Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Barbara K Seeber, Professor, English Language & Literature, Brock University

Season 2 of Netflix’s A Man on the Inside finds Charles Nieuwendyk, private investigator and retired engineering professor (played by Ted Danson), undercover at Wheeler College.

The mission: recover the college president’s laptop. This might not seem juicy, but said laptop contains sensitive information about a $400 million donation by a tech multibillionaire, Brad Vinick.

As someone who has lived and studied academic life, I find the series created by Michael Schur (also behind The Good Place starring Ted Danson, among other hit series) is both funny and uncomfortable because it hits close to home.

Budgets trimmed to the bone

The P.I. is thrilled by his university case, calling it something “I can really sink my teeth into.”

Wheeler College, founded in 1883, has seen better days. It is struggling financially and its leadership is unpopular. The board of trustees hired a president who trims department budgets to the bone, cuts student aid and embraces corporate sponsorship — as well as the bonus he receives with every major donation.

These measures are not enough. Enter Vinick.

Vinick’s secret plan — “Project Aurora” — is to fire half the professors, exclude faculty from decision-making and close what he considers “non-essential departments,” leaving “three tracks of study — biotechnology, economics and computer science to prepare young adults for life in the modern world.”

President Jack Beringer knows Vinick’s intentions but does not want anyone to know he knows. Faculty uprisings would not help his bid for a higher-paying university job in Dallas, where he ate the best steak ever.

Language of efficiency, innovation

Any campus stroll reveals that Wheeler’s “Pepsi T-Mobile Covered Garage brought to you by Sephora” (Episode 4) is only a slight exaggeration.

Vinick’s language of efficiency and innovation dominates in real life. Universities are run increasingly on a corporate model, as numerous studies have demonstrated, including my collaboration with Maggie Berg in our book The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy.

Budgets and programs are being slashed, and in the guise of economic necessity, principles of higher education are undermined.

Professors also satirized

While Beringer and Vinick are the villains of the piece, there are, of course, some digs at the professors. (I admit we are an easy target).

The musicologist, for example, will abandon any conversation mid-sentence when inspiration hits.

In Episode 4, we see the chair of the English department is a snob about books you can buy at airports.

However, the show resists indulging in nutty, overpaid professor stereotypes because it recognizes, in the words of Dr. Benjamin Cole, head of the English department, “these are not the best of times.” The show focuses on staff and faculty efforts in an era of budget cuts and attacks on what the billionaire investor calls “pointless subjects” like art history and philosophy.

Holly Bodgemark, the provost, is so overworked she swallows nicotine gum (“It works faster if it goes right to the stomach”) and mixes her own “Peptocoffee.”

The musicologist may be flaky, but she buys used instruments out of her own pocket for students who can’t afford them. Money is tight for students. Student Claire Chung works a dozen jobs to pay tuition and housing. “When do you sleep?” Nieuwendyk asks. “In class,” she replies.

Defending higher education

To defend higher education, the show calls in the big guns: Ozymandias, a sonnet by 19th- century Romantic writer Percy Bysshe Shelley. It’s mentioned in one of Cole’s lectures, where he recites some of its lines and comments on its continued relevance: “Money, fame, power do not last. But ideas … can endure.”

Published in 1818, Ozymandias speaks of a “traveller from an antique land.” The traveller comes across the remains of a sculpture with an inscription that reads:

“‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!’”

The rest of the sculpture is a “colossal Wreck,” and the king’s boast has dwindled into unintentional irony.

Given that the show is American, the literary allusion might be a veiled reference to the No Kings protests.

Making sense of the present

The series seems to side with philosophers like Martha Nussbaum, who argues that a liberal arts education can help us make sense of the present and read it critically.

Vinick is a modern Ozymandias. He wants to be immortal, literally (he undergoes longevity treatments) and figuratively (he commissions oil portraits of himself). As the professor of fine arts notes in the first episode of Season 2: “Newsflash: the billionaire is a narcissist.”

Not to give away the mystery, but a crisis is averted. Wheeler is safe … for now. It might go under, but, as the provost says, “better to end on our own terms.”

And those terms are: education is not a business; it cannot be reduced to the delivery of quantifiable outcomes. The book What Are Universities For?, by Stefan Collini, professor emeritus of intellectual history and English literature, makes this case in a particularly compelling (and at times laugh-out-loud) way.

Higher education is a public good because it teaches critical thinking and civil debate and prepares engaged citizens.

