in a completely different way.

The illusion of two-way connection creates a real sense of inspiration which shapes the way we think about ourselves. Psychologists call it ‘motivation by association.’ “If this man Elvis can do it, then so can I.” Of course, everybody else had the same access to him. The more media outlets, though, and the more there was a more regular sense of his face and voice being seen and heard everywhere, the greater was the feeling that one was ‘plugged-in’ to a direct line to Elvis—and wouldn’t we all just love one of those.

Celebrities became symbols of themselves—plus something else, something powerful. The frameworks of mediated representation—the four sides of the TV and the billboard, the bandwidths of the radio—infused their personality with an extra mystique. The difference between Marilyn Monroe and Byron was that Monroe was that much more in the public eye. Paradoxically, the more she is presented, the more she becomes flat: the more the public feels they know everything about her.

Pregnant Kim Kardashian, Image Rights: Larry Busacca (CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0)

Here we reach the present day —yes, I’m going to talk about ‘influencers.’ Their goal is to create the ultimate ‘two-way’ connection, something that was previously impossible. They can literally interact with fans. The product is now synonymous with the advertisement, because, as mentioned, a celebrity is both a product of and a reproducer of a commercial society. The celebrity can now directly sell their personality to brands.

With respect to the ‘flatness’ and ‘depth’ which I’ve mentioned, I’d say that the modern celebrity now appears to be completely flat, which is where their new interest and marketability comes from. If we take the Kardashians, who are nothing if not ‘known for their knownness’—having very little to actually make them famous (well)—we feel we completely understand them. I’m not saying that there isn’t more to them than what Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Instagram present, but the illusion which reality television casts is one of a perfect facsimile of the Kardashians’ lives. The show requires us to believe that we’re seeing everything, even though that may not be the case.

Unlike in Byron’s time, the media is no longer restricted by platform or by time and space. Social media eliminates those limitations. Internet influencers are closer to us than any stranger has ever been. Imagining that we’re able to see everything in the Kardashians’ lives makes us aware of their similarity to us, but also highlights their differences. We like watching (bear with me even if you don’t) because we see distant lives of glitz and glamour; but then, we also know they are only people, because we’ve watched their children grow up. They are similar, therefore relatable; but their otherness also makes us feel we are more, counters our insignificance, because we define ourselves against them: “I’m more than that. I’ve got more nuance than that.”

The Kardashians and the internet celebrities have weaponised personality. They harness the potential of the media to beam a commercialised, cultivated image of themselves straight into our everyday lives; it is all the more powerful because we actively choose to follow them. And we choose to follow them because other people follow them; it is only the technology that has changed. They are free to perform relatability; brands love it because it automatically inserts their product into the everyday life of an audience.

So, things have changed. Celebrities used to be used to be symbols. Now they rely on seeming completely and utterly themselves, on creating the illusion (is it an illusion?) of a two-way relationship. This, if it is nothing else, is the most powerful commercial model yet. How long will it last? Will they always seem so authentic? Or perhaps they’re more like Alexander McQueen’s piece depicting Kate Moss, from his 2006 ‘Widows of Culloden’ show in Paris—a hologram, strangely close and ever, ever distant.

Alexander McQueen’s hologram of Kate Moss

Oxford SU given award for work on democracy

Rachel Cordery
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Oxford SU given award for work on democracy

The Oxford Student Union has been awarded an NUS Quality Student Award following a two-day assessment.

The Awards are an annual celebration of the work which Union’s undertake each day.

A representative from the National Union of Students (NUS) and an independent assessor visited the Oxford to review twelve elements of the SU, including leadership, engagement, and government.

The Quality Assessment Team decided to give the Oxford SU with a ‘good’ Quality Students’ Union and an award for their work over the past year, especially their “ground breaking work on Democracy”.

Meeting with Oxford SU staff, University Staff, and students, the panel was impressed by the work on Student Council, and the clear and easy Governance.

The creation of Projects, which enable students to deliver real change in a number of individual areas, also impressed the assessors.

Student Projects allow students to start their own projects which matter to them. The SU helps students to kick start their projects by piecing together a project proposal document with a budget and plan. Support from the Student Engagement staff team continues throughout the process.

