Tuesday, May 20, 2025
Blog Page 853

Christ Church win record 33rd Summer VIIIs headship

Matthew Roller
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Christ Church win record 33rd Summer VIIIs headship

Christ Church M1 finished Head of the Year at this year’s Summer VIIIs, after holding off the challenge of a Blues-heavy Keble boat.

In the Women’s competition, Wadham won the headship for a fourth year in a row, having rowed over on each of the four days of the competition.

The Men’s headship was a hotly-contested position this year: last year’s winners, Oriel, started VIIIs as third-favourites behind Christ Church and Keble, who were both boosted by the presence of several Boat Race winners.

Indeed, Keble boasted four Boat Race winners in their boat, with Matthew O’Leary, Jamie Cook, Joshua Bugajski, and Olivier Siegalaar all holding off Cambridge’s challenge on 2 April.

There was controversy in the build-up to the race as well. Not only were Keble accused of being ‘Blues buyers’ by Oriel College Boat Club’s Facebook page but the JCR voted against an emergency motion to allow them to burn a boat in the event of a headship.

However, as Keble closed in on Christ Church on a balmy evening on the Isis, the klaxon sounded due to an infringement, and their headship was confirmed.

In the Women’s race, Wadham held off the challenge of a strong Pembroke crew to secure a fourth consecutive headship.

Whilst there was a point in front of the boathouses when Pembroke looked to be closing on Wadham, the Parks Road College were always in control, and rowed over for a fourth consecutive day.

Several colleges also managed to secure the honour of Blades, bestowed on a crew which manages to bump on all four days of the competition.

Balliol M1, St Catz’s M1, Jesus M1, Queen’s M1, St John’s M1, St Catz’s M2, Green Templeton M1, St Hilda’s M1, St Peter’s M2, St Benet’s M1, Queen’s M2, and Keble M3 all won Blades in the Men’s competition.

In the Women’s racing, fewer crews managed to bump on all four days, with only Worcester W3 and St. Edmund Hall W1 managing to secure Blades.

Several thousand spectators made the trip down to Christ Church Meadow on Saturday, with the vast majority of Colleges opening bars or barbecues to keep fans involved.

And those who went down early in the day were rewarded for their persistence: the overcast skies gave way to a resplendent sun, as temperatures soared towards the mid-twenties.

To find out individual boats’ results, head to the OxBump website.

A tempestuous tribute to a perplexing artist

Anoushka Kavanagh
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A tempestuous tribute to a perplexing artist

A spiny woman lies splayed, horrifically contorted, with her elongated neck severed
just below her gasping head, in what has become the most conspicuous piece of Giacometti’s haunting new retrospective at the Tate Modern. This surreal insectile being, writhing in pain, that is ‘Woman with her Throat Cut’ (1932) is a far cry from the near impalpable spindly spectres, that are more associable with the French artist. Yet it has been singled out for
a reason: it sets the tone for the rest of this show that accentuates a more perplexing side of the master. Full of torment and turmoil, the Tate’s retrospective presents an oeuvre permeated by the artist’s own inner conflict and frustration, not just the embodiment of European inter-and post-war anguish that is most often read into the Frenchman’s work.

Throughout his life, Giacometti was obsessed with the human form, something demonstrated
by the army of heads that greet us in the first room. Whether it be in oil, plaster, ink, or bronze, the artist returned again and again to the figure, chipping away at his portraits in frustrated attempt to find a likeness. These ten rooms portray this with surprising proficiency, doing well to dispel the often unavoidable repetitiveness of his work.

Yet the figure was something that also evaded Giacometti constantly. It provided the source of much dissatisfaction with his work throughout his life, and was responsible for many an ‘artistic crisis’. For instance, in 1959 Giacometti became disheartened by the ‘lack of likeness’ in his oil portraits of the Japanese philosopher Yanaihara, then sitting for him. These grey, smudgy paintings on display here reflect this grievance in their frantic, multi-layered brushstrokes. In ‘Bust of Yanaihara’ (1959), the philosopher’s head is crowned by a smudged white halo—these rough marks appear to prove repeated reworkings of the facial features, and along with the multitude of scratches that define his face, highlight Giacometti’s frustration.

