Category: Academic Analysis

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jolel Miah, Senior Lecturer, Health Psychology, University of Westminster

Riz Ahmed’s Bait is an exceptional piece of television. Not only for its satirical exploration of the entertainment industry, but for the psychological narrative running underneath it.

At its heart, the Prime Video series is a quietly devastating study of the pressures placed upon British‑Pakistani men. What appears to be an eccentric comedy about a struggling actor auditioning for James Bond soon reveals itself to be a nuanced portrayal of shame, internalised stigma and the early signs of psychosis.

The series follows Shah Latif (Ahmed), whose obsessive pursuit of validation becomes a catalyst for a psychological unravelling. Shah’s downward spiral is shaped by relentless scrutiny and the fear of not belonging. These themes resonate strongly with a growing body of research on psychosis in British‑Pakistani communities.

A 2024 study in The British Journal of Psychiatry found a significantly higher incidence of first‑episode psychosis among British‑Pakistanis, compared with the majority population.

This offers an important parallel to Bait. Shah’s sense of cultural drift, his distance from grounding community structures and his struggle to inhabit multiple identities all heighten his vulnerability.

The show does not name psychosis explicitly, but Shah experiences intrusive thoughts, escalating paranoia, fragmentation of self and delusions. This reflects real trajectories observed in early intervention services.

Racism and psychosis

One of the most incisive threads in the series is the portrayal of racial microaggressions that Shah absorbs without resistance. These include remarks about his “Britishness”, comments on his appearance, and the persistent insinuation that he exists outside the cultural centre.

Recent research has shown that racial discrimination is one of the strongest predictors of psychosis risk. It increases the likelihood of psychotic symptoms by 77%, with physical racial attacks multiplying the risk five-fold.

Shah’s encounters – ranging from subtle jabs to overt dismissal – operate cumulatively, shaping his internal monologue and eroding his self-esteem. The brilliance of Bait lies in how it embeds these aggressions into the comedic structure, illustrating the subtle normalisation of harm.

The series highlights the importance of family dynamics, a key but under-researched factor in understanding psychosis among South Asian Muslims in the UK. A 2009 study found that families often had to navigate stigma, concerns about privacy and honour, and tensions between medical models of illness and culturally rooted understandings of distress.

Shah’s relationship with his family shifts between warmth, expectation and pressure, reflecting this complexity. Family can act as both a source of support and a cause of psychological strain.

Research examining British-Pakistani Muslim views on mental health has found that cultural stigma, fear of public opinion, and uncertainty around religious explanations can delay people seeking help.

These dynamics are reflected in the silence running through Shah’s world. Mental health struggles are hinted at but never openly discussed, and Shah instinctively hides his distress behind humour and performance. This also reflects how many communities describe mental health in moral or spiritual terms, rather than psychological ones.

I recently explored these issues in a podcast conversation with Zenab Sabahat, a PhD researcher at the University of Bradford. Her research looks at access to, experiences of and outcomes for South Asian Muslim families receiving family interventions for psychosis. This work explores how cultural identity stress, stigma and mismatches between different models of care shape pathways into support.

Sabahat’s work reinforces what Bait illustrates narratively: that psychological distress among British-Pakistanis is closely linked to experiences of migration, racism, cultural belonging and intergenerational tension.

This reality also underpins the work of Our Minds Matter, the UK charity I co-founded to deliver culturally grounded mental health education and support in under-served communities. The organisation’s mission emphasises the need to address mental health through the lenses of culture, faith and community – approaches that mainstream services often overlook.

Early education, reducing stigma and building culturally sensitive support are essential for addressing the inequalities faced by communities like Shah’s.

Five years ago, our team produced a community-led documentary exploring psychosis. It highlighted the experiences of South Asian families and the urgent need for culturally coherent support structures. The challenges articulated in the documentary continue to be reflected in both academic research and people’s lived experiences today.

What Bait achieves is not simply representation but illumination. It exposes how psychological vulnerability can be fuelled by cultural dislocation, racialised exclusion, and the impossible expectation to excel while carrying generations of unspoken pressure.

Shah’s experiences – humorous, painful and increasingly fractured – mirror the mental health inequalities faced by British‑Pakistani communities, particularly men navigating contradictory identities and structural disadvantage.

The series invites viewers to see psychosis not as an isolated biomedical event, but as a response to accumulated pressures: family honour, societal scrutiny, cultural misrecognition and stigma that constrains emotional expression.