Ryan Bird, CEO, at Oxford SU said: “I am so proud of what we have achieved so far this year, with the support of the SU staff team, students and volunteers. I am grateful for their continued hard work. The SU has built a reputation of providing strong services to our students and is committed to ensuring all students have a voice on issues that matter to them.”

“We will continue to strive to reach and engage more students in our life-changing work, from campaigning on access to education to improving access to libraries for students with disabilities to helping tackle climate change.”

Ex-University employee pleads guilty to US murder

Rachel Cordery
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Ex-University employee pleads guilty to US murder

A former Oxford University employee accused of fatally stabbing a man in Chicago has pleaded guilty, it was announced on Thursday.

Andrew Warren, who was a treasury assistant at Somerville College at the time of the murder, attacked his victim while he was sleeping, according to a plea agreement released by the court.

Warren also agreed to give evidence against his co-defendant, Wyndham Lathem, in exchange for a lesser sentence of 45 years.

The pair were charged with first-degree murder for the killing of Trenton Cornell-Duranleau. A hair stylist from Michigan, his body was found with his throat slit and 70 stab wounds in July 2017.

A nationwide manhunt was launched for Warren and the former Northwestern Professor, Wyndham Lathem, who lived in the apartment and was identified as Cornell-Duranleau’s boyfriend.

After the body of Mr Cornell-Duranleau was found, Warren was suspended and subsequently fired from his job at Somerville College.

Natosha Toller, an assistant state attorne in Chicago, described the plan as a sexual fantasy. Warren and Lathem began communicating online in the month before the murder.

Abandoning the original plan to commit suicide following the murder, the pair fled Chicago and headed to California, stopping at a public library in which they made large donations in Cornell-Duranleau’s name.

Warren eventually handed himself in after eight days on the run in San Francisco, and Lathem gave himself up in Oakland.

Somerville College has been contacted for a comment.

Councils raise concerns over Oxford-Cambridge Expressway plans

Luke Dunne
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Councils raise concerns over Oxford-Cambridge Expressway plans

With Highways England in line to open a consultation on the proposed ‘expressway’ between Oxford and Cambridge, two Oxfordshire councils have signaled their opposition to the plans.

South Oxfordshire and The Vale of White Horse district councils have voted to oppose the plan. Comment given by the South Oxfordshire council highlighted the potential damage done to the area. 

The council’s leader, Sue Cooper, said: “It will bring more traffic, create a major source of air and noise pollution, destroy farmland and habitats and increase CO2 emissions, all of which are incompatible with the recent Climate Emergency declared by this council in April.”

The two proposed routes for the road will take it either into the Vale or South Oxfordshire. 

The development is intended to link Oxford and Cambridge via Milton Keynes, both as a way to provide an outer orbital route around London and to stimulate development in the corridor between Oxford and Cambridge. There are plans to build new towns along the route when it is completed. 

In addition to the council’s objections, groups have raised concerns previously. The public consultation comes as the result of a motion by Oxford County Council criticising Highways England for their failure to engage with local people when planning the route. The consultation motion passed by 49 votes to 5. 

The Campaign to Protect Rural England has also criticised the route, which is to pass through the greenbelt, as unnecessary and likely to lead to the expansion of Oxford. 

Current estimates of the cost range between £3 to £4.5 billion. 

All Souls professor appointed to Supreme Court

Rachel Cordery
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All Souls professor appointed to Supreme Court

Professor Andrew Burrows, a fellow of All Souls College, has been appointed to the Supreme Court.

A Barrister and Honorary Bencher of Middle Temple, Professor Burrows is Professor of English Law at the University of Oxford. He will join the Supreme Court on 2nd June 2020.

An alumnus of both Brasenose College, Oxford, and Harvard University, his work focuses on private law.

Burrows is the main editor of the compendium English Private Law which produces textbooks on English contract law and the legal treatise A Restatement of the English law of Unjust Enrichment.

Popular amongst judges, Baroness Hale said in her 2017 Hamlyn Lecture at the University of Exeter: “there are few, if any, legal scholars whose writings are more frequently cited in our courts.”

Queen Elizabeth made four new appointments on the advice of outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May, including Lord Hamblen, Lord Leggatt, and Lord Reed, a Scottish judge, who will become the next president of the Supreme Court.