Community

Good satire like A Man on the Inside points out the problems as well as possible remedies. Vinick mocks the notion of community, but the show values it above all because, without it, resistance is impossible. Wheeler College’s faculty and staff celebrate each other and band together across disciplinary divides.

In the words of the provost in the last episode of the season, they are committed to protecting “community and knowledge for the sake of knowledge.”

Schur’s comedy offers a timely defence of higher education and is notable for bridging the gap between academics and the general public.

Barbara K Seeber received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Institutional Grant at Brock University.

– ref. A Man on the Inside: Netflix comedy offers a timely defence of higher education – https://theconversation.com/a-man-on-the-inside-netflix-comedy-offers-a-timely-defence-of-higher-education-270934

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Robert Chernomas, Professor Of Economics, University of Manitoba

United States President Donald Trump and his MAGA base are often portrayed as a break from past political norms. While that is certainly true, it overlooks the long and predictable path that led to his rise.

The slogan “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) became the movement’s rallying cry, tapping into a nostalgic vision of a past era of economic prosperity and social dominance and appealing to voters who feel left behind by demographic and economic change.

Trump is the predictable result of the deteriorating economic conditions in the U.S. since the 1980s and the political machinations that brought those economic conditions about. In our recent book Why America Didn’t Become Great Again, we explore how the U.S. has set itself on a path toward self-destruction.

The rise of corporate power

In the 1970s, higher taxes and regulation, a growing “rights-conscious revolution” around the environment, gender and race, demand for rising wages and increasing foreign competition threatened corporate power. In response, American business embarked on what billionaire Warren Buffett described as “class warfare.”

To transfer wealth and power from the many to the few, institutions had to be organized, government policies reoriented and economists, journalists and politicians recruited, funded and promoted.

Corporate lobbying skyrocketed. In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C.,; by 1982, 2,445 did. The number of corporate political action committees (PACs) rose from fewer than 300 in 1976 to more than 1,200 by the mid-1980s.

Business lobbying organizations advocated for policies like corporate tax cuts, deregulation, free trade, anti-worker legislation and more permissive rules on corporate political donations. Between 1998 and 2022, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent US$1.8 billion on lobbying activities, making it the single largest spender in the nation.

The role of wealthy individuals

Individual business owners also chipped in. Figures like Charles and David Koch funded organizations that aligned with their desire to create a U.S. free from government regulation, taxation, redistribution or public services. During the 2016 election cycle, Koch-backed PACs spent just under US$900 million.

Many of these organizations, like the Tea Party, also helped put into the mainstream an evangelical creationism that distrusted science and expert opinion, supported a patriarchal animosity to women’s rights, opposed policies to further racial equality and expressed xenophobic opinions.

The flood of corporate money shifted the political centre, making Democrats more conservative. No progressive economic policy has been passed in the United States since the 1970, with the tepid exception of the Affordable Care Act, which is friendly to the health insurance industry.

The strategy proved remarkably successful. According to political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, when wealthy Americans strongly support a policy, it’s about twice as likely to be adopted. But strong support from the middle class has “essentially no effect.”

How does this happen in a working democracy?

Business leaders cannot win elections on their own — they need allies. One particularly large group was easy to convince. Since the 1960s, no Democratic presidential candidate has won the majority of white voters.

Between the 1960-64 and 1968-72 election cycle, support for Democratic candidates among less-educated white voters fell from 55 to 35 per cent. With the exception of the 1992 and 1996 elections when their votes were more evenly split, this gap has held to the present day.

Although their share of the population is declining, less-educated white voters still made up just under 50 per cent of the electorate nationally in 2018. College-educated white voters have tended to split their votes more evenly or provide a small edge to Republicans.

If Democrats have branded themselves as the party of inclusion — of different races, genders, ethnicities and sexualities — the Republican Party has defended what they euphemistically term “traditional values.”

In a Faustian bargain to advance a pro-business agenda, the Republican Party successfully appealed to less-educated white voters, whose historical economic and social advantages have been diminishing. They earn less and die younger than they used to and their advantages over other groups in society are diminishing.

The Republican Party seized on this group’s discontent and actively channelled it against African Americans and immigrants. As early as the 1960s, the Republican’s Southern strategy promoted racism, successfully shifting white voters to their party and shifting the political spectrum to the right. That strategy continued through Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, the Tea Party and Trump.