These pressures interact across biological, psychological and social frameworks, creating conditions in which psychosis risk becomes elevated. The show’s understated portrayal of this trajectory offers a culturally specific, psychologically accurate narrative rarely seen in British television.

In a media landscape where the mental health of British South Asian Muslims is often sensationalised or overlooked, Bait offers an important counternarrative. It shows that the intersections of identity, discrimination and cultural expectation are not abstract ideas but lived experiences that shape psychological wellbeing.

The show’s quiet strength lies in revealing these dynamics without being preachy – inviting audiences and practitioners to better understand how culture, racism and mental health intertwine.

Jolel Miah does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Bait sheds light on British-Pakistani mental health struggles rarely seen on screen – https://theconversation.com/bait-sheds-light-on-british-pakistani-mental-health-struggles-rarely-seen-on-screen-280102

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christoph Siemroth, Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Economics, University of Essex

The price of oil has changed a lot in the last few weeks. There have been dips as well as peaks, but generally, since the the start of the US-Israeli attacks on Iran at the end of February, the black stuff has been getting more expensive.

As a direct result, petrol and diesel prices in the UK have also rocketed.

Motorists have felt the steep rise on petrol station forecourts, while some fuel sellers have been accused of profiteering and ripping off customers. There have also been calls for the government to intervene to prevent costs from spiralling out of control.

But what can it actually do to bring petrol prices down?

One option might be to impose price caps, setting a legal limit on what motorists can be charged for a litre of fuel. But a major problem with this idea comes down to a lack of supply.

Taking the Strait of Hormuz as a perfect example, if fewer tankers from Kuwait and Qatar are getting through, that means there is less oil available. As stocks runs low, it is impossible for everyone to get the same amount of fuel at the same price as before.

If price caps were introduced (with the supplier taking on the full impact of the discount), the countries and firms with oil to sell would naturally shift their sales to countries willing to pay higher prices. So a price cap would probably lead to empty petrol pumps in the UK.

There have already been shortages in France, where one major fuel provider implemented its own price cap and was subsequently inundated with customers.

In contrast, high fuel prices may persuade households to cut down on consumption, which is helpful when there is less oil available. After all, people don’t switch from travelling by car to public transport (which is often less convenient) unless there is a good reason to do so. High fuel prices are a good reason.

Research suggests that in the UK, a 10% increase in petrol prices can lead to a reduction in demand of up to 5%. So, high prices are a way of adjusting consumption to cope with the lower supply.

Duty calls

In the longer term, households might invest in a way which reduces their dependence on future fossil fuel consumption. Maybe, instead of a big SUV, the next family car will be be smaller or electric.

In the short term, though, demand for petrol and diesel will remain. Not all commuting and travelling can be cancelled or postponed. People need to get to work, children need to go to school.

A more promising policy intervention could be temporary fuel duty discounts – reducing the proportion of fuel costs which ends up in the Treasury. Unlike with price caps, oil exporters’ incentives to sell in the UK are not diminished by reducing fuel duty. So fuel duty cuts wouldn’t cause supply issues.

The issue here is that fuel duty cuts reduce government revenue at a time when it is already seriously stretched. Fuel duty receipts account for almost 2% of UK government income.

Also, the measure is not very targeted. Wealthy households with multiple vehicles would benefit more than a single mother struggling to pay for petrol to get to work.

Making allowances

Another option, favoured by some economists, is based on one-off transfers of money from the state directly to some motorists.

Instead of fuel duty cuts, the government could pay out a fixed sum to those in particular need (much like the winter fuel allowance for heating bills). This could be paid to households under a certain income threshold that own a car.

When a similar transfer scheme for gas was implemented in Germany in 2022 after Russia shut off gas pipelines, firms and households received compensation based on past consumption. Germany was able to reduce its gas consumption by about 20% during that time.

Unlike a fuel duty cut, compensation does not change depending on the amount of fuel bought. So the incentive to cut down on fuel consumption wherever possible remains.

Indeed, households that leave the car at home will profit, as they keep the transfer. This is as it should be: households that use less fuel get rewarded, while those that need it still have some support.

Many economists like this proposal because it keeps prices as an accurate reflection of supply shortages, while providing targeted relief. Neither price caps nor fuel duty cuts achieve this.

Christoph Siemroth previously received funding from the UK Economic and Social Research Council.

