Category: English

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Melinda Laituri, Professor Emeritus of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability, Colorado State University

Although women have always been part of the mapping landscape, their contributions to cartography have long been overlooked.

Mapmaking has traditionally featured men, from Mercator’s projection of the world in the 1500s to land surveyors such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson mapping property in the 1700s, to Roger Tomlinson’s development of geographic information systems in the 1960s. Cartography and related geospatial technologies fields continue to be male-dominated.

But as a geographer and specialist in geographic information systems, I have observed how opportunities for women as mapmakers have changed over the past five decades. The advent of technologies such as geographic information systems has increased education, employment and research opportunities for women, making mapmaking more accessible.

The female landscape

Women have long been essential to how people see and understand the world. The concept of Mother Earth or Mother Nature as the center of the universe and source of all life spans Indigenous cultures around the globe.

In the 20th century, the scientific community and environmental activists adopted the term Gaia – the Greek goddess personifying the Earth, the mother of all deities – to reflect the notion of the Earth as a living system. Gaia is represented as female and understood as a guiding force in maintaining the atmosphere, oceans and climate.

The representation of land as woman was reshaped with the rise of nationalism when the terms “fatherland” and “motherland”took on distinct meanings. Fatherland implied heritage and tradition, while motherland suggests place of birth and sense of belonging. These gendered constructs appear across cultures.

Another aspect of the gendered nature of cartography is the way maps used female forms to portray features. Anthropomorphic maps from the 16th through 19th centuries demonstrate how cartographers used female figures to depict European countries. For example, cartographer Johannes Putsch’s “Europa Regina,” originally drawn in 1537, set the template for later maps in which nations are depicted as women in various poses and different states of dress – or undress – though they don’t actually correspond closely to the actual shapes of real landforms.

These maps reflect shifting cultural and political meanings attached to territory and power. The female landscape, or woman as map, is often used to portray countries as active, aggressive or supine, depending upon the status of the nation state in relation to war and peace and the stereotypes of a country.

Technology and women’s roles in mapmaking

While the technical contributions women have made to mapping span the entire history of cartography, they are difficult to identify and document. But a closer look reveals the variety of roles women have played in mapmaking.

One of the earliest known examples of a map made by a woman dates to the fourth century, when the sister of the prime minister of the Han Dynasty in China embroidered a map on silk.

During the 15th and 16th centuries, women were employed to color maps and contribute artistic details to borders. Many women cartographers used only a first initial and last name, obscuring their gender and making their work difficult to trace.

The 18th century brought the advent of printing, which opened new avenues for women to participate as engravers of copper plates, publishers of maps, and globemakers.

By the 19th century, cartography became part of formal education for women in North America, where the intersection of embroidery and geography produced fabric globes and linen maps. This was later followed by drawing and coloring maps as access to paper and pencils improved.

World War II ushered in a new era of opportunity for women in the U.S., as they were recruited to fill critical roles in cartographic development while men were sent to war. Known as Millie the Mapper or the Military Mapping Maidens, women produced topographic maps, interpreted aerial photography and helped advance photogrammetry, the use of photos to make 3D models of the Earth’s topography.

Building on the expanding role of women in cartography, in the 1950s Evelyn Pruitt of the U.S. Office of Naval Research coined the term remote sensing, referring to the use of satellite imagery to observe, measure and map the Earth. In the same period, mathematician Gladys West developed the mathematical models for global positioning systems, known as GPS.

Women creating the maps

Women have also overseen the creation of maps in a number of ways.

Indigenous matriarchal societies expressed spatial information through different forms of cartography. These includes songs, dances and rituals that identified important communal resources such as springs, sacred groves and migration paths.

The development of European cartography was driven by the Age of Exploration from the 15th to 17th centuries and entrepreneurial activities associated with reproducing and selling maps. Women often assumed these roles after the deaths of their husbands, ensuring the continuation of family businesses.

Not only kings but queens also directed what maps were needed. For example, Queen Elizabeth I commissioned the 1579 Atlas of England and Wales, one of the first national atlases. It rendered a map of the entire country, accessible from home or a reading room.