Similar frenzied marks pervade most of the artist’s portraiture hanging here, especially pictures of his loved ones. ‘Diego Seated’ (1948) reads like a compilation of vertical brushstrokes, blurring his brother into unrecognition, whilst multiple paintings of the artist’s wife, Annette, show her shrouded in darkness with unruly lines absorbing her being. Giacometti did not conceal the challenge his creations posed and often confessed to difficulties: “Diego has posed ten thousand times for me. When he poses I don’t recognise him…When my wife poses for me, after three days she doesn’t look like herself”.

It is not just from these paintings that dissatisfaction emanates. Up close and personal, the infamous stick people show Giacometti’s inner conflict over artistic expression to be a recurring theme. Tate’s acquirement of less familiar plaster and clay figures—displayed alongside their bronze counterparts—aids this impression, for it becomes evident that the production process itself facilitated constant readjustment.

One of the show’s highlights is ‘Women of Venice’ (1956), eight plaster sculptures of the
female form produced for the Venice Biennale of that year. Each woman was moulded by hand—so that they are all slightly different—in an attempt to highlight variation of the female figure (perhaps a seminal moment in the representation of women). Giacometti chipped away at the plaster once it had semi-dried, reworking the forms with sharp knives, before reapplying liquid plaster to achieve a product with which he was eventually satisfied.

Alongside this creative conflict, some sentiment of post-war anguish undeniably also permeates Giacometti’s slender, distorted figures. A sense of the ‘existential despair’ adrift on the continent radiates from the starved figures, scarred faces, and distorted limbs. His brushstrokes are emotionally charged, and there is striking violence in the hacking away of the bodies outlined above. Works like ‘The Glade’ (1950) invoke both aggression and isolation in composition alone—lean, cutting figurines pierce from their bronze base like arrowheads at various distinct intervals. Indeed, his first show of the harrowing bronze casts at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1948, incorporated an essay by Jean-Paul Sartre—‘The Search for Absolute Truth’—into the catalogue that established this anxious, despairing tone.

Such torment makes itself clear again in earlier inter-war surrealistic pieces, which are adorned with sharp spikes, or formed from disconcerting shapes. Violent eroticism surfaces here in ‘Man and Woman’ (1928-9), whereby a spike painfully pierces a concave dish within the abstract assortment of cast bronze shapes. Whilst ‘Limping Figure’ (1931-2) evokes a distorted being, the wooden sculpture penetrated by three legs awkwardly
mismatched in length. A continual line of turmoil is observable in Giacometti’s oeuvre
throughout this retrospective then. This theme is not surprising when noted that he witnessed the excruciating death of his travel companion Pieter van Meurs in 1921, which haunted the artist since. We are left with the suspicion that he was deeply conflicted both emotionally and artistically.

There is more depth to Giacometti than these haunting human shapes, as Tate’s retrospective masterfully exposes. Throughout the course of ten rooms, we are captivated by more benign cubist creations and abstractions of African art, enthralled by his own fascination with Egyptian mythology, and treated to glimpses into the artist’s mind in an extraordinary selection of sketches and notebooks—before arriving at the more macabre output.

Simultaneously we are alerted to his wider philosophical musings via portraits and connections with figures like Yanaihara, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Jean-Paul Sartre. These links heighten the sense of existentialism and frustration radiating from the tormented art, and bind together beautifully this tempestuous tribute to a highly complex man.

“Careless” press pigeonholes artists that deserve far more

Anoushka Kavanagh
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“Careless” press pigeonholes artists that deserve far more

Earlier this month the 2017 Turner Prize shortlist was released. Boasting two black artists, one of Palestinian descent, and one German, three women, two painters, and two over 50s (for the first time ever) amidst the four of them, the nominees show diversity in both their ethnicities and works. Personally, I was more than excited by this line-up because compared to the mundane bullshit that has been selected in recent years—over conceptualised to the point of incomprehension, and lacking in any degree of skill, sensibility, or aesthetic value—these four artists’ works are refreshingly different: full of purpose and genius.