Succeeding Baroness Hale, Lord Reed has sat in the Supreme Court since 2012 and served as deputy president for the past year.

While Lord Hamblen and Lord Leggatt already sit in the appeal court, Professor Burrows has sat as a part time Deputy High Court Judge for more than 20 years and he was a Law Commissioner for England and Wales.

Ruskin College accused of ‘victimising’ trade union reps

Ben van der Merwe and Luke Dunne
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Ruskin College accused of ‘victimising’ trade union reps

Ruskin College have been accused of ‘victimising’ trade union representatives after a University and College Union (UCU) branch officer was fired in mysterious circumstances, and four others are due to be made redundant.

Dr Lee Humber was suspended from his position as a lecturer in health and social care in April, just two days after organising a vote of no confidence in the college’s principal, Paul Di Felice. After months in limbo, Humber was fired last week, prompting outrage from the UCU. Ruskin College denies that the dismissal was related to Dr Humber’s trade union activity.

Speaking to Cherwell, Dr Humber praised “the absolutely fantastic amount of support I got from colleagues in the UCU, from the union leadership and from the thousands of other trade unionists who wrote their support and invited me to address their branch and union meetings.”

“It was clear from the very start that trade unionists and many, many others understood that this as an attack on me as a trade union officer, on our UCU branch and on the national union generally.”

Ruskin College did not respond to a request for comment.

The adult learning institution, which is affiliated to Oxford University, has been embroiled in an official dispute with UCU over its treatment of staff. The college, which has traditionally maintained strong links to the trade union movement, has recently moved to scrap trade union courses and to casualise teaching contracts in a bid to stem falling student numbers.

These proposals led to a vote of no confidence in the college’s Principal in April, which was passed “unanimously” by Ruskin College’s UCU branch.

Two days after organizing the vote, Dr Humber was suspended from his post as a lecturer in health and social care. The Ruskin UCU branch said at the time: “We believe that Lee is being victimised in order to intimidate us as a union branch. This is utterly disgraceful behaviour from the management of a college with such deep roots in the trade union and labour movement.”

The campaign to reinstate Dr Humber has attracted the support of ten union leaders and the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. In a statement following Dr Humber’s suspension, Ruskin UCU said: “We believe that Lee is being victimised in order to intimidate us as a union branch. This is utterly disgraceful behaviour from the management of a college with such deep roots in the trade union and labour movement.”

UCU have criticized the college’s restructuring proposals on the grounds that falling student numbers are a result of poor management rather than staffing costs or course content. Ruskin College received a 90% student satisfaction rating for the quality of its teaching in 2018, but just 35% for the quality of its management – the lowest in the country. No data is available for 2019.

In a separate incident, the Ruskin Students’ Union was forced to relocate its May ball to a local pub after what it described as “poor, bureaucratic management” of their budget by the college.

The college’s business development plan has resulted in a pivot away from secure, long-term contracts towards the hiring of temporary and insecure agency staff. In 2018, the college spent 19% of staffing costs on contracted workers, compared to just 5% in 2015. These changes saw Ruskin College placed on UCU’s “list of shame” for academic institutions undermining staff pay and job security through casualisation.

In that time, the number of in-house staff has fallen from 75 to 55. Ruskin UCU allege that more than 80 staff, disproportionately women, have left during that period, including three entire senior administrative and recruitment teams.

The union allege that this high turnover is the result of a “climate of uncertainty, stress and fear” created by the Principal. The text of the no-confidence motion passed by the group states: “A large number of women have stated in exit interviews that they are leaving directly because of the Principal.”

The branch also accused the college of failing to carry out stress risk assessments for staff, in violation of their legal duties.

Last week, Ruskin College’s management outlined a further phase of restructuring to take place before the new academic year, including the discontinuation of four of the college’s six higher education courses in a bid to make the college less reliant on trade union teaching for its income. All five employees due to lose their posts as part of these changes are UCU Branch Committee members, which has led to accusations that union activists are being targeted.

Ruskin UCU says that staff and students were not consulted on the move to shrink the college’s higher education programme. In a statement, the union said: “We firmly believe the college is being wound down for merger. This will see multi million pound assets, prime Oxford real estate and working-class resources built up over 120 years given free to the private sector.”