Women setting the direction of maps

While early maps positioned women primarily as symbolic bodies to project political meaning or as supporters of larger mapping enterprises, contemporary cartography reveals a different dynamic between gender and maps: There is a lack of geographic data on issues affecting women, including health, safety and planning for the future.

For example, women are disproportionately affected by disasters, including through a heightened risk of experiencing gender-based violence. Geographic analyses reveal a persistent gender gap in datasets, which often lack information on women’s health and daily needs, reproductive services or child care centers.

Studies have shown that the development of geospatial technologies and open mapping platforms are dominated by men. In situations such as disasters, having a diversity of perspectives in mapmaking is essential to serving the needs of the community.

Creating maps that specifically reflect women’s needs is foundational for women to fully participate in 21st-century mapmaking. In the past decade, several programs and organizations have been working to reflect women’s contributions to cartography and demonstrate how collective action can make a difference.

For example, African Women in GIS hosts workshops to elevate women’s perspectives and mapping needs, putting mobile mapping technology in women’s hands. GeoChicas and YouthMappers’ Let Girls Map empower women to make maps through training and education that address the digital divide. Women in GIS and Women+ in Geospatial build community in mapmaking through professional networks. Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team amplifies women’s voices to inform geospatial approaches to mapmaking and empowering women’s mapmaking contributions.

Never have there been more opportunities for women to participate in mapmaking, and never has women’s role in mapmaking been as important to address the intractable issues societies face around the world.

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

– ref. Women have been mapping the world for centuries – and now they’re speaking up for the people left out of those maps – https://theconversation.com/women-have-been-mapping-the-world-for-centuries-and-now-theyre-speaking-up-for-the-people-left-out-of-those-maps-272757

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Michael J. Lansing, Professor of History, Augsburg University

Forcibly entering homes without a judicial warrant. Arresting journalists who reported on protests. Defying dozens of federal orders. Killing U.S. citizens for noncompliance. Asking constitutionally protected observers this chilling question: “Have you not learned?”

This is daily life in Minnesota. Operation Metro Surge, ostensibly an immigration enforcement initiative, has become something more consequential: a constitutional stress test. Can constitutional protections withstand the actions of a federal government seemingly intent on aggressively violating the rule of law?

In Minneapolis, a city still reckoning with its own grim history of policing, the federal operation raises fundamental questions about law enforcement and the limits of executive power.

Legal scholars and civil rights advocates are especially worried about ongoing violations of the First, Second, Fourth and 10th amendments, as are other observers, including historians like us.

Catalog of violations

First Amendment concerns stem from reports that agents from ICE – described by some scholars as a paramilitary force – and the Border Patrol have deployed excessive force as well as advanced surveillance methods on suspects, observers and journalists. When enforcement activity impedes the rights to assemble, document and criticize government action, that chills those rights, and the consequences extend beyond any single demonstration. These rights are not peripheral to democracy. They are central to it.

Second Amendment issues erupted following the fatal shooting of a legally armed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Highly placed administration officials claimed Americans could not bring firearms to protests, despite a long-standing interpretation that in most states, including Minnesota, a person who was legally permitted to carry a firearm could bring it to such events. The assertion was in fact contrary to the Trump administration’s support for gun rights.

Thanks to the videos flooding social media, Fourth Amendment concerns are the most familiar. Allegations include entering homes without warrants, stopping, intimidating and seizing legal observers, and detaining suspects by virtue of their appearance or accent. Those are clear violations of the Fourth Amendment’s safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures, which were adopted to prevent the exercise of arbitrary government power.

Finally, the 10th Amendment lies at the heart of Minnesota’s legal cases against the federal government.

One lawsuit contests the federal government’s refusal to allow the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to investigate the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Another challenges efforts to pressure local governments into assisting federal immigration enforcement. These disputes implicate federalism itself – the constitutional division of authority between states and the federal government that is the foundation of the American system.

The massive and rapid accumulation of these alleged constitutional violations – now working their way through the courts – in a single geographic locale is striking. So are the mass resignations from the state’s U.S. attorney’s office, which is responsible for representing the federal government in these cases.

