Publications 

The first Pride March was held in 1970 in New York City, and since then, June has become a celebration of identity and hope throughout the world. Utrecht has its own Pride, which features a boat parade and street parties all over the city. This year, it was on June 6, but there was another Pride event that weekend, even closer to home: our own campus’s festival! From June 4 to June 7, QueerCo hosted an on-campus Pride Festival in collaboration with over fifteen other committ

In your time at this college, you will likely hear a lot about how “UCU is a bubble, and you should try to break it from time to time by seeking out entertainment or hobbies in the city”, etc., etc. I certainly found it true that, with its lovely, enclosed campus and relatively small community, this place can lull you into thinking that you don’t need anything else (groceries be damned; that’s what silent dinners are for). But I don’t want to talk about The UCU Bubble™. The p

Energy for Refugees is a foundation that aims to alleviate energy poverty among refugees and other displaced people around the world. The organization is run by volunteers, students mostly, and we have teams in four cities: Delft, Amsterdam, Leiden and Utrecht. The organization is growing rapidly, as we are also creating new teams in Eindhoven and Enschede. However, we would love to share what we have been working on here, in Utrecht. First, a little more about Energy for Re

As we often talk about, social media needs to be limited, or at least closely supervised by some framework. But I think it must be limited in a way much greater than most people think. The most worrying problem with social media lies not in the harmful consequences that we experience today, but in the world that it will guide us into tomorrow. As it stands, social media is a self-reinforcing destructive mechanism. While starting as a ‘social’ form of media, it has transformed

My apologies to anyone who has heard me complain about not being able to watch Eurovision. My boycott this year was accompanied by a lot of self-victimization, and I made sure that anyone who I was talking to knew I absolutely hated not watching it. But no one forced me to boycott Eurovision. In fact, it was me who pushed my family to refuse to watch the show. To be honest, very naively, it felt like the European Broadcasting Union was trying to hurt me personally. Why else w

Curaçao has created one of the greatest fairytales in football history. The island, a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Southern Caribbean Sea, has a population of around 158,000 people. After beating Jamaica in the final of the qualifiers, Curaçao has now debuted at the World Cup in the USA, Canada and Mexico, and became the country with the smallest population to ever participate in the tournament. Both the fans and players have been praised as s

A Shaking Democracy and Lack of Coherent Vision I joined the student council in April 2025 and have since had many difficult discussions and made many decisions, but the first time I felt the pressure and difficulty of representation was when we discussed budget cuts. Discussing budget cuts is always met with a certain feeling of frustration, both at the situation and the process. We broke up into smaller discussion groups with representatives from teachers, support staff, ma

“What happens when we try to do things differently and when we actually do writing that does not separate out experiences, subjectivities, genres?” Stephen Ball writes that "at its most visceral and intimate, neo-liberalism involves the transformation of social relations and practices into calculabilities and exchanges, that is into the market form – with the effect of commodifying educational practice and experience.” Although the commodification of the educational sector is

Carnival has a special place in my heart. In Gran Canaria, where I grew up, Carnival is a tradition with a history spanning five centuries. It symbolises creativity, music, and freedom. Now, let me share a bit of an inside joke. For much of the twentieth century, Carnival celebrations in Tenerife were more recognised than ours. Their festivities were declared a Festival of International Tourist Interest in 1980, and few things irritate a Gran Canarian more than hearing that a

Like many of my fellow UCU-ers, I like learning about mythology. Stories of strange and faraway times always seem to fascinate me. This is why I’m always ready to check out a new adaptation of a mythological story. However, after watching or reading a mythological retelling, many people are left disappointed or outraged. So very often, mythological adaptations change key things about the original stories. These inaccuracies have certainly bothered me before. Recently I have b

To my dear sisters and brother. For some reason, having 6 siblings sort of becomes an identity marker at a place like UCU. Which is odd. But when somebody asks what it was like, I usually tell them about one of three things. It was never, ever quiet in that house. What is privacy? My room didn’t even have a door. The bathroom. Sharing one bathroom between two ‘grown-ups,’ five antsy teens who are always down for an argument, an unhinged 8-year-old, and a bratty 6-year-old (