– ref. What can governments do when petrol prices rocket? – https://theconversation.com/what-can-governments-do-when-petrol-prices-rocket-280094

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Debra Kelly, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Cultural Historian, University of Westminster

Director François Ozon’s new film adaptation of Albert Camus’s novel L’Étranger (The Outsider, 1942) confronts a considerable task: turning a brief, philosophical novel into a cinematic experience.

Though the book is short, it is dense and readers often discover it requires multiple readings. Camus’s spare prose conceals profound questions about morality, society and human existence. Translated into over 75 languages with millions of copies sold, The Outsider has inspired stage, screen, radio and even graphic and manga adaptations. It has long been a set text in schools and universities, often perplexing young readers, just as it did a young Ozon. This film offers an invitation to return and reflect on Camus’ work.

The story follows Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), a French-Algerian office worker living in Algiers. The novel famously opens with the death of his mother, whose funeral he attends with apparent emotional detachment. He begins a relationship with Marie (Rebecca Marder), who formerly worked in the same office and becomes involved with Raymond (Pierre Lottin), a neighbour entangled in a violent dispute.

Meursault’s life changes dramatically when he shoots a young Arab man on a sun-drenched beach. The act leads to his arrest and the second part of the novel focuses on his imprisonment and trial. Throughout, Meursault remains a detached observer of the absurdity of existence and the moral expectations of society.

Ozon’s adaptation closely follows this narrative while expanding certain perspectives giving the film its own vitality and richness.

Camus and the challenges of adaptation

In a recent Curzon audience Q&A, Ozon observed that this is a novel every reader has already visualised and staged in their own mind. The director faced not only the expectations of readers’ imagined versions of the story but also the iconic stature of Camus himself.

Born into a poor French settler family in Algeria, afflicted by tuberculosis, Camus rose to become a journalist, playwright, actor, philosopher, member of the French Resistance, world-famous novelist and Nobel laureate (in 1957). His death at the age of 46 in a fatal car accident little more than two years later, with an unused train ticket to Paris in his pocket, added a mythic aura to his life and work.

Shot compellingly in black and white, Ozon’s film moves fluidly between the opening 1930s archive images of Algiers to the film’s recreated streets and natural landscapes with their play of light and shadow. The heat of the sun, the glare of the sea and the tactile presence of sand are central to the story, while also reflecting Camus’s own love of Algeria’s natural riches.

Camus described the story as both abstract and intensely physical – rooted in flesh and heat. Ozon’s film captures that tension between the intellectual and the sensory.

The title of the novel sets up the ambiguities of interpreting and adapting it. Published as The Outsider in the UK and The Stranger in the US, both titles seemingly settle the possibilities of Meursault’s status.

In French, “étranger” may mean stranger, foreigner or outsider – a multiplicity Ozon preserves in his adaptation. Voisin, incarnating Meursault’s stillness and silences on screen, moves between these roles. Among the French quarter’s neighbours, cafes and small businesses, he is just another man. Algerian passers-by, merely glimpsed here, are the strangers, foreigners, outsiders.

Among the Arab prisoners Meursault is imprisoned with, he is suddenly “the foreigner”. The film traces his inexorable shift from detached observer to condemned outsider. The confrontation with the chaplain, a climactic moment in the novel, is key to Ozon’s own vision. Here, Meursault refuses conventional consolation, embodying the “rebel” of Camus’s later philosophical work.

Reclaiming Camus’s ambiguities

The colonial context of L’Etranger has often been politically contested. Camus’s unfinished autobiographical novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man, 1994) was found at the scene of his death. It reflects his position on Algeria (and on poverty, class and education), which is more complex than trial by the political convictions of various critics allows.

Camus’s detachment from Algerian nationalist movements, along with his choice not to name Arab characters in his fiction (or to avoid them altogether), drew sustained criticism from the French Left and Algerian nationalists in the 1950s and 60s. His vision of a multicultural Algeria – seen by some as utopian and by others as implicitly racist – was later criticised by postcolonial scholars as well. However, these ambiguities are inseparable from Camus’s literary and moral vision and his lived experience.

Ozon’s adaptation speaks to contemporary audiences by giving form to these ambiguities. By expanding the presence of his lover Marie, Ozon provides subtle insights into Meursault, a man condemned because he doesn’t play the game and refuses to lie, as Camus later described him in a 1955 American edition of the novel. Ozon also gives agency to the murdered man’s sister Djemila (also nameless in the novel). These female performances provide the film’s emotional centre.