In truth, the shortlisted shows don’t offer much innovation in medium or practise, but that
is forgivable as they hammer home their messages clearly and cohesively. Though very different in their presentations, the artists all launch dialogues on cultural and societal perceptions.

Lubaina Himid MBE—born in Zanzibar—explores black cultural visibility and history in her pieces. ‘Naming your money’ (2004), which is on display at the Spike Island show for which
she has been nominated, presents 100 life-sized cut-outs of 17th-century slaves. Accompanied by a soundtrack that discusses the transformations in the figures’ lives when entering Europe—such as name and occupation changes—the installation emphasizes the loss of black cultural visibility in British society and reasserts African identity.

Hurvin Anderson’s paintings similarly expose conversations between Afro-Caribbean and
British cultures in his barbershop displays and Caribbean landscapes. In ‘Is it ok to be black?’,
displayed in his shortlisted exhibition at New Art Exchange, Nottingham, Anderson highlights cultural vitality through portraits of Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and other famous black figures hanging on the blue barbershop wall.

In Andrea Büttner’s works, societal issues take prominence, as beggars’ grasping hands emerge from faceless hoods in vibrant woodcuts, questioning the way in which we judge those we don’t know. The last artist on the list, Rosalind Nashashibi, addresses external perceptions of other cultures in her cinematic work. The highlight of her contribution to documenta 14 in Athens is her film ‘Electrical Gaza’. In this half-documentary,
half-animation, Nashashibi invokes her Palestinian roots to depict Gaza from a native viewpoint, at odds with that which is portrayed so often in the media here.

Collectively, these shows reveal a shift towards a lesser glamourized, more eloquent side of the contemporary art world. Perhaps the representation of more substantiated, globalised work is, in itself, enough of a development—finally giving space to under-represented sectors and ideas. That would be so if these works were welcomed sincerely. But as commentary on the nominations has surfaced, it seems that these artists may not get the recognition for their talents and discourses that they deserve.

The Guardian’s crude headline read, ‘A cosmopolitan rebuff to Brexit provincialism’ whilst a
rather aggressive freize post by Paul Clinton—’The Turner Prize and Identity Politics’—likewise
appeared to self-righteously attack, perhaps unintentionally, Eurosceptics: “Of course, it’s
difficult not to hear echoes of Brexit Britain and protectionism in these responses.” Undeniably diversity must be defended, but the problem here is that if petty Brexit hysteria is to dominate commentary, the issues these works truly seek to promote—and indeed the value of the physical art itself—will be wholly overshadowed. Failing to engage in the debate about BME artists’ place in the art world at the expense of attacking Brexiteers will fail to make visible the invisible. This is illustrated by the lengthy list of comments under the Guardian article that argue ferociously about Brexit but mostly fail to touch upon the art itself.

The ineffectuality of this analysis is illustrated by the example of Lubaina Himid, who made a name for herself in the 1980s as a leading figure of the Black British Art Movement. Much of the work occupying her listed shows was produced in the decades prior to her nomination and tackles representation of black artists on the contemporary art scene. As she explained in an interview, black artists initially “weren’t [visible] on the television or the newspapers or media at all”. It seems that the press are still failing to make her purpose any more visible—instead of rambling on about Brexit, commentary must positively address the celebration of black culture and heritage that is concurrent in Himid’s works.

The Turner Prize nomination and recent multitude of acclaimed shows have started to grant
Himid the attention she deserves. But appropriating them in Brexit battles is therefore inappropriate. In an interview for Apollo Magazine, Himid recognised that resentment hindered the proper narration of histories. Though she was talking about the struggle of the 80s, this is a resonant message today. For the resentment surfacing again around Brexit debates appears to detract from the detailing of black cultural history.

