Son algunos de los temas que hemos abordado a lo largo de los últimos 15 meses en torno a una temática que preocupa especialmente a la sociedad: el bienestar digital de los menores. A través de más de sesenta textos hemos funcionado como agregadores de conocimiento multidisciplinar sobre bienestar digital aportado por sociólogos, educadores, psicólogos, pediatras, legisladores, expertos en ciberseguridad, psiquiatras, lingüistas… Y como colofón, los hemos reunido en un monográfico que no tiene desperdicio.
Pasen y lean este compendio actualizado que esperamos que, como sociedad, nos ayude a optimizar nuestra relación con la tecnología de una manera crítica y responsable, aprovechando todo su potencial sin que eso implique una pérdida de nuestro bienestar.
Many people have felt the subtle pressure to be “man enough” or “woman enough” in the eyes of others. And research has shown this pressure can have personal and social consequences.
When men feel their manhood is challenged, they can respond with compensatory aggression and other harmful behaviors. When women step outside stereotypical femininity – or even just consider doing so – they often receive backlash.
As researchers who studyhow gender stereotypes and norms affect people in often unexpected ways, we wondered about the processes by which children feel motivated to conform to stereotypical gender norms. When does this start, and how might it manifest?
Borrowing from research on adults, we decided that the best way to assess children’s motivation to conform to gender norms was to challenge their status as a “typical” member of their gender group.
To do this, we asked 147 children ages 5 to 10 in New York City to play two games: a “Girl Questions Game” and a “Boy Questions Game.” Each featured difficult trivia about topics that are stereotypically gendered, such as “Which of these flowers is a poppy flower?” (Girl Questions Game) and “Which of these football teams was the 2016 champion?” (Boy Questions Game).
We randomly assigned children to receive feedback suggesting their performance was either gender-typical or gender-atypical, the latter of which was our version of a threat to their gender conformity. For example, a boy in this threat condition received feedback that he had aced the Girl Questions Game but flopped the Boy Questions Game.
Next, we assessed how they responded to this feedback. Would the boy publicly share or hide his achievement in a “Girl Questions Game Book of Winners”? Would he proudly wear a “Girl Questions Game Winner” sticker, or would he prefer to switch stickers? Would he be worried about what his peers would think?
Responding to gender conformity threats
We found three distinct ways children responded to threats to their gender conformity.
First, girls and boys of all ages were extra concerned about not fitting in with their gender group. This means they anticipated more rejection from their peers and reported lower self-esteem.
Second, certain children actively tried to demonstrate that they fit in with their gender group. Younger girls ratcheted up their femininity, while older boys ratcheted up their masculinity. For example, older boys would tell us they liked action figures more than dolls, or that they wanted to retry the Boy Questions Game over the Girl Questions Game.
This is in line with previous research showing that many young girls are immersed in “princess culture” and are especially motivated to prove their femininity, though this declines with age. In contrast, older boys increasingly learn as they age that masculinity is a precarious social status that is hard-won and must be actively proven.
Third, boys of all ages avoided seeming atypical from their gender group, actively distancing themselves from anything feminine. We didn’t see girls distancing themselves from anything masculine in the same way.
This response mirrors a cultural double standard in the U.S.: Girls are often encouraged to be athletic, assertive or like “tomboys,” while boys face no socially acceptable equivalent in the other direction. There is no benign male version of tomboy. The closest word is “sissy,” which is not typically considered a compliment.
Boys are often not given much leeway to express their femininity. Maskot/Getty Images
Boys as young as 5 already recognize that femininity is something to avoid. By middle childhood – around age 7 – they seem to understand that masculinity is a status that must be actively proven and defended, a mindset that can manifest as aggression, sexual violence and resistance to seeking help in adulthood.
For girls, our findings suggest that they are motivated to prove stereotypical femininity at younger ages, but this may dissipate with age. This may be because girls are sometimes encouraged to pursue achievement in historically “masculine” domains, such as sports andin STEM. Or they may realize that masculinity affords men – and boys – success in these fields, so they seek to move away from femininity and toward masculinity.
However, it’s possible that girls in other settings are more pressured to perform femininity and avoid masculinity – that is, to engage in feminine stereotypes – in ways we were not able to capture in our study. It’s also unclear to us why girls’ responses to perceived threats to gender conformity may weaken with age, given that adult women are affected by these threats. Our future goal is to further test how gender conformity develops in more diverse geographic and cultural contexts, as well as among more gender-diverse children.
All said, we believe middle childhood may thus present a critical window for intervention. Programs that help children, especially boys, build secure identities that don’t depend on gender performance could help them have a healthier relationship with gender norms. In this way, children may be less vulnerable to responding to perceived threats to their gender conformity in ways that harm them through adulthood.
Nevertheless, what’s clear is that children don’t simply observe gender norms – they internalize them, actively defend them, and begin to do this earlier than people think.