In a statement, Ruskin College said: “Disciplinary investigations are internal staff disciplinary matters which are entirely unconnected with any trade union activity of those involved. It would be wrong for any institution to seek to discipline or suspend a member of staff as a result of their union activity; the notion that Ruskin College, the home of trade union education for more than 100 years, would do so is absolutely inconceivable. 

“Trade union membership at Ruskin is actively encouraged among the staff and there are currently four unions well-represented in College. Contrary to claims, the vote of no confidence in March was not unanimous, even among UCU members, and was supported by less than 20% of staff. Ruskin College remains the largest provider of trade union training in the UK with up to 3,000 reps trained each year.”

Speaking to Cherwell, Dr Humber said: “Everywhere in the country I went to speak to people and address meetings support was fantastically genuine and warm. Of course, coupled with this positive end of proceedings were – initially at least – feelings of anxiety.

“I worried about how I was going to support my family, whether the stress the dispute bought on me would infect my young kids, about what would happen in the future. Thankfully, due to the great resilience of my family, itself underpinned by the incredible depth and breadth of support we received, we’ve all grown out of it and we’re facing the future with great optimism.”

Asked how he was informed of his dismissal, Dr Humber said: “A simple letter. It was the 43rd letter they’d sent me (in the first 50 days of my suspension) arriving on the Friday as so many of their meant-to-be intimidating communiques had. It was no surprise to any of us.

“They made various allegations all of which we refuted in great detail in a 14-page document we sent to the disciplinary hearing. They’ve dismissed our refutation. We’ve now appealed against this decision and they’ll turn that down too.

“Then, at last, we’ll be out of the Alice in Wonderland world of Ruskin-based disciplinary procedure, where they’ve consistently made up policy and process to suit their own ends, and on into the world of ACAS and Employment Tribunals where there are real rules by which both parties in this dispute must abide.”

“A Kind of Dirty Poetry”

Charlotte Hall
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“A Kind of Dirty Poetry”

It smells of earth. In the expectant gloom and chatter, the smell penetrates everything; muddies thoughts, muffles voices, buries conversations in a layer of murky suspense. It’s soon obvious why; as the lights come on, and the audience settles down, all that is visible is a circle of soil, surrounded by a thick tangle of cables and industrial electronics. Silence falls.
A man steps into the light, through the cabling. He’s dressed simply but in contrast to the rawness of his environment, there’s a magnetizing humanness about him.
“Look around!” he cries. (Like sheep, we look.) “Everything’s rigid, hard, dark. – What lies beneath it all?” – and then he transforms, before our very eyes, into someone completely different.

The play hasn’t happened yet.

But the vivaciousness with which Saul Barrett and Joshua Silverlock, two students taking on the Edinburgh Fringe, describe their reinvention of Woyzeck draws me into another world. That world, originally outlined in Buechner’s unfinished script, has been adapted and re-claimed by Saul and Joshua’s independently founded production company Missing Cat in a project that has taken them almost a year to complete. Despite the dark tone of the play, described by Saul as “humanity laid bare in its dirtiest form searching for sanity and the sanitary,” the two of them are positively beaming. Knee-deep in rehearsals, the “juicy part” of preparations, with the finish line in sight, they can’t help being excited. The energy is infectious – and it’s clear why the two of them have teamed up; they regularly finish each other’s sentences, bouncing off one another in sparkling creativity, even during this brief conversation.

But the road hasn’t always been easy. Joshua, director and producer, describes how he has “only recently felt the other hats come on.” He’s been pre-occupied with financial and organisational decisions, including a crowd-funding campaign and, he says with a hint of self-consciousness, “I guess, creating a brand.” Figuring out how to present themselves on social media, advertise and encourage donations has taken up most of the past year – and only with their first production meeting in the Royal Court last month have creative decisions started to take the foreground. “I actually found the meeting quite emotional,” Saul says, turning to his director “It went from me texting you from a bus one day going ‘should we give this thing a go?’ and you going ‘yeah, let’s do it!’ to suddenly being something that is shared – something that is no longer just yours.”