For instance, a recurring theme is the repurposing of European masters to indicate the institutional void. In ‘Freedom and Change’ (1984), Himid transformed the two women in
Picasso’s ‘Two Women Running on the Beach’ (1922) into black women, their hounds dashing
before them, warding off racism. Her 1986 work ‘A Fashionable Marriage’ likewise repurposed
Hogarth’s ‘The Countess’ Morning Levee’ to offer commentary upon the position of black artists in cultural circles. The castrato became the art critic—dithering over whether to support the minorities himself, or wait until the art world gave permission—whilst the slave became a black woman artist. Symbolic of her contemporary place, the slave suggested that black artists then were still “signifiers of white corporate wealth, expensive to keep, but oh so decorative and useful for dealing with awkward situations”. They worked for nothing, without recognition. Her work is so much more than ‘rebuffing provincialism’ therefore—it’s about finding a place for black artists in the art world.

I’m not saying that these works don’t deserve the attention—far from it. But it is careless of
the media and art institutions to present the works in this light. Last time I checked, neither
Zanzibar, Jamaica, nor Palestine were in the EU. By appropriating the art in this debate critics are not only wrong, but are unnecessarily alienating the works via negative and exclusive language. Comments need to be phrased more positively to celebrate and engage with the diversity of the work—after all, the Turner Prize is intended to encourage wider interest in contemporary art, not raise further barriers.

“A woman sitting alone, doing nothing”

Tilly Nevin
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“A woman sitting alone, doing nothing”

Mary Ruefle’s prose poem ‘Self-Criticism’ in her new collection, My Private Property,
begins “In a typical poem by myself, a woman is sitting alone doing absolutely nothing. She notices a fly crawling across the table and strikes up a conversation with him”. Ruefle’s prose poems (for want of a better term) on first glance might appear to be about a woman sitting alone, doing absolutely nothing. These poems begin when the speaker strikes up a conversation with a fly, or speaks through the mouth of a yellow finch watching a woman through her windowpane, or sees crumbs on a countertop or notes the strangeness that is a plastic Christmas Tree. Many of the pieces in the collection are about a woman ‘sitting alone’. But from such simplicity, from the detail of everyday life comes a striking beauty: the woman who sits alone, alienated and aging, is not really just doing nothing but creating something beautiful and startling from the ordinary.

In an interview with The Paris Review, Ruefle says “the unspooling of the body leads to rather grand contemplations at the same time it leads to the quotidian, the daily aches. It is the most beautiful and heartbreaking of paradoxes. It’s life”. Noticing a Christmas tree becomes an analysis of contemporary society and its strange arbitrary social rituals, about poverty and time. Remembering a moment when as a teenager she sprinkled salt and pepper
in a friends milkshake, an older woman is caught between two versions of her self—
similarly, in ‘Personalia’ the speakers says, “Now I am an old woman who wants to die and lodged inside me is a young woman dying to live: I work on her’”, a line I can’t seem to shake.

A shrunken head is both a literal object and yet also metonymic of both colonialism and
of our afterlife in memory: ‘Don’t we carry photographs of the heads of those we love who have died?’ The collection asks if we can stay close to loved ones as well as to the past selves we once knew—does a woman remain both the young girl she was, skipping school, and yet also go through the menopause?

The epigraph to the collection, taken from Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget reads “what an extended body in which to die” and most of the pieces in My Private Property in some way or another are about aging, the effect of time on the body. When you age, Ruefle
points out, you notice how a Christmas tree might not really be a Christmas tree at all but
a symbol for the cycles of life. Still, Ruefle says “my allegiance to poetry, to art, is greater than my allegiance to knowledge and intelligence”: age doesn’t give a simplistic, quantitative
knowledge of how time works, but a greater allegiance to art, which provides a space for the wonder, the humour, and the grace one can achieve with age.

My Private Property is stunning—each work in the slim volume holds more in its simple, almost childlike tones than Victorian novels might. Some call Ruefle “the best prose writer
in America”. It is impossible to decide whether Ruefle’s new collection counts as prose or
prose poetry—it is impossible to label such works. The quasi-refrain, describing different
types of sadness in different colours (“Blue sadness is sweetness cut into strips with scissors”) to some evidences the poetic quality of the texts. Although Ruefle herself calls some of the pieces prose works, the author also notes that in the refrain “if you substitute the word happiness for the word sadness, nothing changes”.