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.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Andrea Hickerson, Dean and Professor, School of Journalism and New Media, University of Mississippi
Staff members watch as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks during a press briefing at the Pentagon on March 2, 2026. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein
Historically, when the U.S. has undertaken military action against foreign governments, journalists have relied heavily on government sources and rallied “’round the flag,” often uncritically sharing official narratives about U.S involvement. This has been evident during periods of U.S. military engagements in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Recently, however, the Pentagon has restricted access for legacy news organizations. And on March 14, 2026, Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, replied to a social media post from President Donald Trump complaining about reporting on U.S. involvement in Iran. Carr threatened to deny license renewals to broadcasters not operating in the “public interest.”
“The People of our Country understand what is happening far better than the Fake News Media!” Trump asserted in his original Truth Social post.
This hostile relationship between journalists and a presidential administration is only part of the story about what is or isn’t happening on the ground in Iran and the Middle East.
In times of conflict, information about military activity can be seen as another domain of conflict, much like air, land and sea. Countries, including Iran, have long tried to manipulate information to persuade or influence what people think outside the region.
A preprint, not yet peer-reviewed study authored by academics affiliated with the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Air Force Academy describes increased government funding and attention to “cognitive warfare,” or efforts to influence what people think through strategic messaging.
A common call to action from advocacy and educational groups in politicized situations where misinformation weighs heavy is to teach media literacy. Conventional wisdom holds that if people only knew how to read the news and look for bias, they would understand a situation more clearly.
As a journalism scholar and educator, I agree that media literacy is valuable. But it’s also time-consuming. It’s impractical to complete a full training or curriculum when faced with immediate current events. As an abbreviated measure to assess the current Middle East conflict, readers can start with the premise that information is contested and an extension of the battlefield.
Key questions to ask
This assumption reframes news not as something that finds a reader by chance, but as something someone wants a reader to see. It primes readers’ critical thinking.
Then readers can consider some key questions:
Why does the author of this information want me to see this?
The obvious answer is that they think it’s important, but what are they focused on? Military progress? One actor in the conflict? Civilian responses? Public opinion? Diplomacy? Asking these questions helps assess what is left out and helps readers resist the temptation to extrapolate details they can’t know from a single news story.
What information does this person or organization have access to?
Graves dug for coffins of students killed in a bombing on a girls elementary school in Minab, Iran, are seen during a mass funeral on March 3, 2026. Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images
Relatedly, and especially when consuming content from social media, readers can ask:
What about an author’s personal experience may inform their interpretation of events?
Media produced for and by diasporas – people displaced from their country of origin by choice or force – is a good source for contextualized and expert information about conflicts in their country of origin. But diasporas can also be deeply political and strategic in what they share. As a general consumer, readers don’t need to get to the bottom of the veracity of the information they share. Readers can simply be aware of disaporas’ positions so they can factor this into their interpretation and understanding of the conflict.
What do different people or organizations have to gain or lose by people widely seeing specific information?
Politicians will want to show they are winning. Journalists may want to show they are being a watchdog on the government. Readers can consider the goals of both the authors and the sources they cite when trying to orient themselves around the information they share.
Transparent fact-checking
Beyond media literacy, there are several potential short cuts to finding accurate information about immediate events in Iran.
First, readers can look for opinions and commentary from established experts on the Middle East, Iran, oil, the military and other related fields. Too many readers claim expertise after reading a few popular articles or listening to a podcast.
Instead, they can look for people who have been observing and researching the region for years – people whose work has been already validated by peer review. As a starting place, readers can look for subject matter experts on the social network LinkedIn or search for research on Google Scholar. Readers can also see whether authors of older popular books are writing about contemporary events on websites or blogs.
Vehicles pass a billboard in Tehran, Iran, on Feb. 22, 2026, depicting a U.S. aircraft carrier with damaged fighter jets on its deck. AP Photo/Vahid Salemi
Think tanks that produce research reports may also be helpful, but sometimes think tanks with neutral-sounding names are politically affiliated. A close read of the “About Us” page and perusing the list of funders can offer some helpful clues.
Finally, perhaps the most efficient way to evaluate what is happening in Iran is to follow fact-checking and open-source reporting organizations. These groups often do a better job showing their assessment work and linking to evidence than do traditional news outlets, which focus on narrative structure and a cohesive final product.
Poynter, a nonprofit journalism institute, recently detailed the work of Factnameh, run by an Iranian fact-checker in exile. Bellingcat and Indicator are two excellent open-source reporting organizations that use public data to investigate whether actual events match circulating narratives.
The transparent methods of fact-checking and open-source sites can also serve as interactive exercises in media literacy. Both Bellingcat and Indicator regularly showcase information validation tools that readers can use.
Regardless of how much effort readers choose to spend on evaluating the accuracy of reporting on Iran, none of us are watching the battle from the sidelines.
Andrea Hickerson 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.
With this comes difficult decisions around health care plan enrollment. No one can know exactly what their health care needs will be in any given year, so people are forced to hedge their bets in choosing plans.
What plan you pick has a huge impact on what you will end up paying.
As scholars of health policy, evidence-based health care and health economics, we believe understanding these terms can help you pick what plan might be the best for you.