Importantly, this shift in voting preferences occurred well before the advent of the so-called “Rust Belt.” According to Pew Research, manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979.

Faced with declining standards of living, less-educated white voters could have chosen solidarity with all other workers and forced concessions from the elite of the business community to make the lives of all working-class people better. Instead, they voted to maintain the relative advantage of being white.

Rising inequality

The redistribution of income and wealth was detrimental to most Americans. Between 1973 and 2000, the average income of the bottom 90 per cent of U.S. taxpayers fell by seven per cent. Incomes of the top one per cent rose by 148 per cent, the top 0.1 per cent by 343 per cent, and the top 0.01 per cent rose by 599 per cent.

If the income distribution had remained unchanged from the mid-1970s, by 2018, the median income would be 58 per cent higher ($21,000 more a year). The decline in profits was halted, but at the expense of working families. Stagnant wages, massive debt and ever longer working hours became their fate.

Income stagnation is not the only quality of life indicator that suffered. In 1980, life expectancy in the U.S. was about average for an affluent nation. By the 2020s, it dropped to the lowest among wealthy countries, even behind China or Chile, largely due to the stagnation of life expectancy for working-class people.

The paradox of “red state” support

Less-educated white voters have historically supported politicians (mainly Republicans) who support cutting taxes for the rich and cutting social programs that they significantly benefit from.

In 2023, the Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas vowed to get the “bureaucratic tyrants” of the federal government “out of your wallets.” Yet the numbers tell a different story.

In 2019, the federal government collected only half as much in taxes as it spent in the state, amounting to about US$5,500 per person in Arkansas. Similar patterns hold in many other regions.

Republican Kentucky is the largest destination of federal transfers, receiving US$14,000 per resident, approximately 30 per cent of its entire gross domestic product.

The electoral preferences of red states don’t result in good outcomes. States won by Trump in the 2016 presidential election had lower average scores (similar to Russia) on the American Human Development Index — which measures income, education and health — than states won by Democrats, which are similar to the Netherlands.

The modern Republican agenda

For decades, the alliance between less-educated white voters and business worked very well for business. Trump’s MAGA still delivers longstanding pro-business policies, from deregulation to antagonism to workers’ rights and massive tax cuts for the rich.

Today, however, the Republican Party now also promotes policies that business has long fostered, if not supported, including a distrust of facts and science, the ethnic cleansing of the labour force, racism, a vengeance for justice and a hodgepodge of crony, incompetent economic priorities and policies.

This combination has created a more unstable and unpredictable political, economic and social environment, leaving a significant majority of CEOs yearning for the stable Republican Party of a bygone era.

Robert Chernomas is a Professor of Economics at the University of Manitoba and a member of Elbows Up: A Practical Program for Canadian Sovereignty. I am not affiliated with a political party or industry association but I am politically active.

Ian Hudson receives funding from SSHRC.
Ian Hudson is a Research Associate for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

– ref. Why America hasn’t become great again – https://theconversation.com/why-america-hasnt-become-great-again-272778

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jennifer Saul, Chair in Social and Political Philosophy of Language, University of Waterloo

By now, many of us have probably seen the video of a Minneapolis woman whose last words were a calm “It’s fine, dude; I’m not mad at you,” before she was shot three times in the head as she turned her car to drive away from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent.

U.S. President Donald Trump claimed that Renee Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.”

Vice-President JD Vance declared “the reason this woman is dead is because she tried to ram somebody with her car… You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that.”

These statements, and others that doubled down on them, were made even as videos showing they were clearly false were in wide circulation.

It’s puzzling. Why lie in a situation like this? Who can you hope to deceive, when evidence falsifying your statements is freely available?

Seeing is not believing?

Our work on authoritarian public discourse stresses that there are multiple answers to this question, partly because there are many different audiences of mass communication. We need to come to grips with the multiple functions of obvious falsehoods like these to understand why they are made so often and so prominently, and how they serve authoritarian leaders.

First, something that seems obvious to you can be credible to others. How? Because in an era of algorithmic news feeds, we are not all getting the same news. Those with a newsfeed of nothing but MAGA influencers are in a different epistemic bubble from other people.

And they may well be in an echo chamber, in which opposing voices are so discredited that when an alternative narrative reaches them, it’s immediately dismissed.

Millions of people may not have seen the videos of the incident at all, or may have seen versions with instructions on how to interpret the visuals: she’s not turning around, she’s backing up in preparation to ram into the shooter; she’s not calmly indicating that she isn’t a threat, she’s refusing to comply with orders.