Whether you call My Private Property prose or poetry it doesn’t matter, “nothing changes”. Ruefle would probably note the strange insistence with which we do classify literary texts. In doing so we risk missing the joy, the brilliance glimmering in these works.

Class and conflict in the works of Leonora Carrington

Priya Khaira-Hanks
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Class and conflict in the works of Leonora Carrington

2017 marks the 100th anniversary of Leonora Carrington’s birth, and her native country is keen to reclaim this celebrated English Surrealist. In recent years, a retrospective at the Tate Liverpool, a new biography, written by her cousin Joanna Moorhead, countless celebratory Guardian articles, a beautiful new edition of her short stories published by Silver Press, and even a Google Doodle, have all brought Carrington back to Britain, drawing her genius back to the motherland with reverence and adoration. Yet her life and paintings are testament to an opposite and opposing journey, that of an artist that spent her life trying to get as far away as possible from the England of her youth.

A photograph from 1934, showing Carrington being presented at the court of King George V, could be a still from a Tim Burton film for its gothic and unsettling aesthetic—yet for the then 17-year-old, this was not a spooky set, but a real-life nightmare. She stands next to her mother, silk train puddling round her feet, and stares directly at the camera, a look that sends a desperate plea for help across the decades. The image marks the alternate life that Carrington could have lived, her pale gown and porcelain skin dissolving into the matching rococo wallpaper, another talent subsumed by the stifling convention of the English class system.

This was a woman that, even at an early age, found the bounds of upper-class English society excruciatingly restrictive. After being expelled from two boarding schools and a French finishing school, she followed the path of many a rebellious teenager, by defying her father and enrolling in art school. She was forcibly cutting her ties with the British elite, yet, in doing so, she also waved goodbye to financial support and security: the price of freedom was being cast adrift.

This difficult choice, and the sacrifice required to gain true autonomy, are expressed in ‘Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse)’ (1937-8), the first painting where we see Carrington’s distinctive style come into its own. She paints herself as the young English rose at leisure, trussed up in her riding habit and perched on her boudoir chair. Her hand, however, stretches to the lactating female hyena at her feet: though the world she inhabits might be ordered and superficially beautiful, she is drawn to the rawer, uglier, and wilder side of femininity. Through sickly yellow damask curtains, painted so realistically we can almost smell their musty mothball aroma, the white rocking horse becomes a real creature outside of the gentility of the home. It’s a Pinocchio narrative turned on its head: in the fairytale it is obedience that turns a wooden toy into a real being, whilst in Carrington’s life, it was breaking the rules that allowed her to truly come alive. She disobeyed her father in pursuing painting, which led to her meeting—and falling in love with—Max Ernst, and eventually, by way of France and Spain, arriving in Mexico, the country she would adopt as her true homeland.

Nevertheless, even in the left-wing, creatively fertile Mexico of the 1940s (Frida Kahlo was an acquaintance), Carrington still mined the aristocracy for its rich comic and satirical potential. In ‘Bird Pong’ (1949), two upper-class women are engaged in a game of ping pong whilst their children play in the corner, the manicured gardens of a stately home glimpsed through the window. Yet they accessorize haute-couture millinery with feathered bodies and bare feet, and instead of balls they rally with tiny birds that seem to burst into feather as you watch. Their cruelty in hitting the minute creatures with bats is complicated by the fact that they themselves seem avian. These successive, perpetuating layers of cruelty and captivity perhaps evoke the way in which aristocratic women imposed ownership on others, yet were simultaneously owned themselves by husbands and fathers.

Some may argue this is trying too hard to read Carrington’s autobiography in her work, and in fact her paintings were meant to live in the dynamism of incomprehensibility and irreverence, forever evading narrative. Yet part of the unique joy of her art is the way it can function as a stimulus for flights of fancy: each image, with its vivid characters and arresting landscapes, could spawn a film franchise, complete with new fantasy species, fan theories and a sprawling, encyclopaedic IMDB page.