Frequently encountered health insurance terms
The first of these is your health insurance premium. This is the amount you pay each month for having health insurance coverage, whether or not you use any services. Premiums can be expensive, but they are predictable. Once your premium is set for the year, it won’t change.
What’s much harder to predict is how much of each medical bill you will have to pay yourself, known as out-of-pocket costs. These are sometimes also referred as “patient cost-sharing” or “copays.” These typically come in three forms: deductibles, coinsurance and copayments.
A deductible is how much you need to spend on your health care in a given year before your insurance starts covering any costs. Under plans with a deductible, you pay the full cost of health care services first – essentially as if you did not have health insurance – until your total spending reaches the deductible amount. Once you reach that threshold, your insurance will start paying for your additional medical costs.
But in most plans, even once you hit your deductible, your insurance will still not cover the full cost of your care. You will continue to pay a portion of the bill through coinsurance, which is the percentage of the cost of care that you are responsible for paying. For example, if your coinsurance rate is 20% and you receive care that costs US$500, you would pay $100 (20% of $500).
What often makes coinsurance confusing is that while the coinsurance rate – the percentage – is usually listed on your health insurance card, you still need to know the total cost of your care to calculate how much you will owe. That cost is difficult to know in advance because reliable health care prices are difficult to find and health care needs – and the services required to treat them – can be unpredictable.
Then there are copayments. This is a fixed amount you pay for a health care encounter, such as $20 for a primary care visit or $150 for an emergency department visit. In everyday language, people sometimes use copay to refer to any amount a patient pays out of pocket. Technically, however, a copayment refers only to a fixed fee paid for a health care service.
Whether through deductibles, coinsurance or copayments, these out-of-pocket amounts can add up quickly. To protect patients, especially those who need a lot of care and could otherwise face devastating medical bills, federal regulations require health insurers to limit how much patients can be asked to pay out of pocket each year for covered services.
This amount is called the out-of-pocket maximum. This is sometimes also called the out-of-pocket cap or out-of-pocket limit. Once your total out-of-pocket spending reaches that limit, your insurance must pay 100% of the cost of additional covered services for the rest of the year.
Additional factors to consider
These insurance rules can become even more complicated. Many plans have multiple different deductible amounts, coinsurance rates, copayments and even out-of-pocket maximums, depending on several factors. For example, in family plans, each person may have their own deductible or out-of-pocket maximum, but there may also be thresholds and limits that apply to the family as a whole. Cost-sharing can also vary by the type of care you receive. For instance, inpatient hospital care may be subject to a different set of cost-sharing rules than outpatient care.
Another important factor is whether your health care provider has a contract with your insurance company. Providers who have such a contract are called in-network providers. Those who do not are called out-of-network providers. Some insurance plans further divide in-network providers into tiers.
Providers in Tier 1 are the most preferred by the insurance plan, often because they agreed to provide services at relatively lower prices. Other in-network providers may be placed in Tier 2. Costs to you tend to be lowest for services from Tier 1 providers, higher for services from Tier 2 providers and highest for services from out-of-network providers. Some insurance plans may not cover out-of-network care at all.
There are often trade-offs between these elements – low premiums look great on the face of it, but any money you save by paying lower premiums is often offset by significant out-of-pocket costs, limited options for in-network providers, or both.
The problem, of course, is that it’s impossible to predict how much health care you might need. If you could somehow know you weren’t going to need much health care in the following year, then a low-premium, high-deductible plan would make sense.
If, on the other hand, you knew you were going to receive a catastrophic diagnosis or be in a life-altering car accident, you would want to opt for a plan that might include higher premiums but lower copays.
Gambles and trade-offs
If everyone knew all the medical care they needed could be provided by any general doctor, they might not care much about what or who was in-network. But if they knew they were going to need specialist surgery for a rare type of tumor, for example, offered at only one center out of state, they would want to consider what counts as in-network – or the costs of going out of network – in substantially more detail.
In many other countries, people don’t face the same burden. In nations with universal health coverage, understanding health insurance jargon isn’t a matter of financial survival. Because coverage is guaranteed, people do not have to agonize every year over choosing a health plan based on countless variables.
But until meaningful change comes about in the U.S., the best many Americans can do is understand health insurance jargon so they can choose plans that work best for them.
Jamie Hartmann-Boyce receives research funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Truth Initiative, and Cancer Research UK.
Michal Horný consults to VBID Health. He receives funding from Arnold Ventures and the National Institutes of Health. He received speaker honoraria and/or travel support from Health Care Cost Institute, Georgetown University, Brown University, Charles University (Czech Republic), Masaryk University (Czech Republic), and the Czech Academy of Sciences (Czech Republic).
If you’ve ever ordered food through DoorDash, Uber Eats or Instacart, you may have realized the person who delivers it isn’t a salaried employee. They’re gig workers – independent contractors who pick up delivery tasks through an app, get paid per delivery and have no guaranteed hours, benefits or minimum wage protections.
Policymakers in several cities have tried to change that.
