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2 months ago | 
cherwell.org | Faye Chang
With an increased focus on divestment over the past year, Cherwell sat down with two student activists involved in this work, Diana Volpe and Lina Osman. They are the presidents of Divest Borders and Student Action for Refugee (STAR) respectively – Lina serves as co-president of STAR with Tala Al-Chikh Ahmad. We started with a conversation about what these groups do.
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Jan 18, 2025 | 
cherwell.org | Faye Chang
Alec Tiffou is a student playwright for Matchbox Productions. His past two plays, Daddy Longlegs and Moth, have ran sold-out shows at the Michael Pilch Studio. Cherwell: Where does your writing process start? Where do you generally get inspiration for your plays? Alec: I think it’s difficult to say it comes from one place.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
cherwell.org | Faye Chang
For a budget involving tax rises worth £40bn, it’s pretty damning that Labour’s Autumn Budget can still be branded a ‘non-event’. However, this label may be apt in some ways: the pattern of increased spending and taxation continues from the previous government, with a lack of the large-scale tax reform that some might hope for from the first Labour government in 14 years.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
cherwell.org | Faye Chang
Half an hour north of central Oxford, you’ll find two disparate developments. On one side, Oxford’s new pride and joy: a £4 billion partnership with Legal & General for a state-of-the-art science area. On the other, Campsfield Detention Centre: a £70 million project by Galliford Try to reopen a facility for 400 immigration detainees. The hypocrisy is glaring. Campsfield’s closure in 2018 was met with significant relief, given its notorious living conditions.
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Nov 9, 2024 | 
cherwell.org | Faye Chang
When I was at school, we learned monologues from Antigone; after lunch around twenty of us would gather, choosing between playing at Haemon, Ismene, Creon, and Tiresias. Of course, as angsty, pubescent, 13-year-olds, it was Antigone’s monologue that we revelled in the most. The opening lines of her soliloquy still resonate with me: “so to my grave, / my bridal bower, my everlasting prison”. Even at our age, it evoked a depth of tragedy and righteous anger that we latched onto with fervour.
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Oct 7, 2024 | 
cherwell.org | Faye Chang
“Where are you living this year?”For some, this question brings back memories of scrambling to organise tenancies and coordinate renting plans. The panic of finding student accommodation in Oxford parallels a national housing crisis, just as manifest here as anywhere else. Private rentals for students line the streets in Cowley and Iffley (and for unfortunate Univ-ites, in the far reaches of Stavs), placing further stress on the already-boosted prices.
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
cherwell.org | Faye Chang |Morien Robertson |Alex Prvulovich
Irene Tracey is used to doing uncontroversial good. She has dedicated her remarkable career to studying pain, poring over MRI machines with the goal of understanding and preventing the phenomenon. She’s a fierce advocate for women in STEM, involved in several mentoring programmes. In January 2023, she went from Warden of Merton to Oxford’s Vice-Chancellor, the first state-educated and second female one in the University’s history, and seemed set to continue her success.
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Jun 9, 2024 | 
cherwell.org | Faye Chang
Thames Water, the UK’s largest waste and wastewater company, has revealed that they have spent £4.7 million in Oxfordshire to clean up sewage overflows in the past financial year. In response to an Environmental Information Regulations request submitted by the Liberal Democrats, the organisation also revealed that across its network, the total cost of clean up came up to £30 million.
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Jun 5, 2024 | 
cherwell.org | Faye Chang
The original title I had for this article was ‘Retired from Sad, New Business in Camp’. This was weeks before the actual concert itself, where my view was entirely informed by the series of videos posted on the instagram account, @mitskiontour. From the upbeat rendering of I Don’t Smoke, to the dead-bug poise Mitski holds in the second verse of I Bet On Losing Dogs, these excerpts seemed to promise a campy, joyous, pick-apart-and-put-back-together of the bastion songs of my teenage years.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
cherwell.org | Faye Chang
On Saturday, 25th May, the Modern Art Oxford (MAO) gallery hosted the Young Women’s Music Project’s (YWMP) one-day festival, ‘No. 80’, that ran from 3pm until late. The exhibition’s title came from the race/ethnicity designation of the UK population census, as the label for a checkbox for those who did not identify with any of the other listings. With these origins, ‘No. 80’ was a celebration of the margins and otherness.