Take ‘Hunt Breakfast’ (1956), another painting born from the bourgeois rituals of Carrington’s youth. In a forest rich with tiny, luminescent creatures, a prim and proper Edwardian gentlemen stands beside a phantasmagorical, triangle-headed figure, as they sit down to a post-hunt meal. A mixed-race marriage, a questionable dowry, the leisurely meal of the rich about to be disturbed by the teeming forest they have tried to exploit—stories abound, various and simultaneously possible. Susan Aberth, writer of the first book in English to survey Carrington’s life and oeuvre, noted that in her art “meanings have always been permeable and shifting, encouraging multiple levels of perception”. Yet in this nebulous space, one thing is certain: Carrington’s England never truly left her, and therefore, it could never escape her eviscerating, uncompromising artistic gaze.

Da Vinci Code cracked by Oxford academic

Jordan Bernstein
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Da Vinci Code cracked by Oxford academic

More than 500 years after the death of da Vinci, the artist renowned for his world-famous Mona Lisa painting, an Oxford professor believes he finally has the answer to a question which has puzzled historians for generations.

It has been thought for some time that Da Vinci was an illegitimate child, born of an affair between a 15-year-old slave-girl, Caterina, and an older lawyer.

Professor Martin Kemp, however, now claims that the full name of the artist’s mother was Caterina di Meo Lippi, a peasant who lived with her grandmother in the Tuscan hills of Italy, just outside of Vinci.

Kemp puts the findings down to archives, including property tax records, which it was reported were previously overlooked by researchers.

With a father who disappeared early in her life, Caterina was left to be brought up by her grandmother in a decrepit Italian house.

15-year-old Caterina then became pregnant in 1451 by Ser Piero da Vinci, 25, a lawyer working in Florence, according to Professor Kemp.

Of these new findings, Kemp said: “Caterina was a peasant fallen on bad times, and you cannot be much lower in the social pile than that. To be a 16-year-old with an illegitimate son and no house was about as bad as it gets”.

Records also reveal that at the time, da Vinci senior was already engaged to be married, and Caterina herself was soon married off to Antonio di Piero Buti, a farmer.

It was, however, the house of his biological father in which baby Leonardo was brought up following his birth on 14 April 1452. According to Kemp, this is also where Leonardo was born.

Professor Kemp has long had a fascination with the life and times of Leonardo da Vinci. In 2000, he advised skydiver Adrian Nicholas as he constructed a parachute according to Leonardo’s drawings from materials which would have been available in his day. In 2007, Kemp was the mastermind behind an exhibition in London entitled Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design.

Crinkled plate may be new method for weight loss

Selma Stearns
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Crinkled plate may be new method for weight loss

A new crinkled plate, designed graphic designer Nauris Cinovics at the Art Academy of Latvia, has been suggested as a method of weight loss and reduced food intake.

The plate was presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Porto, Portugal, as a possible variable in reducing the weight of the 30 per cent of the world’s population who are obese.

Cinovics told The Guardian: “My idea is to make food appear bigger than it is. If you make the plate three-dimensional [with the ridges and troughs] it actually looks like there is the same amount of food as on a normal plate—but there is less of it.”

The plate is made of clear glass, and although it looks the same as a normal plate from above, it has ridges and troughs, which reduces the amount of food that can be piled onto it.

In addition to holding less food, it is suggested that the speed of eating will be slowed down as people navigate the troughs and ridges.

Professor Charles Spence is a behavioural psychologist at Somerville college, who specialises in the perception of food and taste. Spence’s book Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating reveals the importance of the “off-the-plate” elements of a meal, such as the weight of the cutlery, the placing on the plate, the background music, and more.

Many things can influence perceptions of how much one has eaten and what it tastes like. For example, Spence’s research has indicated that “sweet” tastes are better expressed by means of rounded shapes, typefaces, and names, and low-pitched sounds.

Spence told the Cherwell: “[this wavy plate] certainly fits well with the literature suggesting that using smaller plates tricks brain into thinking that there is more food.”