I have always had a morbid attachment to the objects I own. I know such a rampant expression of capitalism will be condemned at UCU, but that’s just how my life has worked, for as long as I can remember. My family makes fun of me because my go-to sentence starter at age five used to be: “Back in my youth...” One of the first manifestations of this disease called nostalgia had me fighting with my mother, at the ripe age of twelve, over throwing away my notebooks from elementar

I was born a Man-flower. Of course, no one else knows that. They think I’m just a regular flower. They pluck me and smell my hairs, pull my limbs off, drop them in jars until their blood oozes out, and they either rot or dry away. I don’t mind it all. I enjoy the pain of the infection, savour each second as I feel those old fragments of my body distance themselves from my consciousness. The pain dissolves, and what was once a vital limb becomes but a distant memory. I always

I am a very picky reader. By that I mean that most books I read I put down after just a few pages because they just lack a certain something. In a way, I feel like this makes me weirdly qualified to give book recommendations because you know they have undergone a very strict filtering process. There is a certain kind of writing that touches my soul like nothing else can; prose that feels alive, there is no better way to put it. The two authors that I will present to you here

Storms terrified me as a child. The teeth-rattling grumble of thunder would send me scurrying to the basement, or lead me to press my nose against the panes of glass in the living room, staring through them in the hope of identifying whether this particular storm would be the one that tore off the roof. Growing up in the leafy Washington suburbs, I needn't have worried. Nothing worse than the wispy tails of Carolina hurricanes ever troubled our little brick house, but that ge

My younger brother has always been my shadow, both my biggest burden and my biggest blessing. We shared every toy and childhood memory until the 2020 port blast carved him into someone else. I watched him retreat into a shell of PTSD and anxiety, a twelve-year-old who couldn't sleep alone or let our parents out of his sight. While my brother found his footing again, the world shifted once more. To be frank, I find it difficult to be here while Lebanon is falling apart. Ther

Beams flick from leaf to petal, skipping softly, half-aimless,their mellowed shine stitching a dappled constellation across the forest floor. I watch the light shiver through your silvered hair, trembling, uncertain,as if it senses the slight unravelling of your being. Mottled bark loosens, slips from the towering gums,from the pendulous hush of wattles- And in its quiet shedding,I see your skin begin to remember, every year it has carried,your face freckled with the slow fat

In November of last year, I had to leave campus and temporarily stop my studies due to an unexpected health issue. This meant that I would have almost 6 months off; no class, no deadlines, no exams. To those who are in the midst of an academic crisis, this may sound like a dream, but no one prepares you for how strange and unfamiliar having nothing on your schedule feels. At the beginning of my leave of absence it felt like there was this huge mountain in front of me. How wa

Anyone who has taken Introduction to Art History probably recalls the stress of studying for the final exam and having to remember every single artwork in the textbook. I remember flipping through The Story of Art, desperately trying to memorise all the paintings and sculptures, and slowly coming to a realisation. Of the approximately 370 artworks depicted in this book, covering almost the entire history of Western art, there was only one single artwork made by a woman. Conve

河中行 躺在吊床上，仰望着看不见的星空——我闭上眼，通过你的眼睛看——同样的树，同样的天空，同样的粒子。 你从第一道光就存在，你也会在我的结束后还在。 睁开眼——细胞更新，分子和原子悄然替换。接触到我视网膜的光子，已然不复存在。 闭上眼，我是永恒的。睁开眼—— 我将重新、第一次注视这个世界。 A walk in the river Lying in a hammock, I gaze at unseen stars. I close my eyes, and see through yours— the same trees, the same sky, the very same drifting particle. You have existed since the first light, and will remain long after my end. I open my eyes: cells renew, molecules and atoms silently replaced. The photons that met m