Videos of police using force often have this dual nature: they can document and prove wrongdoing; but they can also be used to train citizens to see threats where there are none.

Authoritarian tactics

Some people will find the lies too obvious to be plausible attempts at deception. Yet bald-faced lies are important in strongman politics.

Authoritarians can display their power by asserting obvious falsehoods, showing that they cannot be held to account. They also play to their base by showing contempt for a shared enemy, while demanding displays of loyalty and compliance from underlings.

Officials are forced to engage in the humiliating ritual of repeating what we call compliance lies. Think here of White House press secretary Sean Spicer at the start of Trump’s first term, forced to defend absurd lies about Trump’s and Obama’s inauguration crowds.

At the time, this may have seemed merely buffoonish. What’s happened since illustrates how dangerous this can be as the subject of the lies has changed to matters concerning life and death.

Other people may simply become confused by obvious lies. The competing interpretations of the Minneapolis video are diametrically opposed. Once news sites and social media feeds are sufficiently populated by these opposing views, it can feel like an overwhelming task to discern what’s really true.

And exposing a lie still doesn’t end its influence. It is easier to create an opinion with a lie than to undo that opinion when the lie is debunked, something known to psychologists as the continued influence effect.

Filling social media feeds with falsehoods to create confusion is a crucial part of the strategy that Steve Bannon, a Republican strategist and former Trump adviser, called “flooding the zone with shit.” This can leave people unsure of who to trust, what to believe, or even what the issue really is.

‘Both sides’ reporting

Relatively savvy and good-faith entities can be used as instruments of this strategy. In the name of neutrality and balance, centrist news media can fall back on a “both sides” model that frames stories mainly in terms of what each side is saying.

When one side commits to obvious lies, this approach obligingly repeats those lies while outsourcing the fact-checking to the opposing side, as if it were merely a partisan dispute.

Read more:
Why Donald Trump is such a relentless bullshitter

These duelling narratives can then become the story. The strategy to lie shifts focus away from the shooting itself, in this incident, and onto the alleged controversy.

In other words, obvious lies aren’t necessarily failed lies. They can confuse, distract, excite and intimidate a range of audiences. They can also be believed, no matter how obviously false they seem.

To treat them as mere indications of shamelessness or incompetence on the part of the liar is to overlook the serious harm they can do and the appeal they have in authoritarian politics.

Jennifer Saul is a member of Democrats Abroad.

Tim Kenyon has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

– ref. Why Donald Trump is telling such obvious lies on the ICE Minneapolis killing – https://theconversation.com/why-donald-trump-is-telling-such-obvious-lies-on-the-ice-minneapolis-killing-273200

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Ye Xue, Research Fellow, China Institute, University of Alberta

It has been more than three years since China’s Xi Jinping told Canada’s Justin Trudeau to “create the conditions first” before the two countries could work together constructively during their awkward private exchange at the 2022 G20 summit.

Despite occasional diplomatic engagement since then, the conditions for genuine co-operation between Canada and China failed to materialize, and the relationship remained overshadowed by the Meng Wanzhou affair, the ordeal of the “Two Michaels” and disputes over foreign interference.

Read more:
Meng and the two Michaels: Why China’s hostage diplomacy failed

Threats by United States President Donald Trump to make Canada a 51st state, combined with his disruptive trade policies, have forced Ottawa to re-examine the risks of excessive economic dependence on its closest ally and articulate an ambition to double Canada’s non-U.S. exports over the next decade.

As Prime Minister Mark Carney recently put it: “Never have all your eggs in one basket. We have too many eggs in the American basket.” At the same time, China has signalled a willingness to stabilize strained relations following Carney’s election win last year.

Canada-China tariffs

Foreign Minister Anita Anand’s visit to Beijing, together with Carney and Xi’s informal meeting on the margins of the APEC summit last October, suggests that the groundwork now exists for a serious stabilization of Canada–China relations.

Carney’s visit to China this week builds on this emerging momentum.

While the visit could be positive, Canadian expectations should be realistic, since the trip marks a stabilizing process rather than a symbol of stabilized relationship.

Trade will be at the top of Carney’s agenda, particularly the Canadian push for China to lift anti-dumping duties on Canadian canola oil. Yet few should expect an immediate breakthrough. Economic sanctions are rarely undone in a single high-level meeting; more often, such visits lay the groundwork for the harder, more technical negotiations that follow.