The film’s careful attention to Algeria, both past and present, meanwhile, reframes The Stranger as a story not just of one man, but of a society. Following the bloody civil war in 1990s Algeria, Camus was “recuperated” by Algerian dissidents against the rise of fundamentalism and reclaimed by new generations of Algerian writers. The final scene of the film honours the murdered “Arab” with the name Moussa, which has been taken from Kamel Daoud’s knowing re-telling, Meursault, Contre-enquête (The Meursault Investigation; 2012).

In doing so, Ozon takes his own place in reclaiming Camus’s moral fable in all its ambiguities. The Stranger retains Camus’s philosophical challenge: to confront the absurdity of existence without surrendering to despair.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Debra Kelly does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. In The Stranger François Ozon captures the many ambiguities of Albert Camus’s novel – https://theconversation.com/in-the-stranger-francois-ozon-captures-the-many-ambiguities-of-albert-camuss-novel-279718

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Laura O’Flanagan, PhD Candidate, School of English, Dublin City University

Undertone is the terrifying feature film debut from Canadian director Ian Tuason, which promises to be the “scariest movie you will ever hear”.

Evy (Nina Kiri) is a podcast host caring for her dying mother (Michèle Duquet) at home. Told only from Evy’s perspective, the film moves from initially creepy to utterly horrifying over a tense, tight 93-minute running time.

Evy’s Undertone podcast explores supernatural phenomena. Her co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco) is in another time zone, so they record online in the middle of the night, Evy’s time. This veers close to the “witching hour”, but as Evy is the podcast’s resident sceptic – the voice of reason opposing Justin’s belief in the paranormal – she is unbothered. Until she’s not.

For this week’s instalment, Evy and Justin react to a series of mysterious recordings involving a couple: Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas), who has begun talking in her sleep, and her husband Mike (Jeff Yung), who records her. These clips lend the story a naturally escalating structure, as the material grows increasingly distressing and the sense of dread intensifies.

As elements from the recordings seep into Evy’s world and her sense of reality begins to shift, Kiri proves superb in the role. Alone onscreen aside from her unconscious mother, she balances a raw fragility with intense emotional control. Kiri carries the film almost entirely, with supporting characters reduced to voices in her headphones or on her phone.

Undertone’s domestic setting has an uncanny familiarity to it, with soft furnishings, lamps and religious artwork bathed in cold, often unpredictably flickering light. Compounding the disquiet is the fact that Tuason used his childhood home in Toronto as his filming location, inspired by caring for his own ailing parents.

The result is an uneasy intimacy which blurs the line between personal memory and horror. This, combined with Evy’s mother’s impending death and the harrowing implications of the audio clips, makes the film a disturbing yet consistently absorbing experience.

At times, though, Tuason leans too heavily on religious iconography to generate unease, diluting some of the originality. The film also flirts with shock value using inherently distressing subject matter, rather than fully earning its impact.

Sound as terror

Sound design is Undertone’s real strength. As podcast host Justin says: “Don’t be afraid of the dark, be afraid of the silence.”

The film captures the sound of podcasting with close, warm, immaculately clear voices and achieves an intimate, studio-polished quality. Building the sense of unease, there are authentic-sounding sleep-talking recordings, nursery rhymes played backwards, exaggerated household noises such as taps and whistling kettles, and prolonged silences.

Other horror films such as Berberian Sound Studio, The Black Phone and Keeper have harnessed the unsettling potential of sound in recent years, exploring the eerie power of disembodied voices.

This is a lineage Undertone joins while carving out a more intimate horror. Tuason’s film also makes narrative use of the podcast hosts’ editing skills to great effect, as they speed up, slow down, reverse and replay the recordings over and over, trying to glean some sense from them. In doing so, sound becomes Undertone’s primary source of terror, placing its audience in the same position as Evy.

Undertone is a confident debut from Tuason, who understands exactly where the film’s power lies. By grounding its horror in voice and sound, the film becomes an experience that feels immediate and inescapable.

In placing us so firmly within Evy’s singular perspective, Undertone crosses the boundary between listener and participant, resulting in a work which fulfils its promise of terror. It is not for the faint of heart.

Laura O’Flanagan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Undertone: this creepy sound horror is utterly terrifying – https://theconversation.com/undertone-this-creepy-sound-horror-is-utterly-terrifying-279915