Rachel
May
Hart
Wannabe polymath, failed flautist.
Writer, creator, Oxford PPE graduate. I work in and on the university: a space I know intimately, with all its rituals, contradictions and spreadsheets. My professional life is rooted in higher education where I navigate both the formal structures - policy, finance, strategy - and the informal cultures that shape how universities actually work. I care about what happens to people within institutions, particularly those trying to survive them while also trying to change them.
My background spans philosophy, public policy, and a vague but persistent sense that institutions could be better if only they weren’t quite so much themselves. That contradiction drives much of my writing: an attempt to square the ideals of care, curiosity, and justice with the realities of bureaucracy, metrics and managerial language. I believe in asking hard questions and making space for ambivalence. I think the university can still matter but only if it’s willing to listen.
Alongside this, I write about mental health, particularly experiences of psychosis and the complexity of recovery. My personal and critical writing in this space resists tidy narratives of illness and resilience. I’m interested in the language we use - 'episodes', 'disorders', 'outcomes'. What gets flattened or erased in the name of clinical clarity? For me, psychosis was not a detour from life but a transformation of it: not simply something to overcome, but something to understand, integrate and live with. I write to honour that complexity, and to offer something different to the overly simplistic arcs of suffering-then-strength that dominate mental health discourse.
This site is a place to gather my writing, document what I’m working on and experiment - somewhat awkwardly - with the art of personal promotion. I approach it with equal parts curiosity and dread. You’ll find essays, reflections and works-in-progress that explore the politics of knowledge, the ethics of care and the quiet violence of institutional life. I’m drawn to the places where language cracks under pressure: the moments when systems speak in euphemisms, or when something real slips through the policy prose.
I’m interested in how we tell stories about systems, how those systems tell stories about us and what’s left unsaid in the spaces between. I write from the edges of academia, not fully inside or outside it, trying to make sense of what it means to live and work in these structures without being consumed by them.
If you’re here, I’m grateful. I’m still figuring it out.
