Freshers Week 2010 announced

The Students’ Union has announced a fun packed week for 2010 Freshers including Seafront Festivals, Welcome Weekend Parties, Live Music, Parties on the Pier, Club Nights, Headline Acts, Barn Dances and much much more… making sure there is something for everyone to get involved in this Freshers.

The Students’ Union has also launched the Freshers Week gold ticket – a wristband that will get you into all the main Freshers events for only Read more

Gomez show Brighton they’re back with a bang

It’s been a while since we last had Gomez here in Brighton.  The release of their new album A New Tide in March and their seemingly stealthy presence in the British music scene over the last few years gave me reason to wonder: would they would still live up to their one time Mercury Music Prize status?
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An Injection of Common Sense?

When the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse began its heroin “shooting gallery” pilot project four years ago, critics argued that it would result in a proliferation of drug dealing and crime.

In fact, it has had the opposite effect. In the areas of south London, Brighton and Darlington where heroin prescribing clinics have been set up, levels of both drug dealing and crime have declined. Read more

Badgeronline upgrade

Hello Badger-online readers,

We are due to upgrade the WordPress version to include lots of new facilities, including security fixes.
During this time, we may need to go offline in order to complete this upgrade.

Please be patient with us whilst we take thebadgeronline into the new version!

*Latest: We have successfully upgraded from an earlier version but are currently experiencing issues with our Tags cloud and comments box, please be patient whilst we deal with this issue*

All the best,

Hesan
IT Manager (USSU)

Project Sand

Last summer I spent 6 weeks in Accra, the capital of Ghana, doing an internship in human rights law. I did this through a large reputable volunteering agency that organised my placement and my homestay accommodation and also hit me up for £2,500, for my troubles, and that wasn’t even including the additional expense of my flights, my malaria tablets, visa and vaccinations. I was officially broke.

And since handing over that large wodge of cash, ‘trouble’ has indeed been the operative word. My homestay was a two hour journey out of the capital city of Accra where my office was supposed to be located and thus meant that I had to be on the roadside at 6.30 every morning to arrive in the office for the designated time of 8.30.  Now, I use the term office loosely, as it was merely a room with no facilities, excluding the luxury of running water for a toilet. No office manager was present, and we were all emailed obscure topics to write articles on with no focus, deadline or imminent purpose. It soon became apparent that we had all been lured here under false pretenses through the greed of supposed charitable beaurocracy.  The upshot: The volunteering organization didn’t cap volunteer numbers and thus we were just ‘overspill’ as there was just not enough work to go around.

As you can imagine, I therefore chose to spend the majority of my free time, away from the office and out of the bustle of Ghana’s demanding capital city. On such a weekend, I came across the estuary community of Kewunor (pronounced Kay-oo-noo), whilst exploring the banks of the Volta River. Kewunor in Ewe means ‘Village of Sand’ and the community is entirely dependent on fishing as there is no possibility for any sort of agriculture.  The sand dominates, and consequently the people are condemned to extreme poverty and a complete lack of amenities.  Kewunor, 6 kilometres from the nearest town, is virtually an island. It is only accessible by foot or boat, and as all medical, educational and nutritional needs have to be gained from this town, the village community is somewhat isolated. Whilst there, I met a local man called Winfred Dzinadoh who had great vision for the community, and in line with this, started his own form of an eco-lodge 3 years ago.  Kewunor is the perfect place for an idyllic getaway; sandwiched on a sandy palm-lined estuary with the gentle river lapping on one side, and the seaside-nesting site for the local marine turtles on the other. Winfred runs this hotel with the design to support and include his fellow local inhabitants. In addition to the setting up of the hotel, he has used its profits to start a number of projects to benefit the community. All too aware of the woefully inadequate education provisions in the area and with the nearest school miles away and only accessible by foot, Winfred decided to establish his own nursery school in the grounds of his hotel.

