K.E.E.N. to help?
Next week is the first ever Student Community Action Week, with events happening in most universities around the country. The aim is to celebrate the variety of volunteering projects undertaken by students in their local communities - over 25 000 students nationwide volunteer each year. Oxford has a variety of groups working in the local community, and they hope to improve interaction between groups and attract more people through this week of information and events....
Features: Not bookish: de Bernieres
Having attended an audience with Louis de Bernieres (oh the privileges of an Oxford education) on Tuesday, the importance of the fictive and the imaginative in day to day dealings has occurred to me. Move from the analytical to the artistic and you will reap the rewards, both in terms of creativity and novelty value....
Features: www.god.com
Who needs God in the age of the Internet? It may not be that Him Upstairs is dead, as Nietzsche suggested, but how much less fraught is it to click a button and have instant access to the intangible and omnipresent? The Internet appears to have all the answers and some extremely interesting apocrypha (http://www.geocities.com/chathamgirls/translate.htm) which you can take or leave as you please - just like Buddhism. Sadly, God doesn't come in shades of Blueberry, Grape or Tangerine - and mercifully, Napster is hardly likely to take up guns for its beliefs....
Features: Students decide not to Nestle
Oxford Green Party invited controversy last week inviting representatives from Nestle to speak at their weekly meeting. Nestle have been the subject of a 10 year boycott by the National Green Party, 80 UK student and trade unions and amongst others Ocean Colour Scene, and Pulp. The discussion focussed on their sale of breast milk substitutes in developing countries which has been criticised for contributing to the deaths of 1.5 million babies every year. Milk substitutes discourage breast-feeding, with all its immune functions; in addition, poor sanitation, illiteracy and a failure to provide instructions in an adequate number of languages mean it is often mixed incorrectly or with unhygienic water, with fatal results. Nestle were quick to admit blame in the sale and marketing of products but stated that they now conform to international legislation and even exceed these standards in some countries. Both representatives stated milk substitutes were never advertised and no free samples were given to mothers or hospital staff, for which they have been strongly criticised. The speakers stumbled when the audience gave their experiences of developing countries where substitutes had found their way into rural communities with low literacy and poor sanitation. Despite Nestle's argument that they promote breast-feeding, the widespread availability of substitutes may still discourage mothers from breast-feeding and its undeniable nutritional and health benefits. Perhaps the strongest criticism was their refusal to stop selling the product or limit its use to prescription-only. Evidence suggests the product (which currently forms only 1% of their total sales) contributes to infant mortality. This suggests despite its new 'ethical' claims, Nestle is still driven primarily by profit, challenging whether big business will ever be compatible with social responsibility....
Features: Woman of the week:
"Practically the only available expression of lesbian culture we have in the modern western world since Sappho"
Features: Which way now?
They say it is a woman's world now. But what they really mean is, it is still a man's world, but women are better off than they were 100 years ago. Sure, we have the vote, we are better represented in education and the workplace, and we are not so constrained by social stereotypes. In other words, we have it all. But is that really how things are for the modern woman?...
Features: Perchance to dream....
I am a student of English Literature, sent to Oxford from the United States to delve into the theatrical worlds of William Shakespeare and modern British dramatists. So if I'm holed up in my room late at night with my nose buried in a book, what am I studying? Shakespeare's tragic heroes? The importance of Harold Pinter's silences? Of course not. I'm more likely lost in the world of a trashy romance novel....