BAIT ISSUE 10 | Borders

BAIT is a termly magazine created by students in Cambridge, but open to anyone based in Cambridge (or around the world!). It was founded as a radical response to the awful money-burning scandal, as a way for Cambridge students to express themselves, tackle big, unspoken topics and care about the local community at the same time. Today, BAIT is a welcoming creative space to discuss important social issues alongside personal experiences, inspirations and doodles, all focused on the issue’s theme (which has been anything from Memory to Sex to the Internet).

There’s no one kind of submission we look for – we’ve published doodles on sheet music, textile pieces, nonsense poetry, absurd stories, Wuthering Heights adaptations, mixtape reviews, comics, oil paintings, 35mm photos, sketches of chairs, collages, pastel drawings, knotty Finnegan’s Wake-esque prose, and translations of opera arias.

We hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together!

FUNDRAISING FOR SOLIDARITEE

SolidariTee was founded in January 2017 by Tiara Sahar Atai, a then-first year student at the University of Cambridge. It has since expanded from t-shirt sales on the back of Tiara’s bike to an international organisation with teams at over 55 universities in more than 8 countries worldwide, with over 700 student volunteers working on fundraising and awareness raising. Their work falls into two main branches: fundraising to provide grants for NGOs working on legal aid for refugees in Greece, and awareness raising to dispel harmful narratives about refugees and asylum seekers and spread knowledge about global refugee issues.

IN COLLABORATION WITH CAMBRIDGE UNDOING BORDERS

Cambridge Undoing Borders is a student-led campaign doing important work to oppose the hostile environment policy. Universities are essentially erecting and upholding borders. They are instrumental in blocking migrants’ access to education as one of the most important public goods. Migrants with irregular status are denied access completely, while those with a temporary status face insurmountable barriers.

IN COLLABORATION WITH NEW HALL ART COLLECTION

From its very inception, New Hall Art Collection at Murray Edwards College has pushed and expanded borders. Murray Edwards (née New Hall) was founded in the 1950s as the third establishment for women at Cambridge, at a time when there was only one female student for every seven male students at the University. Its first intake consisted of 16 students. In the 1960s, the College moved to its iconic Brutalist structure designed by the architects of the Barbican Centre as a monument to the broadening opportunities in women’s education. Since then, New Hall Art Collection has developed into Europe’s biggest collection of art by women.