Warwick Liberation Conference Reflections Blog

Recently Oxford SU supported two Part-time Officers to attend Warwick SU’s annual Liberation Conference (LibCon), newly opened to a national stage. Led by the Decolonise Collective, the theme for this conference was ‘Forging Solidarity’.  

Luke Liang, our Black and Ethnic Minorities Students’ Officer writes: 

“Seven thirty start, 

Trains barrel through morning mist, 

Clouds part for libcon. 

I attended a session about poetry as part of the 2026 Liberation Conference. Our task to set the mood was to write a poem about your journey to Warwick. For now, poetry does not come naturally to me, so I stuck to the structures I’m most familiar with: a haiku and talking about the weather. 

The poems and commentary I listened to, by celebrated poets Maureen Onwunali and John Bernard, reminded me of the importance of art as a political mechanism, as a way to be vulnerable, to be emotional, and to understand one's relationship with the world around you… all condensed into verses that cut to the core of the complexities of our material realities. Poetry’s potential for vulnerability and understanding of positionalities do not just make for nice prose, but are instead the preconditions for genuine solidarity: one where you come as you are to share and be transformed in collective struggle for what you believe in. 

At the conference, I was struck by the incredible work student activists were doing across the country, such as boycotts, divestment campaigns, rent strikes... In contrast, despite educating some of the most powerful people in the world, Oxford does not have a strong tradition of student activism, even compared to Cambridge, which continues to have successful arms divestment campaigns. The enthusiasm and dedication from the activists I met reminded me of the importance of mass participation in effecting change. 

My inner post-structuralist notes that discourse frames everything: who tells the stories, how are they told, who listens, and who is made to listen. It is therefore up to us to tell our stories, of what belonging, change, equality and decolonisation look like, and how we might be able to use the concentration of knowledge and power at this university to get there. In this spirit, my story from the conference was that I came into it believing that Oxford was in a position to lead change, but left understanding how much Oxford had to learn from others. 

Valerie Mann, our LGBTQ+ Officer writes: 

Alarm into doze into startle 

Throw myself, hurtle 

The rush becomes tamed 

Now I frame 

And it all clicks 

Always a sucker for a novel experience, I chose to get the 7:40 train to Coventry and walk the hour to Warwick rather than getting a bus. At the expense of some sleep, I had a lovely time walking through the green spaces on the way to the university campus. 

We had a very busy schedule both days, but it was absolutely worth the time because I took away so much from every single one of the events I attended. I won’t try to present all of my notes and thoughts on each individual one, for the sake of this blog staying short and sweet, but the conference as a whole really focused my mind on the matter of organising; ‘Organisation’ as distinct from ‘Mobilisation’ is not something that I’d previously come across in such a clear form, and has reshaped some of my thinking about how a movement sustains itself. 

Among other things, a key part of organisation is creating structures that not just allow but directly support the development of a long-term collective memory, an aspect that  I’ve found to often be either missing or only precariously present. It was fascinating to learn about the history of student movements in the UK generally, and also the early histories of Students’ Unions and their origins. Did you know that Oxford students offered their rooms to miners during the 1972 strike? 

While I have seen excellent examples of both mobilisation and organisation within Oxford, as a whole I see the student body at present as being in a lull of activism. I don’t claim to have the sole power to change that, but I will be carrying the learnings from the Liberation Conference with me into my future efforts.