And so is the deeper historical context.

A retreat from federal constitutional oversight

Starting in 1994, federal intervention became a powerful corrective whenever local police violated constitutional rights.

From Newark to New Orleans, federal oversight was not always welcomed, but it was frequently necessary to enforce equal protection and due process.

Federal oversight has been essential in enforcing civil rights when municipalities would not. Active monitoring of policing in those cities kept officers and administrators accountable and encouraged officers to follow constitutional standards. At its core, what experts call “constitutional policing” requires that government’s use of authority to ensure order be justified, limited and subject to oversight.

In that vein, after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman, the 2023 U.S. Department of Justice report on policing in Minneapolis identified questionable patterns and practices. Those problems included the “unreasonable” use of deadly force, racial profiling and retaliation against journalists. The Department of Justice’s proposed consent decree – grounded in constitutional policing – offered a way forward.

But in May 2025, the Department of Justice, under the leadership of President Donald Trump’s appointee Pam Bondi, withdrew the recommended agreement.

Seven months later, Operation Metro Surge deployed thousands of federal agents to Minnesota with a markedly different enforcement philosophy.

Indeed, the recent expansion of federal enforcement authority in Minnesota followed a retreat from federal constitutional oversight.

Taking the handcuffs off

A presidential executive order, signed by Trump in late April 2025 and titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” pledged to remove what were described as “handcuffs” on police.

Soon thereafter, the administration deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles amid immigration protests.

Though a federal judge later rejected the legal rationale for that deployment, in August 2025, the president sent National Guard forces to Washington, D.C., purportedly to reduce crime. In September 2025, Trump described American cities as potential “training grounds” for the military to confront what he called the “enemy from within.”

Each episode reflects an increasingly expansive view of executive branch authority.

Whether Operation Metro Surge ultimately withstands judicial scrutiny remains to be seen. Numerous lawsuits continue to wind their way through the courts.

But the broader question is already clear: When, in the name of security, the executive branch directly challenges so many Bill of Rights protections at once, how much strain can the American legal system absorb? Will basic constitutional rights survive this moment?

What is unfolding in Minnesota is not simply a local enforcement story. It is a test of whether the Constitution as we know it will survive.

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

– ref. ICE and Border Patrol in Minnesota − accused of violating 1st, 2nd, 4th and 10th amendment rights − are testing whether the Constitution can survive – https://theconversation.com/ice-and-border-patrol-in-minnesota-accused-of-violating-1st-2nd-4th-and-10th-amendment-rights-are-testing-whether-the-constitution-can-survive-274613

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Claire Leavitt, Assistant Professor of Government, Smith College

President Donald Trump and Congress agreed to separate funding for the Department of Homeland Security from a larger spending bill that enables the federal government to continue operations. They now face a self-imposed deadline of Feb. 13, 2026, to negotiate potential changes to immigration enforcement.

The fact that funding for the department – and in particular Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE – has become politically contentious represents a new turn on Capitol Hill.

Funding for ICE has increased substantially over the past year, with the number of its agents more than doubling.

On July 4, 2025, Trump signed a massive tax-and-spending package that increased annual funding for ICE from US$8 billion in 2024 to $28 billion in 2025.

During the first year of Trump’s second term, Republican majorities in the House and Senate have taken a hands-off approach to oversight of what is now the nation’s most highly funded law enforcement agency.

I am a professor of government who studies Congress and its oversight role. Since ICE’s funding increase, the Senate has held just one public hearing on ICE, according to my own unpublished data. Although the House has held a few routine oversight hearings of DHS, none have focused on ICE or Customs and Border Protection.

Traditional role for Congress

Congress holds longtime, well-established constitutional authority to oversee and investigate the executive branch and other political institutions. Having authorized funding for federal programs, it typically – if inconsistently – conducts substantial oversight to ensure its policies are being carried out successfully and as lawmakers originally intended.

Following the January 2026 killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Minnesota, members of Congress from both parties have called for investigations.