Due to the great potential of the project and my admiration for the fantastic work Winfred was doing, I hung up my African office suit, jacked in my internship and moved out to Kewunor for the rest of my summer. I spent the most amazing two months of my life there, as it is not only the most beautiful place I have ever visited, it was the most welcoming. I had never conceived that I would actually want to wake up early in the morning out of sheer excitement for the day ahead, but for two incredible months, that became my mindset. I showered with coconut husks in the river, built epic sand palaces with the local children, shared a beach with gigantically graceful marine turtles and learnt how to fish, drum and dance like an Ewe warrior. And, best of all: I survived without my GHDs!

In an attempt to steer away from sounding like a pretentious and irritating asbestos-under-the-skin backpacker, who after a year of sitting in a tent in the jungle playing a singular drum declares they have ‘found themselves’; I shall try and explain my enlightenment differently.  But I can’t: I truly ‘found myself’. So, armed with an unruly barnet and newly found sense of self-knowledge, came the birth of ‘Project SAND’. SAND stands for Sustainable AfricaN Development, a charitable initiative set up by Winfred and I, for the purpose of continuing the sustainable development of Kewunor, and other isolated waterside communities with a specific focus on sanitation, healthcare, education and conservation.
In light of my dreadful volunteering experience, we have set up a low cost, grass-roots volunteering scheme with placements in teaching, conservation, catering and construction and it has been going from strength to strength since January of this year.

We are currently working with the aim of registering Project SAND as a charity in the UK by summer 2009 and as a NGO in Ghana by December 2009. Registering as a charity with the UK Commission has proved to be less romantic than I naively believed, with lots of CRB checks, child protection policies, trustee boards, and the worst thing of all is that I might not even get approved.

Fingers crossed.

Website: www.projectsand.org
Email: info@projectsand.org

The Badger – Year in review 2008/2009

Tradition dictates that the outgoing communications office and editor-in-chief(s)  write a small summary of the past academic year. These summaries have gained a repuation for distilling the mood of a whole cohort of graduands, whilst simultaneously providing a soapbox for the people who spend a year being neutral.

This year however, has seen the blossoming of a wonderful experiment: The Badger Online. (Thanks for reading by the way!) Accordingly, the tradition is in need of a bit of an update. Superficially, this is the first time that the end-of-year summaries have been made available online (scroll down). Perhaps more importantly though, you now have the ability to see all the articles they’re talking about, because they’re all stored here, on this site, preserved forever and ever.

For my part, I’d like to join the others in thanking all the contributors for allowing us to publish their work, the editorial team for curating this wealth of talent, Dan Higgins for imagining the site, Andy Spratley for constructing it and Lisa Murray for spending her Friday evenings helping me run it. You guys are all amazing.

Anyway, without any further ado, here are the real summaries:

Suki Ferguson

Suki Ferguson – Editor-in-Chief

This year, numerous events occurring on our humble campus have played out on a surprisingly national stage.

The students spurred into action by the conflict in Gaza proved that a good oldfashioned Sussex sit-in can simultaneously bring about significant policy changes and provide inspiration for fellow protesters across the UK. The recent campaign to protest against the management’s dodgy Linguistics-cutting tactics has garnered its own publicity, attracting the support of internationally respected academics. And our news agenda has proved inspiring for the broadsheets, who came to The Badger for leads on stories about the use of pep pills in universities. Clearly, The Badger plays an important role in the gradual evolution of how the world sees Sussex, and how we see ourselves as a student body.

Being involved with producing The Badger for the last two years has taught me several important lessons: how to write articles that provoke surprisingly rude and incoherent responses from the occasional loon; how to negotiate editing software that possesses only intermittent spellchecking abilities (sorry about all the typos guys); and that editing the student newspaper is almost always way more fun than working on my degree. In fact, loons and typos aside, writing and editing The Badger is an experience I can wholeheartedly recommend to any student with a few hours to fill and something to say.