When we studied what happened to delivery drivers’ earnings after Seattle’s payment rule took effect, we found that despite base pay per delivery roughly doubling, their total monthly earnings barely changed. That’s because competition among drivers for delivery tasks intensified while customers made fewer orders and tipped less on each order in the aftermath. Those effects combined washed out almost all of the intended gains.
No change in monthly earnings
To understand the policy’s effects, we used detailed data from Gridwise, an app that gig workers use to track their earnings across multiple delivery and ride-sharing platforms. This gave us an unusually complete view of how much the drivers were earning across all of the apps and platforms they were using.
We compared what happened to the earnings of drivers who were primarily working in Seattle before the law took effect with the earning of drivers working in other parts of Washington state, where nothing had changed. By tracking both groups over the months before and after the policy, we isolated the policy’s impact from broader trends affecting all drivers.
Base pay per delivery in Seattle jumped from about $5 to over $12, as intended. But base pay is only part of the picture. Tips typically make up most of a platform delivery driver’s income, since customers generally tip 10% to 20% of the cost of their meals.
After the law took effect, tips fell sharply. Delivery apps passed higher costs on to consumers through new fees. DoorDash added a roughly $5 “regulatory response fee” to Seattle orders, and customers responded by tipping less.
The other major change was that drivers started completing fewer deliveries.
Beginning in the second month after the policy took effect, Seattle drivers who had been consistently active on the apps prior to the change completed roughly 20% to 30% fewer monthly deliveries than they would have without the policy.
Importantly, these drivers didn’t leave the apps. They were still logging on and spending about the same amount of time working. They just weren’t getting as many delivery offers.
What were drivers doing with all that extra time on the app? Our data shows they were spending more of it waiting.
The share of on-app time spent actually performing paid deliveries fell substantially. Wait times between tasks increased by about five minutes, nearly doubling from pre-policy levels. And drivers went farther between deliveries – suggesting they were actively cruising toward restaurant-dense areas to find their next task, burning more gas without being paid for those extra miles they were logging.
Put those pieces together – higher pay per delivery, but fewer deliveries and lower tips – and they almost exactly cancel out. After a brief bump in the first month, monthly earnings returned to pre-policy levels.
Why gig markets are different
To understand why this happened, it helps to think about how gig delivery markets differ from traditional employment.
In a conventional job, raising the minimum wage creates a clear divide: Workers who keep their jobs earn more, while others may struggle to find work if their employers cut jobs.
But in gig delivery, there’s no such divide. There’s no hiring or firing involved; anyone can download the app and start looking for work. Delivery tasks are distributed among everyone who is online, and there’s no sharp boundary between having a job and not having one.
When what drivers get paid per delivery rises, gig work becomes more attractive, drawing new drivers into the market. Meanwhile, higher costs to pay drivers are passed along to consumers through increased delivery prices, which can lead to fewer orders and lower tips. More drivers chasing fewer deliveries means longer waits for tasks.
This process continues until the higher pay per task is fully offset by the longer gaps between paid work.
Our data confirms this pattern.
While deliveries by existing drivers fell sharply in Seattle, new entrants arrived. Within three months, newcomers were doing most of Seattle’s deliveries.
To be sure, gig workers’ low pay is a real problem. The impulse behind Seattle’s law reflects legitimate concerns.
But our findings do suggest that efforts to directly regulate what gig workers earn per task they complete won’t easily fix that problem.
As long as anyone can join the platform and start competing for deliveries, the guarantee of higher pay per task will attract more drivers until the benefit is competed away through longer wait times.
But entry barriers undermine the flexibility that draws many people to gig work in the first place. And platform behavior matters too: If apps eventually restore normal tipping features rather than strategically discouraging tips, which New York City and some other jurisdictions are now requiring, the picture for drivers could improve somewhat.
New York City implemented its own minimum pay rate for delivery workers in late 2023. City councils and state lawmakers in Chicago, Colorado, Minnesota and elsewhere have proposed similar protections.
Seattle’s experience suggests all cities should proceed with caution and be aware of the limits of what per-task pay regulations can achieve when the door is always open to new workers.
To purchase access to the data used in this study Brian K. Kovak received funding from the Block Center for Technology and Society at Carnegie Mellon University.
You check your credit score before applying for an apartment. Your fitness watch tells you whether you slept well enough. A workplace dashboard measures your productivity. Parents can buy devices that track their baby’s breathing and heart rate while they sleep.
Increasingly, numbers tell us how we are doing.
These systems promise something appealing: clear feedback about whether we are behaving well. They appear objective, neutral and data-driven. But they also signal a deeper cultural shift, as algorithms define what counts as virtuous behavior.
For generations, religious congregations structured everyday life for many people, offering templates for identity and for what a “worthy” life should look like.
People start to assemble their own sense of right or wrong from a patchwork of sources – and increasingly, that involves for-profit scores, rankings and dashboards.
Credit scoring offers a clear example of how this works. A credit score seems like an objective measure of financial worthiness.
