So I came back from Oxford University's UNIQ Summer School last week. I was studying "History: Race and Protest" and I thoroughly enjoyed it all. It's almost like it finished too quickly but at the same time, while it was happening, it felt almost interminable. It was both the longest week of the year and yet it was also far too short.
There were 30 of us on the course but we all stayed in different colleges. I stayed in Brasenose (well more specifically Frewin Annexe which is 2nd year accommodation) with 9 other historians (all girls woo gal power yo) and other students reading Medicine, Geography and Materials Science (it's so cool how we were all studying really different subjects).
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| My pretty room in the Frewin Annexe! |
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| Beautiful Brasenose |
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| This wasn't even the fanciest food we ate in the week (but damn that steak was probably the best steak we've all ever eaten) |
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| I don't know if you've spotted it yet but sorry I'm going to ruin it - the unicorn has a hugely erect penis! It was put there to scare the women away from applying to the college when it first opened to women (men are so stupid no offence - we just found this hilarious!) |
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| Alumni Dinner at Balliol College (this was by far one of my favourite colleges it was stunning and huge and also left-wing!) |
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| Above is the alumni dinner at Balliol and yes those chocolates do have the Balliol crest embedded on them and they were still really tasty |
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| The beautiful Brasenose historians in our costumes before the Bop (which is a disco/party and it was lovely and held in a really nice club |
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| Brasenose College Crew! <3 |
Favourites:
Comedy Night with the Oxford "Imps", an improvisation group who were hilariously witty and talented. For the last twenty minutes, they even created a whole new musical from the word "whip" which was shouted out spontaneously from a member of the audience. Yes, a musical. It involved singing and therefore included improvised rhythms (people clicking musically in the background while also shouting out random words to the beat) and improvised rhyming and funny lyrics! My body was full to the brim with a raging sense of jealousy and an even stronger sense of admiration after the show. I wish I could sing well and I wish I could effortlessly throw out witty comments into conversation(sob).
Lecture about "The Struggle for Equality in Britain in a Global Context" by Imaobong Umoren who read History at King's College in London and has since began doctoral research at Oxford University on the international travels of Caribbean and African American women in the 20th century. This was my favourite academic lecture because it gave us a chance to finally appreciate the people who drove the movement, the people who weren't lucky enough to become major figureheads, the people who struggled and fought, arguably, the most for equality. She started the lecture by showing us a picture of the "Empire Windrush", a boat that's famous for transporting loads of people of colour from the Caribbean to Britain. The people who came were largely respectable middle-class men (being able to afford the transport to Britain is proof of that) in the hope of finding a good job after being subject to a lot of British propaganda in their own countries which portrayed England as the kind-of "Motherland" holding many fantastic opportunities for them. Unfortunately, however, there was a kind of "Colour Bar" that existed which meant that people could pick and choose who worked for them and thus this meant that many skilled people of colour (blacks, indians, others from the empire etc.) were degraded into working unskilled jobs for little pay. There was also a horrifying amount of prejudice in daily public life like in schools, finding housing and even politics. For instance, as a part of Peter Griffiths' winning Tory parliamentary seat campaign, he used the slogan "If You Want a N*gger for Your Neighbour Vote Labour".
We learnt about how in 1963 Paul Stephenson led the Bristol Bus Boycott which successfully allowed black and other ethnic minorities to work on buses and the fact that Dr Harold Moody founded the League of Coloured Peoples in 1931 which was the first black pressure group in the UK and also had a journal called "The Keys" that was about race issues which often transgressed borders for instance by reporting about the Scotsboro Trials and the maltreatment of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. What was particularly interesting for me was the fact that the 1935 invasion of Abyssinia (now called Ethiopia) by Mussolini particularly sparked anger in people therefore galvanising activism for racial equality as Abyssinia was one of two of the only independent African countries (the other being Liberia) at the time.
Also, the fact that there were so many women who also worked really hard to create racial equality was great to learn about - here are just a few of the names Anna Julia Cooper (an author, educator and orator), Paulette Nadal (co-founder of great newspapers that highlighted racial struggles and was also a key activist who later worked for the UN), Una Marson (poet, playwright and journalist who contributed to Moody's "The Keys") and Eslanda Robeson (an anthropologist, author, actor and civil rights activist). What particularly stuck out for me was how class really affected whether these activists were taken seriously - without the money for a good education and respectable clothes, would they have still achieved such great things? That's the sad part. It was so difficult to do anything if you were born, not only into the "wrong" race and/or gender, but if you were born into the wrong class. The question remains... Is it still difficult? And if so (which it pretty much is), how can we change this without the need of "social mobility" (being working class is not actually a bad thing on a personal level!)?
The generosity of the University astounded me - they gave us so much good food and 4 amazing free books! When I say "good food", I mean good food... Like I think I experienced about three formals in that one week (formals are like three course fancy meals and everyone sits down in the Hall which is usually really pretty and gothic and Hogwarts-esque) and we had the option of waiters bringing us a cooked breakfast every day and we got vouchers to spend at the local "Taylors" deli for lunch which had such good-quality food. Also, the books we received were "We Ain't What We Ought To Be" by Stephen Tuck (worth over 20 pounds) from whom we were lucky enough to receive advice about topics from admissions to studying history in a global context (it's a really fabulous book btw), "Black Experience and the Empire" edited by Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins (on the Oxford website this is over £80! also possibly my favourite as this is about Britain and thus relatable/applicable to me), "The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation" by Jim Cullen (costs a hard-to-swallow 19.99 in USD) and finally "A Very Short Introduction to American History" by Paul S. Boyer (which I'm currently reading and it's quite a good brief easy read and shockingly though it's only like 100 pages it costs 7.99) = over 100 quid in books and likely even more on food! Thanks Oxford jheez!
Finally, I really enjoyed discussing things and having the opportunity to reflect on the things we'd just learned with people who were really very clever and had a lot of great things to contribute to the conversation and especially with the tutors (we had postgrad students so not crazy daunting but they were still pretty damn knowledgable and thus still significantly intimidating) who were capable of asking the most deep questions. I felt like it was a great way to really get into more depth about such new ideas and thus solidify your understanding of them and help you create your own ideas, arguments and general points of views on particular issues/subjects. It's a teaching style I thoroughly recommend.
I hold the regret of wasting a lot of my research time in the library which meant my essay was not up to scratch at all and was not finished and probably didn't make sense which led to my tutor being pretty sceptical of my ideas during my tutorial and him and the other student in the tutorial winning with their side of the debate but I feel like when I do go to university, I would particularly enjoy that kind of independent learning because it's just the best (you can literally learn anything you want) and it's just a kind of means of getting into the routine for me, or so I hope (!).
Anyway, I hope this has been helpful for you if you're thinking about applying to UNIQ (literally just go for it)/will be attending UNIQ or just generally interesting for you!
For some more pictures check out this link http://uniq15wk1.tumblr.com/ and for more information about UNIQ click here!