Now the two are heading a team of around ten people – and they stress the importance of choosing your group wisely. Paying their team professionally isn’t an option, so they depend on their teams’ dedication. “It’s a double-edged thing,” they explain “you rely a lot on goodwill and friendship – which is sometimes tenuous because it doesn’t give you much leverage as an entrepreneurial organizer – but there’s also a really lovely spirit that we’ve brought with us in recruiting people from all over the place.”

The team work together closely, but the idea for the project germinated with Saul and Joshua. Both were fascinated by the “very rich, very bare-bones” nature of the play and language – “not colloquial, not Shakespeare – a kind of dirty poetry” – but realised they had never seen a good production. “It’s quite a simple archetypal plot – it’s kind of Othello: one man trying to provide for his family, she commits an act of infidelity and he takes revenge. It’s not that. It’s not the plot. There’s something almost inarticulable about the atmosphere of it and the world and these beautiful little strangenesses.” Determined to do the text justice, they decided to give it a go.

Their version collapses the play’s 14 characters into 3 actors. Two take the roles of the main characters, while the third transforms into different people through on-stage transitions. In fact, much of what would usually occur ‘behind-the-scenes’ is incorporated into the performance; including an on-stage sound desk operated by characters who aren’t immediately involved in the scene. “Our production is a primal, visceral and incredibly involving experience for the audience, which lays bare the mechanics of theatre while also pulling you into the world of the characters.”

I wonder how this works exactly, since Brecht, for instance, often revealed theses ‘mechanics’ to alienate, rather than involve his audience. Joshua disagrees with “the corollary of alienating the audience being that they don’t believe in the same way.” Historically, he argues, “theatre has tried to reduce the leap of the imagination as much as possible so that what you’re watching is real” i.e. through realistic costumes and sets, but “you’re never going to completely reduce it and just by making it smaller, you actually magnify the cracks. In some ways it’s easier to believe in a punch and judy show.” Instead, keeping true to Buechner’s sketch-like implications of a wider system, a larger world beyond the lines, Missing Cat wants to “give the audience the crumbs with which to feed their own imaginations,” to make the “audiences active in completing the picture – instead of being talked down to.”

When I ask about Fringe, their jaws simultaneously tighten. “By any kind of logical thinking we should just not go to the Fringe,” there’s a glint in Joshua’s eye as he says this, which makes it clear he’s only half-joking “it’s so far away, so pointlessly expensive, so clogged… I started this as if there’s a but – I don’t think there’s a but.”
“But you want people to see it.” Saul breaks in. London venues are even more expensive, and don’t give you the opportunity to put on 15 shows in a row – it’s a learning experience for young performers. “It does feel like a rite of passage,” Joshua concedes “getting that Fringe Ox blood on your face.”

Fringe does mean some limitations, however. Since it consists of one space catering to so many different productions, with little storage space, it’s difficult to create original sets. “What you get is this really great stuff going on, but in this really homogenous environment.” Much of the design for Missing Cat’s production is driven by the urge to change this and push the boundaries as far as they can; bringing their own technical kit and re-inventing the black box, so they can make Woyzeck stand out visually, too.

“The venue basically hate us” Joshua says with a hint of a smile “but they’ll love us when we get there – if everything goes to plan.”

Catch Missing Cat’s premier at New River Studios, London on the 26th, 27th and 28th of this month, or at the Fringe during 2-10th and 12-17th of August!

Photo credits: Max Longmuir

Does Taylor need to calm down?

Jenna Colaco
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Does Taylor need to calm down?

With the current political uncertainty of Brexit, a massive question-mark over the future leadership of the United Kingdom and the US general election coming up next year, it is fair to say that politics takes up time out of our day-to-day lives– whether we want it to or not. However, what is unclear is what the place of influential public figures in the media, such as musician Taylor Swift, is in political advocacy.

During the lead-up to the 2018 US midterm elections, Taylor Swift sparked controversy with a social media post incentivising young people to register to vote. The post expressed her own preferences for candidates Phil Bredesen for the Senate and Jim Cooper for the House of Representatives and gave reasons why she was not supporting Martha Blackburn, a Republican running for the Senate in Swift’s home-state of Tennessee. The post became a controversial issue as it raised a very pertinent question: should musicians keep their political views and music separate?