But the actions required to optimize a score define what worthy financial behavior looks like in U.S. society today. It’s not just about paying bills on time. Achieving an optimum credit score most often involves having at least one credit card; keeping a low debt-to-credit ratio, which might involve requesting credit limit increases instead of paying down debt; not canceling any credit cards so that average account length is maximized; and having the “right” credit mix, which often includes a consumer loan. Today, a consumer with no credit cards – something that at one time might have seemed financially virtuous – doesn’t develop the kind of “file” that is readily rewarded with a high score, and they might not be able to obtain credit to buy a house or a car.
In our work on consumer credit scoring, consumer culture researcher John Schouten and I found that people often incorporate their credit scores into their sense of identity and narrative about their life, interpreting scores as reflections of their character and morality. A high score feels like a sign of virtue. A low score can trigger feelings of shame or failure and a determination to be better.
One consumer described discovering her credit score for the first time as finding out what kind of person she actually was. Another, working to rebuild his score after a medical debt caused a cascade of defaults, related that he checked it every morning, to see if he was someone people could trust again.
Moral mirrors
Credit scoring is only one example. Health apps convert exercise, sleep and heart rate into performance indicators. Workplace platforms turn everyday tasks into dashboards, rankings and streaks. Reputation systems rate drivers, sellers and freelancers, often with a single number that stands in for trustworthiness.
Even parenting, one of the most emotional human roles, is touched by this logic. Wearable infant monitors translate babies’ breathing, oxygen levels and sleep patterns into charts, alerts and “insights.” These technologies are marketed as tools for reassurance, but in a 2026 paper, my co-authors and I found that these tools also nudge expectations.
Parents describe feeling that if a device exists that can watch a baby’s breathing all night, then a truly responsible caregiver must use it. “All the parents in our social group have one breathing monitor or another,” one dad said. “My boss has one. If I could prevent something horrible by spending a little money and watching the monitors, and I didn’t, what kind of parent would I be?”
The emotional weight of that shift is striking. One mother said that she felt guilty on the nights she forgot to charge the device – not because anything had gone wrong, but because she had failed to be watchful in the way the market now defines good parenting. Another said simply, “If something happened and I didn’t have it on, I don’t know how I could live with myself.” The monitor had become less a tool than a test.
Measurement can be genuinely useful. When scores appear precise and impersonal, they can feel more solid than the messy, subjective judgments we make in everyday life. But as historian Jerry Muller lays out in “The Tyranny of Metrics,” scoring systems subtly embed assumptions about what responsible behavior looks like, then reflect those assumptions back to us as if they were simple facts. A high credit score begins to look like proof of moral worthiness. A steady stream of productive hours on a work dashboard looks like evidence of commitment.
As these metrics spread, they start to stitch together a new, data-driven sense of what it means to be a good person. This shows up in ordinary decisions: choosing a loan because it will help your score; taking your phone on a run so it “counts” toward your fitness goals; waking in the night to check a baby only because the app suggests you should. The line between caring for others and optimizing for a number becomes easy to blur.
Into the void
For centuries, religious traditions, philosophers and moral communities have wrestled with what it means to live a good and virtuous life. Algorithmic scoring systems do not claim to answer those questions, but as traditional forms of moral authority weaken among many Americans, I would argue that algorithmic systems are moving into the void.
They do not claim to answer questions about the soul, but they do offer something that can feel almost as reassuring: clear indicators of whether you’re on the right track. A high score, a green check mark, a completed streak – these are small, everyday reassurances that we are, in some sense, measuring up.
The deeper question is how comfortable society is letting these systems become our go-to mirrors for moral self-assessment. Instinctively looking to a number to tell whether someone is doing well as a borrower, worker, patient or parent risks forgetting that numbers can only capture a thin slice of what it means to be a good human being.
Many of these scoring systems are built by for-profit companies with a specific interest in the outcome. They are not designed simply to measure behavior; they are designed to shape it, nudging consumers to continuously improve their scores in ways that make them more valuable, more legible and more profitable to the companies doing the measuring. The goal is not necessarily for you to flourish; it’s for your behavior to benefit corporations.
The next time you check your rating or a ranking and feel a small surge of pride or unease, it may be worth pausing to ask: Whose idea of “good” am I seeing reflected there, and is it really the one I want to live by?
Beth DuFault 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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Anders Grønlund, Postdoctoral Researcher, Centre for Languages and Literature, Film Studies, Lund University
Greenlandic settlements like Aasiaat have long attracted outside filmmakers and photographers.Unsplash
In recent years, Kalaallit Nunaat, as Greenland is known in Kalaallisut (Greenlandic), has come under ever intensifying scrutiny — featuring in debates about geopolitics, climate change and natural resources. As US interest in the island continues, the EU is now stepping into the fray, with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, poised to visit Greenland and the wider Arctic region in March.
News reports are bolstered by images of Greenland’s colourful settlements, its icebergs and fjords. This attention builds on a long history. For over a century, Greenland and Greenlandic culture have attracted international filmmakers, particularly from Denmark, which began colonising the island in 1721. The country has functioned as a powerful visual and narrative resource in global screen culture. And yet, for international audiences, knowledge of Greenlandic society itself often stops at ice and strategy; Greenlandic culture itself remains unfamiliar.