However, “investigations” is a broad term that encompasses several options. The Justice Department announced on Jan. 30, 2026, that it is pursuing a civil rights investigation into Pretti’s death. That same day, DHS announced that the FBI is leading the federal probe into his death, with assistance from ICE.

But Congress could also establish an independent, bipartisan commission to examine the killings and make recommendations for laws and regulations to prevent future deaths and ensure quick accountability. Some notable examples of congressional commissions include one that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and a 2010 commission that recommended $4 trillion worth of budget changes to address the national debt.

Or Congress could take the lead itself.

Rand Paul, the Republican chair of the primary oversight panel in the Senate, and New York Republican Rep. Andrew Garbarino, the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, have asked top immigration officials to testify this month. But other congressional Republicans have remained vague about what shape the investigations should take and which branch of government should lead them.

Who’s in charge of oversight?

The debate over which branch of government should investigate government failures is a long-standing one.

Early in the republic’s history, under President George Washington, a federal militia suffered a massive defeat at the hands of Native American tribes at the Battle of Wabash in 1791. Congress was unsure of its constitutional authority to investigate the disastrous encounter: Did the separation-of-powers system prevent Congress from investigating another, independent branch of government? Or did the Constitution’s system of checks and balances imply that the Washington administration could not credibly investigate itself?

Ultimately, the House opted to establish its own investigative committee, and Washington, setting an important precedent, agreed to turn over requested information.

There are several benefits to Congress leading its own inquiries, whether in lieu of, or in addition to, federal agency investigations. For one, even highly combative committee hearings are valuable arenas for information gathering and processing, helping members of Congress thoroughly understand an issue and thus make informed and effective policy changes.

An in-depth committee investigation of the Minneapolis killings could make it more likely that new restrictions and oversight mechanisms are written into law.

Investigations can be bipartisan

Additionally, Congress’ subpoena power is a legally binding tool that enables committees to draw necessary information from the agencies they are investigating. This information, presented at hearings and in committee reports, becomes part of the historical record and serves as an important resource for future investigations both within and outside Congress, including scholarship.

For instance, the final reports of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack in 2022 and the House Committee on Benghazi in 2016 provide exhaustively detailed timelines of the respective attacks that do not exist anywhere else.

Republican-led investigations into the Minneapolis killings, and continued oversight of ICE and CBP, would also lend credibility to both the party and the independence of the legislative branch.

Political scientists have found that committees are less likely to investigate the executive branch when the president is from their own party. However, significant bipartisan probes do occur even in a highly polarized era. In 2005, for instance, Virginia Republican Rep. Tom Davis launched an inquiry into the George W. Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, despite facing pushback from the White House.

More recently, in 2018, the Republican-controlled House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform investigated Republican Gov. Rick Snyder’s handling of the Flint water crisis in Michigan, earning praise from Democrats on the panel.

Risks of grandstanding

However, while Congress has investigative powers, it does not have any enforcement authority. Congress can recommend criminal charges after an investigation, but only the Justice Department can bring indictments.

There are also significant political risks to committee-led inquiries, particularly public hearings. Political scientists have found that investigations of the executive branch diminish the president’s approval rating.

Additionally, members of Congress often engage in performative outrage and grandstanding during public hearings, which tends to help individual members’ electoral prospects but does little to enhance collective public faith in Congress’ legitimacy or its ability to conduct independent and fact-based inquiries.

Given the continuing partisan divide over ICE and the agency’s increased presence in Minneapolis and other cities, it’s possible that congressional hearings could devolve into rancor and name-calling. However, public opinion polling has found that ICE has become a liability for Trump and the Republican Party.

With the 2026 midterm elections coming up, Republicans in Congress may not be able to afford to stay silent.

Claire Leavitt has received funding from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and the Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy.

– ref. Congress has exercised minimal oversight over ICE, but that might change – https://theconversation.com/congress-has-exercised-minimal-oversight-over-ice-but-that-might-change-274396

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Bingbing Zhang, Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa

Informing people about political deepfakes through text-based information and interactive games both improve people’s ability to spot AI-generated video and audio that falsely depict politicians, according to a study my colleagues and I conducted.