Swift, as the winner of various prestigious music awards including multiple Grammy, MTV Music and Billboard Music Awards, is clearly an influential public figure. From an essay she wrote for Elle in March, it seems that Swift intends to make better use of this influence to increase voter participation in elections. Swift revealed that her new album, due to be released in 2020, the year of the next US general election, will have ‘political undertones’. This very powerfully demonstrates that Swift is not an artist that believes she has to keep her political views separate from her music. In fact, it shows she is willing to use her music as a political tool. In a 2012 interview for Time, Swift said: ‘…I don’t talk about politics because it might influence other people. And I don’t think that I know enough yet in life to be telling people who to vote for.’ Thus, Swift is revoking her previous stance on making her political views public and using her platform to influence her massive social media following comprised of around 119 million on Instagram alone. 

However, Swift is not the first artist to use her platform to bring attention to political issues through art. The 20th and 21st centuries are full of examples where art was politicised to bring attention to the struggle and suffering of people around them. The 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Bob Dylan, was commended for his poetic expressions in the American song tradition. However, part of Dylan’s power as a musician came from using his music to spread messages. Dylan was inspired by the changing political environment in the US during the 1960s. It was a time of great political activism with many people campaigning for Civil Rights for all as well as protesting US involvement in Vietnam. His song The Times Are a-Changin’ was intended to capture the rapid change going on in America and encourage people not to get left behind by the change. The opening lines are ‘Come gather ’round, people/ Wherever you roam/ And admit that the waters/ Around you have grown’. The water acts as a metaphor for rising change, threatening to drown the people who don’t ‘start swimmin’. Dylan is not inspiring political protest, he is singing to encourage people to accept the change that is happening whether they like it or not. He appeals to politicians in particular to move with the times, ‘Come senators, congressmen/ Please heed the call/ Don’t stand in the doorway/ Don’t block up the hall’. Whilst Dylan’s political message is very different to Swift’s, his message of the acceptance of change is one that is fundamental even over fifty years later. His song was brought to life again in the 2018 by Jennifer Hudson and the D.C. choir as part of the March for Our Lives rally in Washington D.C. The rally was led by Parkland students affected by a school shooting and it demanded an end to gun violence in America. ‘The Times Are a-Changin’ took a different subject but carried the same meaning it did in the 60s, a plea for people and politicians to accept the issues of a changing world. 

Whilst it is clear that Taylor Swift has done nothing that other artists have not done before her and will probably continue to do after her, it still begs the question whether an artist should lend their artistic works and platforms to politics. I firmly believe that they should, predominantly because they are people with opinions and I think they deserve the right to share what they feel. As a secondary, but also key reason, I believe that young people today have become very disillusioned with politics and incentivising them to have their say in politics is a difficult job. Using the influence of music and other art forms should be a tool to encourage young people to register to vote and research candidates who represent their views. As long as public figures express their opinions and don’t encourage the spread of propaganda and fake-news, I believe there is real merit in figures such as Swift speaking about politics and I look forward to her new album. 

Bodleian celebrates 50th anniversary of Moon landing

Charlotte Moberly
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Bodleian celebrates 50th anniversary of Moon landing

This Saturday, the Bodleian Libraries is holding an event to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing.

The Lunar Activity Day, which will be held in Blackwell Hall, is intended to be a family-friendly event involving arts and crafts, object handling and live performances.

There will also be talks from academics on themes such as ‘The Origin of the Moon’,  ‘Art in Outer Space’, ‘Contested Meanings of Lunacy in Nineteenth Century Asylums’ and ‘The Moon is Feminist Art’.

A team of academics from the Rothermere American Institute, the Department of Physics, and the Oxford Internet Institute’s Cabinet team have created a display about the moon landings, which will be in the Proscholium of the Old Bodleian Library until 15 September.

The exhibit explores ‘humanity’s fascination with all things lunar’ through selected items from the Bodleian collections.

Dr Karen Patricia Heath, who organised the event, said: “This is going to be a fantastic interactive event for all the family, as we celebrate 50 years since the Moon landing. From meteorite handling and 3D printing to live music and talks from Oxford University experts, there will be something for everyone.”

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