My recent book chapter, in The Politics of Place: Space and Locality in the European Screen Industries, shows that attitudes are changing. Focusing on a Danish-led co-production shot in Greenland, I have found that when Greenlandic filmmakers and stakeholders are genuinely involved and films are shot on location in Greenland, Danish directors tend to work more reflexively and with greater accountability to local perspectives. By centring Danish characters in Greenlandic settings, these films also shift the focus of critique. Rather than reproducing colonial tropes, they turn attention towards Danish histories and responsibilities, resulting in a more self-critical portrayal of contemporary relations between the two cultures.
Expedition and ethnography
Greenlandic culture first appeared on screen in 1897, in the one-minute silent film, Driving with Greenland Dogs by Danish photographer Peter Elfelt. Filmmakers have been drawn ever since, with, my research shows, two recurring motives: expedition and ethnography.
The first relates to landscape, the second to culture. Both have been shaped by outsiders. Greenland was a Danish colony from 1721 to 1953, after which it was incorporated into Denmark as an “amt” (county). Home Rule was introduced in 1979, and since 2009 Greenland has exercised self-government within the Kingdom of Denmark. Yet the legacies of colonial rule continue to shape cultural and political relations, and questions of representation remain closely entangled with this history.
In the expedition strand, Greenland appears as both spectacle and territory: directors focus on distances, harsh weather, endless ice. If people are depicted at all, it is usually as a measure of scale or as proof of endurance.
During the Cold War, this spectacular, colonial gaze intertwined with geopolitical strategy. Greenland was often framed as a disputed territory or frontier. That visual habit persists. The 2022 film, Against the Ice, directed by Peter Flinth, extrapolates on the template of hardship and endurance; the TV series Thin Ice (2020) and Borgen: Power & Glory (2022) update that template through oil-discovery plots, with Greenland the stage for diplomacy, climate anxiety and international rivalry.
The ethnographic strand, meanwhile, promised access to Greenlanders rather than territory. It has been especially prevalent in documentary film, but also with a strong presence in especially Danish and French fiction, often focusing on daily life, language (barriers), cultural encounters and tradition.
Over time, this cultural gaze has often narrowed into two stereotypes: the precolonial idyll (the “happy Inuit”) and the postcolonial decline (addiction, abuse, suicide). Repeated often enough, these images shape both outsider expectations and Greenlandic self-understanding.
Cultural specificity
These filmic strands are now being contested. Productions increasingly combine spectacular landscapes with culturally specific storytelling. Greenlanders are more visible on screen. They’re also more present behind the camera.
Borgen: Power & Glory places Greenlandic politics at the centre of a Danish political drama. As noted above, the series uses Greenlandic landscapes and Arctic noir mood, and frames the island through global political stakes. But it also foregrounds tensions rooted in colonial history. It digs into who controls resources and makes decisions. Greenlandic characters are central to the storyline. Their language and agency matter, which is also the case behind camera.
In her 2023 feature film, Kalak, Isabella Eklöf takes things even further. She engages with themes that have historically been used to pathologise Greenland, including substance abuse, incest and social decay. However, by centering the narrative on a Danish protagonist and his self-destructive behaviour, the film shifts attention away from the idea that Greenlandic society itself is the problem. Greenland is framed instead as a contemporary place shaped by colonial entanglements and personal trauma. And Eklöf’s production choices reinforce this storytelling. It was filmed entirely in Greenland and relied on substantial Greenlandic participation.
Production on Kalak nonetheless met with scepticism on the ground. The team had to address it through dialogue and local mediation. Attitudes within local communities have long been shaped by misrepresentation and by fatigue, with outsiders arriving, filming and leaving without considering the social consequences.
Local industry
Grassroots Greenlandic filmmaking has developed in parallel to these shifts in outsider production approaches. Directed by Otto Rosing and Torben Bech, and produced by Mikisoq H. Lynge, Nuummioq, released in 2009, is widely hailed as the first international Greenlandic feature film.
A wider body of documentaries and shorts have expanded what Greenland can look and sound like on screen. The 2014 music documentary, Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution, tells the story of how the influential Greenlandic rock band Sumé triggered a cultural and political awakening in the 1970s. The multi-award winning 2024 documentary, Entropy, meanwhile, relays the history of the vast Greenlandic ice sheet from an Indigenous perspective. And the 2025 documentary film, Walls: Akinni Inuk, explores memory, colonial legacy and environmental change through personal, grounded storytelling.
In 2024, the Greenlandic parliament passed a law establishing the country’s first film institute set to operate from 2026. Alongside support for Greenlandic production, it is implementing a rebate scheme and an obligatory application process for foreign shoots. Greenland’s landscapes are being treated as assets that can be marketed internationally.
However, this creates a tension. Incoming productions can bring much needed investment, employment and skills to an ultra-small sector. The danger is that they might also reproduce old patterns. The difference now is that Greenland has agency and it is making itself heard, via clearer standards for consultation, more local hiring and more collaboration over stories and images.