Although researchers have focused primarily on advancing technologies for detecting deepfakes, there is also a need for approaches that address the potential audiences for political deepfakes. Deepfakes are becoming increasingly difficult to identify, verify and combat as artificial intelligence technology improves.

Is it possible to inoculate the public to detect deepfakes, thereby increasing their awareness before exposure? My recent research with fellow media studies researchers Sang Jung Kim and Alex Scott at the Visual Media Lab at the University of Iowa has found that inoculation messages can help people recognize deepfakes and even make people more willing to debunk them.

Inoculation theory proposes that psychological inoculation – analogous to getting a medical vaccination – can immunize people against persuasive attacks. The idea is that by explaining to people how deepfakes work, they become primed to recognize them when they encounter them.

In our experiment, we exposed one-third of participants to passive inoculation: traditional text-based warning messages about the threat and the characteristics of deepfakes. We exposed another third to active inoculation: an interactive game that challenged participants to identify deepfakes. The remaining third were given no inoculation.

Participants were then randomly shown either a deepfake video featuring Joe Biden making pro-abortion rights statements or a deepfake video featuring Donald Trump making anti-abortion rights statements. We found that both types of inoculation were effective in reducing the credibility participants gave to the deepfakes, while also increasing people’s awareness and intention to learn more about them.

Why it matters

Deepfakes are a serious threat to democracy because they use AI to create very realistic fake audio and video. These deepfakes can make politicians appear to say things they never actually said, which can damage public trust and cause people to believe false information. For example, some voters in New Hampshire received a phone call that sounded like Joe Biden, telling them not to vote in the state’s primary election.

Because AI technology is becoming more common, it is especially important to find ways to reduce the harmful effects of deepfakes. Recent research shows that labeling deepfakes with fact-checking statements is often not very effective, especially in political contexts. People tend to accept or reject fact-checks based on their existing political beliefs. In addition, false information often spreads faster than accurate information, making fact-checking too slow to fully stop the impact of false information.

As a result, researchers are increasingly calling for new ways to prepare people to resist misinformation in advance. Our research contributes to developing more effective strategies to help people resist AI-generated misinformation.

What other research is being done

Most research on inoculation against misinformation relies on passive media literacy approaches that mainly provide text-based messages. However, more recent studies show that active inoculation can be more effective. For example, online games that involve active participation have been shown to help people resist violent extremist messages.

In addition, most previous research has focused on protecting people from text-based misinformation. Our study instead examines inoculation against multimodal misinformation, such as deepfakes that combine video, audio and images. Although we expected active inoculation to work better for this type of misinformation, our findings show that both passive and active inoculation can help people cope with the threat of deepfakes.

What’s next

Our research shows that inoculation messages can help people recognize and resist deepfakes, but it is still unclear whether these effects last over time. In future studies, we plan to examine the long-term effect of inoculation messages.

We also aim to explore whether inoculation works in other areas beyond politics, including health. For example, how would people respond if a deepfake showed a fake doctor spreading health misinformation? Would earlier inoculation messages help people question and resist such content?

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Bingbing Zhang receives funding from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa.

– ref. ‘Inoculation’ helps people spot political deepfakes, study finds – https://theconversation.com/inoculation-helps-people-spot-political-deepfakes-study-finds-273739

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Mervin XuYang Lim, Ph.D. Student in Chemical Engineering, University of Arizona

The world is looking for more clean water. Intense storms and warmer weather have worsened droughts and reduced the amount of clean water underground and in rivers and lakes on the surface.

Under pressure to provide water for drinking and irrigation, people around the globe are trying to figure out how to save, conserve and reuse water in a variety of ways, including reusing treated sewage wastewater and removing valuable salts from seawater.

But for all the clean water they may produce, those processes, as well as water-intensive industries like mining, manufacturing and energy production, inevitably leave behind a type of liquid called brine: water that contains high concentrations of salt, metals and other contaminants. I’m working on getting the water out of that potential source, too.