One thing is certain: being involved in this newspaper guarantees that you will always have the scoop on the dramas and disasters that make university life so engaging. The Badger gives you access: access to student politics, access to free films, gigs and plays, and even access to the journalism industry (if you’re lucky!).

The joy of it is that if you want to write for The Badger, you can – all you need to do is show up at a writer’s meeting to pick up a story, or hand in your application for next year’s editing positions.

So, to sum up: I hope you’ve enjoyed our coverage of university life in 2008/9 as much as I’ve enjoyed working with the editorial team that produced it. And it’s good to know that even if us almostgrads soon won’t be able to read the paper version, at least we now have thebadgeronline.co.uk to console us should we ever need the occasional Sussex update.

Here’s to next year’s Badger!

Michael Holder

Michael Holder – Editor-in-Chief

First and last of all, a few regrets. There’s a slight chance that you’ve opened The Badger on a Monday (because you definitely always do that) and spotted another minor grammatical error, or the text doesn’t quite line up, or finally realised that you are an annoying pedant. We’re sorry, but beauty and perfection do not come often together. No one can have both. But I always notice these things and I regret that this year has turned me into such into an annoying pedant.

On a personal and far more important level, I regret that our interview with Scott from 5ive was never published. Now the full extent of the bitterness he feels towards his former bandmates because “they don’t want a reunion” may never be known. Can’t you see they’re busy right now, Scott? And anyway, Blue have reformed. We got his photo as well and he’s not all that, in case you were wondering. After the photo, he mumbled something about beauty and perfection not going together and then went off to sing ‘Keep on Moving’ to thousands of adoring Freshers.

This has been an excellent year, though, and massive thanks have to go out to everyone who has helped out: web editors Tom Wright & Lisa Murray; Andy Spratley; Suki & Dan; Nick Blumsom the photographer; all the proofreaders who come in every week to read our mess; the brilliant editorial team we’ve had this year; and of course everybody who has written and contributed to The Badger this year - without you, everything is irrelevant.

Dan Higgins

Dan Higgins – USSU Communications Officer

In a year which has seen linguistics courses cut, an occupation on campus, countless referenda, record-breaking election turnouts and the notion of “studentification”, The Badger has perhaps never been so important to campus life.

This year we have developed The Badger Online to allow readers to comment instantly on whichever article they choose. We have also branched out into social media with a facebook application and twitter feed. None of this development would have been possible without the assistance and technical expertise of Andy Spratley, the USSU IT and Web Manager, and I am very lucky we had someone ‘in the know’ who shared the same vision and had the ability to make it a reality. Through all this development, articles in The Badger are now being read on a regional, local and national level.

With a strong team next year and Michael Holder at the helm, The Badger will continue to grow and become a guiding force in student news. Over and out.

The Waterboarding controversy

Barack Obama last month completed his first 100 days in the Oval Office. ‘So far so good’ seemed to be the majority verdict. But now, Obama faces his toughest job yet. Before his election, he said “brutal interrogations [are] an outrageous betrayal of our core values”. Now he is President, is he bold enough to punish those who tortured in America’s name?
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The world is in mortal danger… time for Plan Bee

Honeybees are dying out worldwide, causing widespread concern amongst not only beekeepers but also politicians and the public. It is becoming a serious and urgent worldwide issue, and where is some of the most important research being conducted? Well, here at Sussex.

When you consider the honeybee, which I’m sure you often do, you may imagine the irritating pest, the painful sting, maybe on a good day a nice pot of honey. But there’s really a whole lot more to our busy little friends.
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Sussex students join protest against Iranian President at UN conference

Last month Sussex student Judith Flacks went to the 2009 United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Geneva. The key talking point was the speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in which a number of delegates walked out. Writing exclusively for The Badger, she tells of her experience.
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Bhaskar embraces new role as Chancellor

As Sanjeev Bhaskar arrived on campus for the first time during the spring break, The Badger met with him to talk about his own academic experiences, how he is settling into his role as University figurehead and his plans to hug every single graduate at this year’s ceremonies…
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