The Smaller Plate Study is a famous study conducted by Dr Brian Wansink and Dr Koert van Ittersum which indicated that people eat less when eating off of a ten inch diameter plate as compared to a plate of twelve inches in diameter, without having an effect on perceived fullness or satisfaction.

“That said, there is a fine line between effortlessly nudging people toward eating less and making it difficult to eat, which trying to retrieve your food from between the cracks might turn out to be,” said Spence.

Professor Susan Jebb is a professor of diet and population health at the Nuffield department of primary care health sciences. She told the Cherwell that the new plate is an interesting idea to reduce food intake and portion size.

However, she added “before we start recommending this we need evidence from a study that shows people really do eat less overall and don’t compensate for smaller meals with more snacks.”

Cinovics is planning on testing the plate in a trial soon, and if the results are significant, we may all see crinkled plates in our households soon.

Oxford to become ‘sanctuary campus’

Jordan Bernstein
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Oxford to become ‘sanctuary campus’

OUSU Council this week passed a motion pledging to turn Oxford into a ‘sanctuary campus’.

The motion was also extremely critical of the Government’s anti-extremism Prevent strategy, calling it “invasive” and “Islamophobic” for Muslims and students of colour. The Prevent framework operates on campus, with one effect being to screen the views of those invited to speak at the University before they are allowed to visit.

The motion began by noting that: “There has been a rise in racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic attacks since Brexit and the election of Donald Trump”, before going on to say that “some universities in the US have adopted a ‘sanctuary campus’ approach, which involves practical support to stop racist government policy from harming the welfare of international students, students of colour and migrant workers, for instance by resisting deportation officials.”

The ‘sanctuary campus’ initiative comes after the defiance of American ‘sanctuary cities’ such as Chicago and Los Angeles. In the aftermath of Trump’s election, such cities, with attempts to institute a ban on travel from a handful of predominantly Muslim countries and suggestions that there would be a mass deportation of illegal immigrants, said that they would not comply with directives issued from Washington.

The motion, proposed by Lily MacTaggart and Lilith Newton, also stated “[that] although it is not always possible to stop the effects of racist government policy on campus, we must try and minimise the impact of these policies on student welfare”, and that “migrant workers are a vital part of our institution and their rights must be safeguarded.”

This follows similar moves to protect the rights and status of immigrants. Oxford Migrant Solidarity is a campaign comprising students and locals which focuses its efforts on pressing for the closure of Campsfeld House Immigration Removal Centre in Campsfield.

The scale of such action from OUSU does, however, appear to be without precedent. As well as “mandat[ing] OUSU to write to all heads of college urging them to protect all migrant sta in the wake of Brexit”, the motion entailed the backing of a detailed pledge and mandated OUSU sabbatical officers and Oxford NUS delegates to act in accordance with it.

Action to be taken includes “organising meetings of all students to increase the awareness of the threats and harassment faced by international students and what it means for all our education.

“We will [also] organise speakouts and tribunals where immigrant, international and Muslim students can testify openly about discrimination they have faced, and where we can vote and decide on actions we need to take.”

The St Anne’s representative to OUSU, Tom Zagoria, told Cherwell: “They did amend it to add ‘peacefully and legally’ several times when it was mandating the officers to act though, just so the motion could get past the trustees.”

An Oxford University spokesperson said: “Oxford University is complying with the Prevent legislation and is meeting all of its statutory duties. Our approach is in line with other Universities in the Russell Group.”

The proposers of the motion and OUSU were contacted for comment.

Keble JCR votes to reject boat-burning after Summer VIIIs competition

Akshay Bilolikar
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Keble JCR votes to reject boat-burning after Summer VIIIs competition

Keble College JCR has narrowly voted in opposition to the College’s provisional decision to burn a boat on its front quad ahead of Summer VIIIs, in a non-binding vote.

The College’s Governing Body had voted last week to allow the Keble College Boat Club to burn an old boat in the centre of the College’s Liddon quad if the men’s first crew (M1) or women’s first crew (W1) finish Head of the River next week.