The most recent available assessment of global brine production found that it is 25.2 billion gallons a day, enough to fill nearly 60,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools each day. That’s about one-twelfth of daily household water use in the U.S. However, that brine estimate is from 2019; in the years since, brine production is estimated to have increased due to the continued expansion of desalination plants.

That’s a lot of water, if it could be cleaned and made usable.

How is brine disposed?

Today, most brine produced along the coastline is released into the ocean. Inland cities without this option typically leave brine in ponds to evaporate, blend it with other wastewater, or inject it into deep wells for disposal.

However, most of these methods require strict environmental protections and monitoring strategies to reduce harm to the environment.

For instance, the extremely high salt content in brine from desalination plants can kill fish or drive them away, as has happened increasingly since the 1980s off the coast of Bahrain.

Evaporation ponds require specialized liners to prevent the brine from leaching into the ground and polluting groundwater. And when all the water has evaporated, the remaining solids must be promptly removed to prevent them from blowing away as dust in the wind. This happens in nature, too: As the Great Salt Lake in Utah dries up, salty windblown dust has already contributed to significant air pollution, as recorded by the Utah Division of Air Quality.

Brine injected into the earth in Oklahoma, including into wells used for hydraulic fracking of oil and natural gas, was one of several factors that led to a 40-fold increase in earthquake activity in the five-year period from 2008 to 2013, as compared to the preceding 31 years. And wastewater has been documented to leak from the underground wells up to the surface as well.

Emerging treatment technologies

Researchers like me are increasingly exploring brine’s potential not as waste but as a source of water – and of valuable materials, such as sodium, lithium, magnesium and calcium.

Currently, the most effective brine reclamation methods use heat and pressure to boil the water out of brine, capturing the water as vapor and leaving the metals and salts behind as solids. But those systems are expensive to build, energy-intensive to run and physically large.

Other treatment methods come with unique trade-offs. Electrodialysis uses electricity to pull salt and charged particles out of water through special membranes, separating cleaner water from a more concentrated salty stream. This process works best when the water is already relatively clean, because dirt, oils and minerals can quickly clog or damage the membranes, reducing the performance of the equipment.

Membrane distillation, in contrast, heats water so that only water vapor passes through a water-repelling membrane, leaving salts and other contaminants behind. While effective in principle, this approach can be slow, energy-intensive and expensive, limiting its use at larger scale.

A look at smaller, decentralized systems

Smaller systems can be effective, with lower initial costs and quicker start-up processes.

At the University of Arizona, I am leading the testing of a six-step brine reclamation system known as STREAM – for Separation, Treatment, Recovery via Electrochemistry and Membrane – to continuously reclaim municipal brine, which is salty water left over from sewage treatment.

The system combines conventional methods such as ultrafiltration, which removes particles and microbes using fine filters, and reverse osmosis, which removes dissolved salts by forcing water through a dense membrane, alongside an electrolytic cell – a method not typically employed in water treatment.

Our previous study showed that we can recover usable quantities of chemicals such as sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid at one-sixth the cost of purchasing them commercially. And our initial calculations indicated the integrated system can reclaim as much as 90% of the water, greatly reducing the volume of what remains to be disposed. The cleaned water in turn is suitable for drinking after final disinfection using ultraviolet or chlorine.

We are currently building a larger pilot system in Tucson for further study by researchers. We hope to learn if we can use this system to reclaim other sources of brine and study its efficacy in eliminating viruses and bacteria for human consumption.

We have partnered with other researchers from the University of Nevada Reno, the University of Southern California and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to help communities in the Southwest secure reliable water supplies by safely reusing municipal wastewater to serve everyday water use.

Mervin XuYang Lim receives funding under Cooperative Agreement Number W9132T-23-2-0001 with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Engineer Research and Development Center, Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (USACE ERDC-CERL).

– ref. Reclaiming water from contaminated brine can increase water supply and reduce environmental harm – https://theconversation.com/reclaiming-water-from-contaminated-brine-can-increase-water-supply-and-reduce-environmental-harm-272232

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Corinne Brion, Associate Professor in Educational Administration, University of Dayton

Cellphones are everywhere – including, until recently, in schools.