Commercial success should not revive the old silences. Greenland must be both seen and listened to. This matters because images linger. Their cultural and social effects shape what becomes possible both on screen and in real life.
Anders Grønlund 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.
Student loans now sit at the centre of how higher education is funded in England, shaping how millions of graduates finance their studies. Many students leave university with debts of £50,000 or more and may spend decades repaying them.
The current system rests on the idea that higher education primarily benefits individuals, because going to university means that they will earn more over their lifetime. On this view, graduates should bear a significant share of the cost of their education through loan repayments once they enter the labour market.
Yet universities also generate wider social benefits. They educate professionals in sectors such as healthcare, education and engineering. They produce research that contributes to innovation and public policy. They make a significant contribution to cultural and civic life.
This raises the question of whether higher education should be treated mainly as a private investment for individuals, or as a public good that benefits society as a whole.
Research also shows that higher levels of education are associated with greater civic participation, higher levels of political engagement and improved health. These findings suggest that the benefits of higher education extend beyond individual graduates.
If this is the case, the question of who should finance universities becomes more complex. Should the cost fall mainly on graduates, or should it be shared more broadly through public funding?
The shift in funding models
Over the past two decades, England has gradually moved away from a system in which universities were funded largely through public expenditure. Now, graduate contributions play a much larger role.
Before tuition fees were introduced in 1998, most undergraduate teaching in England was financed primarily through public funding. Fees were later increased significantly in 2012, when the system that now allows universities to charge over £9,000 per year was introduced.
Students do not normally pay these fees upfront. Instead, they take out government-backed loans to cover tuition fees and living costs, which they repay once their earnings exceed a certain threshold. Repayments therefore depend on income rather than the total amount borrowed.
A fair system?
Several features of the current system have raised concerns about fairness.
One issue is the length of the repayment period. Under recent reforms in England, many graduates may repay their student loans for up to 40 years before the debt is written off.
Another concern is the interest charged on student loans. Interest begins accumulating while students are still studying and continues after graduation. It also continues to accumulate during periods when graduates are not making repayments because their income falls below the repayment threshold. This might be during unemployment, part-time work or parental leave.
Graduate earnings also vary widely. Some graduates repay their loans relatively quickly, while others work in sectors such as teaching, social care or the creative industries where salaries tend to be lower.
Lower-earning graduates typically repay more slowly. As a result, interest accumulates for longer. They may therefore accrue more interest overall and repay a larger total amount than higher-earning graduates. Some may also still have a balance outstanding when the loan is written off.
Earnings also differ across gender, ethnicity and social background, reflecting wider labour market inequalities. Because repayments depend on income over time, these differences shape how the costs of higher education are distributed among graduates.
Possible directions for reform
Different proposals for reform emphasise different priorities, shifting the balance between graduate contributions and public funding.
These include lowering interest rates, adjusting repayment thresholds so lower earners repay less, or shortening the repayment period so student debt does not follow graduates for most of their working lives. Some also argue that a fairer system would involve greater public investment in universities, reducing reliance on graduate repayments and spreading costs more widely across society.
These debates also raise a more fundamental question about justice. The issue is not simply how individuals pay for their degrees, but how societies sustain universities that produce knowledge and educate citizens for democratic life. The real question is whether higher education is treated as a private investment or a public good essential to democracy.
If universities are understood mainly as providing a private benefit to individuals, a system based on graduate repayments may appear reasonable. But if higher education is also recognised as contributing to economic development, research, professional training and civic life, the case for sharing its costs across society becomes stronger.
As discussions about student loans continue, the challenge for policymakers is not only to adjust repayment rules but also to consider how funding reflects the wider role of the university. Ultimately, debates about student loans are also debates about how societies choose to support universities and invest in future generations.
Ourania Filippakou 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.
Student refectory at the School of Pharmacy in the 1960sUCL School of Pharmacy Library, CC BY-NC-ND
Student finance in England is up for debate once again, with extensive discussion on the perceived unfairness of the Plan 2 student loan repayment system
But concerns about how to pay for a university degree are far from new. Our new book Student London: A New History of Higher Education in the Capital explores the financial challenges students have faced for years – and the activism that has changed the student experience.
Undergraduate degrees in England have long been expensive to provide. One of the key features of the new London University, founded in 1826 as England’s third university, was that the education on offer was ten times cheaper than at Oxford or Cambridge. From the late 19th century, government grants provided universities with income that allowed them to keep fees relatively affordable.
This meant that although only a very small proportion of the population was able to attend university, not all students came from wealthy backgrounds. Students survived on a patchwork of scholarships, loans and family help. Many were able to afford only a year’s study. Memoirs attest to the indignities experienced by poorer students who struggled to pay bus fares, refectory prices or students’ union subscriptions.
Institutions could set their own fees. For example, the rates set by colleges across the University of London varied widely even though students sat the same exams and received the same degree. The 1913 Haldane commission on higher education in London recognised the need for fees to be equalised and called for a national inquiry into the topic. However, national government showed little interest.
