Historian Sana Shah is a former Welfare Officer of the Somerville College MCR. As her DPhil studies draw to a close, she joined us to offer this poignant reflection on the special role that the Somerville College MCR has played in shaping her time at Oxford.
For those who live a life in transit, what would belonging look like?
Stillness.
It would look like stillness that consoles, under the shadow of constant movements, of journeys embalmed in anticipation and the weight of baggage packed with memories and promises.
Sana Shah
As a student arriving at the close of the DPhil chapter, now that I look back at my time in Oxford, one of the spaces that embodies and inhabits something closest to that stillness is the Somerville MCR. I understand that it is very unusual for me to speak of a closed space when I could have said the meadows, ancient streets and libraries heavy with silence or the unmapped walkways, signing the Oxford imagination, but it is also an answer thought out several times. I understand that most students will associate a range of activities and happy occasions with the MCR, from term-card events to the shared space that it provides to incoming students, humming the song of movement traced through crescendoes of shared laughter or crowded evenings; a space of coming together, for celebrations like Eid or Christmas, for commemorations, for holding events in support of a cause, and for the in-house business – committee meetings.
My strongest memories of the MCR are the quietest
Having served as welfare officer, I have experienced the often-invisible labour behind putting each event together, and I understand each of these associations, while welcoming new faces, organising events and then worrying about the attendance at the events, rearranging the furniture in preparation for the events and then matching pace with the clatter of the cutlery while steering conversations. Yet my relationship with the MCR lies outside the roles undertaken, beyond the visible hours. The stillness I refer to is an accumulation of little things, measured in fleeting moments that bring together disjointed lives and align them through shared routines, effortlessly weaving the rhythm of becoming. It is the stillness that slows you down when you enter the space one misty evening after a long day, and it offers you a blanket of solidarity that is shared by students enduring pockets of uncertainty in life. It is the stillness that remains after conversations between friends punctured by words, intermittently, over a cup of tea, poured from the kettle in the MCR pantry, the babbling sound of which interjects the cosmic rhythm of the MCR numerous times a day, and of course coupled with the coffee machine whirring stubbornly of its own accord, without a human hand. It is the stillness that accompanies the melody laboured on the piano after a revelatory thought process. The stillness that anchors the notes gliding on the impromptu chorus, jamming on a playlist long lost and found suddenly, simply because old and new friends gathered after a social event, without the almost robotic instructions of our respective calendars. It is the stillness of the hands on the foosball lever, strategising the final goal with bated breath. It is perhaps these interjections which lead me to say that my strongest memories of the MCR are the quietest.
The Somerville College MCR
Having inhabited the space during different phases of the day, I am often drawn to the space at night when the MCR empties, and the sofas turn into recesses of solitude, after the porter’s round. I remember cosy afternoons in spring, when the sun slips neatly through the wide glass window, dissolving with the smoky vapours rising from a cup of brewing tea, and rests with us on the couch, like an old friend inviting us to pause – a rarity in a demanding doctoral life. Much like an old friend, the MCR too offered its presence on days that felt heavy to carry and through disappointments from stalled writing, difficult news from home, or the existential musings that drill through any research sojourn.
If a PhD is a prolonged act of becoming, the Somerville College MCR has been where that becoming felt most possible
Academic lives are often measured by the projects completed, grants awarded, papers published, or conferences attended. Yet what sustains research rendezvous are shared arches of care and curiosity that often make themselves known through spaces where one can land without a prior performative expectation. Consolation unfolds in rooms where friendly banter turns into unexpected assurances and bonds that blossom from coinciding routines, even on unproductive days, and yet one can belong somewhere where reminders of productivity do not stand out. The MCR has been strangely human in that sense.
Now that I slog through the final stretch of my DPhil, I notice the space differently. The idea of departure laces our familiar routines. The structure of everydayness carries within it a deep but quiet awareness that the days await a regimentation that the MCR space deferred until now: The hurried meals between meetings, the spontaneity of foosball matches, the stretching conversations nibbing at the edge of our schedules, for the simple reason that no one wants to wrap up the day as yet. Perhaps, the institution I earlier earned my degrees from, Jawaharlal Nehru University, was a lot about the in-between learning, the informality of being, the coincidence of knowledge with diverse life-worlds, the meeting point of ideas over endless tea-breaks, the temporal rhythm of student life refusing to recognise the clock of the world outside, defying the formal ways of learning. Perhaps that left me with a yearning for similar modes of existence – and a space which comes close to offering such a possibility of existence for the little time that it can, for me, has been the MCR.
Every graduate student, at some point, comes to appreciate the relationship between their intellectual journey and the spaces that hold it. In that sense then, the MCR for me has become an archive of shared lives: friendships formed, anxieties spelt out loud, confidence woven through fragments of assurance.
If a PhD is a prolonged act of becoming, the Somerville College MCR has been where that becoming felt most possible. A becoming, wrapped warmly in tender stillness.