Australia’s experience offers a reality check. China did not lift restrictions on Australian coal and review anti-dumping duties on barley during high-level visits; those steps came months later, following sustained diplomatic engagement after Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s trip to Beijing in late 2022.

Nor did Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s state visit in November 2023 trigger the immediate removal of remaining tariffs on exports such as wine, red meat and live lobsters. Progress came gradually — through patience, process and persistent diplomacy.

Read more:
Vital Signs: Australian barley growers are the victims of weaponised trade rules

The canola dispute is different. China’s tariffs were a direct response to Ottawa’s duties on Chinese electric vehicles. In a relationship governed by reciprocity, China is unlikely to move first without a signal from Canada.

Rather than expecting immediate, tangible outcomes, this state visit is best understood as an ice-breaking moment to encourage governments at different levels and across sectors to resume or establish dialogue. Over time, such channels can normalize working relationships and foster bilateral co-operation.

More diplomacy, no security concessions

The high-profile shift in Ottawa’s China policy places the Carney government under closer domestic scrutiny. Canadians will want to know whether this approach can advance economic interests while safeguarding national security while remaining consistent with Canada’s identity as a liberal democracy.

China, for its part, will expect Ottawa to demonstrate a sustained commitment to stabilization. All of this will unfold under the continued pressure of the American China strategy, which will continue to shape the boundaries of Canada’s policy choices.

Maintaining a balance among competing national interests has become increasingly difficult for middle powers like Canada. Yet Australia’s China policy over the past three years, characterized by “pragmatic engagement without strategic concession,” suggests such a balance is possible.

But it will require Canada to invest more heavily in effective diplomacy, rather than relying on inflammatory or performative rhetoric for domestic political gain.

It means favouring neutral, precise language over emotive labelling when responding to Chinese actions. It also demands strong leadership from Carney: centralizing message discipline, enforcing cabinet coherence on China policy and reducing the risk that domestic political point-scoring spills into the diplomatic realm.

Ottawa should also use re-established communication channels as the primary venue for managing disagreements. These mechanisms can support incremental, negotiated solutions to specific disputes, rather than an over-reliance on public pressure and symbolic gestures.

‘Stabilization with continuity’

A shift in diplomatic approach does not imply a retreat from Canada’s core strategic commitments. The Carney government can and should reaffirm that stabilizing its relationship with China is compatible with maintaining robust national security and democratic values.

This requires embedding China policy within Canada’s broader Indo-Pacific strategy rather than treating it as a bilateral exception. It also involves deepening security co-operation with regional partners to help foster an environment where states are not forced to choose between either the United States or China.

At home, Canada should continue to strengthen institutional safeguards against foreign interference, pairing them with transparent public communication that demonstrates the government’s confidence in institutions and avoids doubling down on any public anxiety about China.

Ultimately, Canada’s China policy after Carney’s visit should be one of stabilization with continuity, making clear that engagement is being pursued from a position of institutional strength, not strategic accommodation.

Ye Xue 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. What Mark Carney’s China trip could mean for the future of Canadian-Chinese relations – https://theconversation.com/what-mark-carneys-china-trip-could-mean-for-the-future-of-canadian-chinese-relations-273202

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Emmanuelle Khoury, Associate professor, School of Social Work, Université de Montréal

Many educators and students living through war and displacement carry difficult emotions into classrooms, but they can also transform them into acts of care and resistance. To understand this, we need to understand their emotional states at a granular level.

Since January 2024, we have been collaborating on a project with the dean and professors at the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Ibn Sina College in Nablus, Palestine, with support from Université de Montréal International.

Our aim is to learn how professors and students talk about their emotions in a region marked by occupation, violence, forced displacement and chronic uncertainty.

From January 2024 to September 2025, we met every two months with five professors and the dean of nursing and midwifery at Ibn Sina College.

Palestinian university professors told us they need to be present and emotionally available for their students while grappling with the impacts of Israel’s military occupation and what many experts have labelled a genocide in Gaza, and they’re looking for tools to help them do that.

Our exchange with Palestinian educators and students led to the development of an intervention tool, CARE (Connection, Action, Resistance, Empowerment), co-designed to address two central emotional states: resistance fatigue and qahr.

Read more:
For Palestinian children living in Masafer Yatta, going to school is an act of resistance

What is qahr?

