Sofian Kourkzi

Hi! I’m Sofian, your current Education Officer, and I’m running to be your next SU President. I’m looking forward to building on collective knowledge, and my experiences in my role, to strengthen student voice and power.

As Education Officer, the team and I successfully and continue to:

• Push for greater student voice representation at the university with a focus on co-creation

• Build and defend student power through increasing visibility and support to student-led campaigns 

• Support the student movement, locally and nationally

• Support students through academic and housing issues

• Represent and fight for student interests in University governance structures ensuring that so-called high level visions do not ignore our everyday lived experience

In the last 2 years, we’ve simultaneously seen the strongest student mobilisation in at least 2 decades, as well as a generalised crisis of Higher Education. Prompting our University to push through redundancies and suppress students rights to protest. All while the administrative and timetabling issues we face are used as justification for even further cuts.

The state of the Higher Education sector should not be used to justify the disconnect between what we were sold, and what we are provided with. This is our education, and we deserve the ability to define our own journey. We should be able to bring together our education, our commitments, and our values, without having to redefine ourselves within the confines of any institution. This is our student experience, let’s take it back.

The only way to do this is to realise our collective power. This is how we get a university that isn’t complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, that serves its students, that respects its staff. 

Now, more than ever, we need a strong students’ union that can be a place for refuge for students, where student ideas and student life can flourish. A Student Union that empowers and emboldens us to not accept what we’ve been told is the only way out of this current crisis. To demand an alternative that is created by and for all who contribute. From the students, through academic and admin workers, to the cafe workers and cleaners whose labour is made intentionally invisible. 

I’m running for SU President to be able to take the work that I’ve been doing further. To ensure the student voice is represented at every level of our university, and so that management is held to account when their choices affect our everyday lives. And to ensure the Students’ Union lives up to its name, and becomes a real place for all of us to make decisions about our futures collectively.

As your President, I will continue to deliver on three fronts:

For Student Experience:

• Ensure all SU Student Staff get paid a Real Living Wage

• Campaign to ensure quicker responses and more transparency to student records and issues

• Campaign for improved access to ECs and RASAs, to reduce delay and misinformation which unfairly impacts students

For The Community:

• Champion for an open forum where students’ concerns are publicly acknowledged and addressed, where the institution is held accountable

• Campaign for a standard grant programme which student-led groups, liberation groups and projects, as well as societies and sports clubs can apply to year-round

• Build on the SU archive to showcase student achievements and student work

For Change:

• Continue to ensure commitments to student groups, including Goldsmiths for Palestine, are completed.

• Build on the university’s existing commitments to student groups by building partnerships, such as through education partnerships with Palestinian Higher Education 

• Build an open community education and political learning space which brings together students, staff and community members