Since 2023, 29 states, including New York, Vermont, Florida and Texas, have passed laws that require K-12 public schools to enforce bans or strict limits on students using their cellphones on campus.

Another 10 states have passed other measures that require local school districts to take some kind of action on cellphone usage.

Approximately 77% of public schools now forbid students from having their phones out during class – an increase from the 66% of schools that forbade students from using phones at school in 2015.

Schools across the country are finding different ways to enforce no-phone policies. Some schools have students lock their phones in pouches that only open at the end of the day. Others use simple classroom bins or lockers.

Some research shows that spending a lot of time looking at phones instead of people’s faces can make it harder for children and teenagers to get the basic human skills they need for developing and maintaining friendships and other relationships.

As a scholar of educational leadership, I believe that school is about more than just classes – it’s where young people learn how to get along with others. When phones are put away, students actually start looking at each other and talking again. School hallways and the lunchroom turn into spaces where students learn to resolve conflicts face-to-face and make human connections.

Putting phones away in Ohio

Ohio is an example of a state that has clamped down on students’ cellphone usage over the past 18 months.

In May 2024, Ohio went from suggesting some cellphone guidelines for different schools to adopt to requiring that all public districts limit students’ phone use during class. School districts could choose to allow phones at lunch or between classes.

Many schools began using lockable pouches, plastic bins or lockers to keep phones out of sight. They still needed to allow some students to have phones for medical reasons, like monitoring blood sugar on an app.

Ohio then adopted an even stricter cellphone use policy in 2025. This new law required all Ohio public school boards to adopt policies by Jan. 1, 2026, that prohibit phone use during the entire school day, including lunch and the time between classes.

A needed break

In the fall of 2025, I surveyed 13 Ohio public school principals from rural, urban and suburban districts. Principals reported that the partial phone bans increased students’ social interactions and reduced peer conflicts:

• 62% of principals described more verbal, face-to-face socializing during recess, at lunch time and between classes.

• 68% noted that students can stay on one task for more than 20 minutes without seeking a quick digital break.

• 72% observed a shift from heads-down scrolling to active conversation in common areas such as the cafeteria.

• 61% reported fewer online social conflicts spilling over into the classroom.

A tension for students

In late January 2026, I also surveyed and spoke with 18 Ohio high school students about the new phone bans in place at their schools as part of research that has not yet been published.

Their responses revealed a complex tension between understanding the need for the phone ban and feeling a significant loss of personal safety and autonomy.

A few students said they felt safe knowing a phone in the main office is available for emergencies.

Some students said they felt anxious about not being reachable if there is an emergency – like if a relative were in an accident, or if the younger siblings they care for required their help.

Finally, 13 out of 18 students argued that they should be learning the self-discipline required to balance technology with focus. Students said that phone bans made them feel as though they were children who could not make responsible decisions – rather than young adults preparing for professional environments.

Some students also said that not having their phones made it impossible to fill out college and scholarship applications during the school day, since many application systems require multifactor authentication and require phones to log in.

Lessons from Ohio

Rules are more likely to be respected when students feel they have a voice in the boundaries that affect their daily lives. I think that school leaders could address students’ safety and security concerns in different ways, including by establishing a dedicated family emergency hotline that people can call.

Principals could designate supervised areas where more senior high school students can briefly use their phones for multifactor authentication. School leaders could also offer a specific time window for students to check messages on their phones, or an easy way for the school’s main office to deliver them messages from family.

While these insights from Ohio students and principals offer a helpful starting point, they are just one part of a much larger conversation.

More research is needed to see how these bans affect different types of schools and communities across multiple states. Because every district is different, what works in one town might cause unexpected challenges in another. By continuing to study these effects and listening to everyone involved, especially the students, researchers like myself can figure out how to keep classrooms focused and students interacting without making students feel less safe or less prepared for the adult world.

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

– ref. Schools are increasingly telling students they must put their phones away – Ohio’s example shows mixed results following new bans – https://theconversation.com/schools-are-increasingly-telling-students-they-must-put-their-phones-away-ohios-example-shows-mixed-results-following-new-bans-274261