Resistance fatigue speaks to a pervasive loss of control over our days, choices and even our inner world. This emotional exhaustion is not only personal, but it is also shaped by political structures of exclusion and dispossession, which includes forced displacement, navigating checkpoints and restricted movement.

However, we witnessed another emotion salient in Arabic-speaking countries that we believe underpins resistance fatigue: qahr.

Qahr is a concept that is necessary to grasp in order to truly understand what Palestinians and others living through colonial violence in southwest Asia and north Africa are feeling.

In Arabic, the word qahr evokes an emotion that blends powerlessness, grief and an acute sense of injustice and being overwhelmed by forces larger than ourselves. More than anger and deeper than grief, qahr speaks to the suffocating weight of injustice, the pain of being silenced, muzzled, diminished, trivialized and made invisible.

Qahr is a complex emotion that also holds the potential for transformation — for naming, sharing and reimagining how to live and care for each other. It is a specific emotion shaped by oppression, perpetuated violence and historical trauma that non-Arabic languages often fail to capture.

What we have learned is that qahr is more than a feeling. It is also an action born of the Palestinian determination not to disappear. It is carried through stories, graffiti, songs and through everyday acts of resistance that push against military occupation and attempts at erasure.

Qahr might feel like rage and grief mixed into one, but it often looks like actions that serve as counter-narratives. These actions are deep forms of care, for ourselves, our communities and one’s history and ancestry. They are also political tools that reclaim space, time and dignity.

Hope and care

Our previous work with teachers in Lebanon has shown that educators and students alike carry the emotional trauma into the classroom from collective crises such as economic collapse, war and displacement. The Lebanese teachers we spoke to discussed losses, suffering, injustice, death, violence, unstable living conditions, but also feelings of hope and resistance.

Likewise, during the early days of the genocide in Gaza, many teachers expressed their profound sense of oppression and how they managed to transform it into hope and even moments of joy.

Their commitment to developing educational initiatives for their students stands as powerful evidence of this resistance. As Asma, a teacher from Gaza, explained: “People in the Gaza Strip have become experts in creating alternative life plans.”

In this way, spaces of suffering also become sites of hope and care. Our research on exploring emotion work, on valuing the role of emotions and on dialogue allowed us to turn toward specific emotions experienced by many of our project partners.

The CARE intervention

Inspired by our research findings about fathering amid political violence in occupied Palestine, we were interested in analyzing our discussions with colleagues at Ibn Sina College in terms of emotions and resilience.

Through our understanding of qahr, we created CARE (Connection, Action, Resistance, Empowerment), a culturally adapted intervention, with professors and students at Ibn Sina College. During a series of online dialogues, we reflected on the lived experience of teaching under occupation, talking about loss, and staying committed to teaching and training.

CARE builds on this insight, offering an adaptation of acceptance and commitment therapy with situated and culturally grounded strategies for educators and students to collectively hold space for their emotions and their actions.

What began as a project to support the psychosocial needs of health-care professionals in crisis turned into the co-creation of a training module on trauma and mental health. Our discussions revealed a common thread in our Ibn Sina colleagues’ objectives: a desire to share their own complex emotions to better support others, in particular their students.

As our collaborations evolve, we continue to explore how emotional concepts can inform pedagogical, political and relational practices. Qahr offers a lens through which to understand not only suffering and hope, but also the actions of resistance and reparation under conditions of war and displacement.

This is how our colleagues in Palestine began to share their complex, often opposing, feelings that arise in these circumstances, including resistance fatigue and qahr.

Together we identified key goals for the meetings, with a focus on developing psychosocial and mental health interventions and training sessions that recognize and validate these emotions. CARE emphasizes practical strategies for educators and students to individually and collectively hold space for strong emotions.

CARE was integrated into a guidebook and was first delivered to a cohort of nursing instructors and academics, who tested it with students and in professional circles in the fall of 2025. This initiative underscores the transformative strength of collaboration, and the importance of diving deep into learning about context and culturally specific emotion concepts for responsive care.

Qahr is a legitimate feeling. CARE offers a stepping stone to accompany teachers and professors in this experience, helping them to channel it in their own way, according to their resources and context. In this process, it is essential to mention that we also have much to learn from those who feel qahr. Their experiences invite us to question our own understandings and reflections of loss, anger and injustice.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Lessons from Palestine: Understanding the resistance of educators and students in times of crisis – https://theconversation.com/lessons-from-palestine-understanding-the-resistance-of-educators-and-students-in-times-of-crisis-269578