Members of the JCR were presented with four options in an emergency motion at a JCR meeting on Tuesday. JCR members were asked whether they supported the burning of the boat, a celebration of the boat not based around burning, a rejection of the burning altogether, or abstention.

50 students voted to reject burning the boat altogether, with 73 choosing to celebrate the boat without burning it. There were 120 votes in favour of burning the boat and four abstentions, leaving a narrow majority of three votes in opposition to the Boat Club proposal.

Given a summer Entz ban in force at Keble, it was also highlighted in the JCR meeting that that there would be no good reason for allowing the boat-burning whilst rejecting, for example, a Welfare Barbecue, which was suggested last year.

One Keble JCR member, who did not wish to be named, told Cherwell:

“It says something about Keble that we sent this motion to debate. We are not afraid to question even the most traditional of traditions. The debate that we had was well-mannered, mature, and ultimately helpful for the whole college I think.

“Everyone here supports the Boat Club and will be very proud if they gain headship but we also want to ensure that Keble’s values of progressiveness and modernisation are represented in everything that we do.”

Keble MCR, which was polled on the question on Sunday, voted 21-18 against burning the boat. Both the JCR and the MCR motions were wholly advisory, with no power to mandate the Boat Club.

College members present at both meetings also criticised an Instagram page, keble4head, which featured a meme that students took to be “sexist and misogynistic”. The Boat Club denied a connection to the page and the particular post has been removed. Following the decision, a member of Keble teaching staff who had been due to go on sabattical in a few weeks resigned early from his positions as the Garden Master and Chairman of the Buildings and Grounds Committee.

Sven Jaeschke, the men’s captain of the Boat Club, said: “The grass won’t be touched and we would use fire retardant blankets to further protect it.

“The old wooden boat that we intend to burn, however, hasn’t been used for over 40 years and is of almost no value anymore”

The Governing Body voted in favour of burning the boat 12-9 with three abstentions, with JCR and MCR representatives not allowed to vote.

Keble College Boat Club and Keble College JCR have been contacted for comment.

Assaults on Oxford University hospital workers continues

Jordan Bernstein
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Assaults on Oxford University hospital workers continues

Figures released by Oxford University NHS Trust show that the number of reported assaults experienced by hospital workers has remained constant this year, despite a £10,000 investment in body cameras.

215 hospital staff were assaulted in 2016 at Oxford University Hospitals, leading many to doubt the efficacy of the investment.

This was a rise of 12 assaults from 2015, and will disappoint those who had hoped that introducing the cameras, worn by all on-duty security officials, would deter aggression towards staff.

Figures show that 199 of the 215 assaults can be linked to mental health conditions of the attacker. Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust emphasised that despite the apparent increase in the number of assaults, the figures, as a proportion, have remained stagnant once staff size increases are taken into account.

Speaking to Cherwell, the trust security manager Rachel Collins said: “The reassurance that the cameras have provided to both staff and patients has been very valuable.

“In the year to December 2016, the Trust provided Thames Valley Police with footage from the bodyworn cameras in 14 cases of violence and aggression at the John Radcliffe site. In addition, footage was used in six internal investigations.

“In this period, the number of complaints received alleging unreasonable force by our security officers across the Trust fell to five, from nine the previous year. All of these complaints were dismissed thanks to evidence from the bodyworn cameras.”

Unison representative Ian McKendrick said: “I am far from convinced by the use of body cameras.

“Our whole training is about prevention. What is the government doing about preventing this from happening? Assaults have gone up in the past five years and I think it is because of waiting times and patients get frustrated.

“You have to address the thing that is driving people to that.”

The Director of Organisational Development at Oxford University Hospitals, Mark Power, said that incidents will only be referred to the police where the assault is not a result of a patient’s ill health.

“Occasionally, members of the public display inappropriate behaviour towards our staff, which is sometimes violent, aggressive or intimidating in nature,” he said.

“We take all such incidents very seriously and, where they are reported by staff, will always initiate appropriate action.”

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