Local authorities had begun providing higher education scholarships in the late 19th century, but these were unevenly distributed and the sums awarded varied. Another important source of funding was Board of Education grants for prospective teachers, although students resented having to pledge to teach as the price for the opportunity to study at university. After the first world war, the Scheme for the Higher Education of Ex-Service Students reflected a growing recognition that the wider social value of university justified greater state funding for individual students.
The 1920s was a time of rapid inflation. The hardship caused by rising prices led to the invention of the student discount. The National Union of Students (founded in 1922) secured reduced prices for books, newspapers, insurance and travel. Student unions helped ameliorate the cost of living crisis by opening shops and canteens that bought at wholesale prices and sold to students at a narrow margin.
The second world war disrupted higher education enormously, with institutions facing evacuation and the conscription of both staff and students. One innovative response was the creation of college hardship funds, although lobbying of the University Grants Committee to provide maintenance grants for evacuated students proved unsuccessful.
After the war, a growing proportion of students had their fees paid directly to universities by their local education authority and were in receipt of maintenance grants. However, it was not until 1962 that a new Education Act introduced a national system entitling students to the same level of support, regardless of where they lived or where they chose to study. It was this that enabled students to move away from home and fuelled a boom in the building of halls of residence. But it also gave rise to new stereotypes of students as taxpayer-funded layabouts.
By the 1970s, students were again struggling with the cost of living as grants were eroded in real terms by inflation. Alternative forms of living such as squatting and short-term housing (staying in buildings scheduled for demolition) were part political stance and part pragmatic response. In what many British students saw a moral cause, they also campaigned against “discriminatory tuition fees” for overseas students introduced from 1967.
The introduction of loans
In the face of concerted opposition, the shift from grants to repayable loans took place only gradually. In 1984 students successfully campaigned to halt the introduction of loans but, like differential overseas fees, ultimately this was to be a lost cause. One concession was that rather than have commercial banks run the scheme, the Student Loans Company was set up in 1990 to oversee it.
The 1998 reintroduction of tuition fees at a means-tested flat rate of £1,000 triggered another wave of student protest. Students we interviewed for our research remembered being so angry because the fees had to be paid up front. The campaign generated extensive media interest but this did not stop a fee increase to £3,000 per year in 2006 – although these no longer had to be paid up front. The financial crisis of 2007-8 shaped the context in which the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government again raised tuition fees to £9,000 a year in 2012.
In the 2020s, a key challenge is that maintenance loans now cover just half of students’ costs but still leave them with enormous debt many will never pay off. It is not surprising that over the past decade there has been a 50% increase in students choosing to live at home. This return to older models signals an erosion of the choice that a national system of student financing was supposed to enable. A number of the people we interviewed expressed regret about such changes.
Financial support for students has often been a low priority for governments facing competing budgetary demands. There have been moments of optimism when the value of higher education to society and the economy helped justify investment in individual students – but this is far from the situation today.
Looking back over the history of student finance, it is hard to see successive campaigns against repayable loans or fee increases as anything other than a series of failures. But it is also clear that many of the support systems students today take for granted arose out of such activism, from student discounts to subsidised canteens to union shops and hardship funds.
Georgina Brewis has received funding from the AHRC, the ESRC, the Swedish Research Council, the Society for Educational Studies and the British Academy.
Sam Blaxland received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to study his Master’s and PhD degrees.
After pressing allies for support – and being rebuffed – US president Donald Trump now insists that the United States can reopen the Strait of Hormuz alone. However, this would focus the risk on US forces and stretch limited naval resources.
Some 20% of global oil flows ordinarily passing through Hormuz; closure of the strait has caused oil prices to soar. British prime minister Keir Starmer has refused to let the UK be drawn into a wider war in the Middle East. However, he has said he is “looking through the options” on helping secure the strait for shipping.
The UK military has already stated that it is considering sending two drone types to the strait of Hormuz: interceptors, to counter Iranian drones, and mine-hunters. These could help ensure the security of shipping in the region, but their task will not be straightforward.
Iran is believed to have around 6,000 sea mines, ranging from simple contact types like the Maham-1 – anchored in place and triggered on impact – to more advanced systems such as the Chinese-designed EM-52, which sit on the seabed and fire a rocket at ships with specific acoustic or magnetic signatures.
So far, only a handful of mines are understood to have been deployed, often covertly at night or using traditional sailing ships to evade detection.
Divers are also used, in the case of limpet mines, to manually attach these devices to a ship’s hull and detonate them remotely. Even limited mining efforts deter commercial shipping, as crews, insurers and operators refuse to risk transit.
The mine threat is only one layer. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has built a broader anti-access system: fast attack craft, shore-based anti-ship missiles – such as the Noor/C802 – and one-way attack drones, such as the Shahed-136, which is so effective the Americans are now copying it. These can be launched from concealed positions along the coastline, allowing Tehran to threaten vessels across the strait.
The result is a multi-domain problem. A ship attempting to transit must contend simultaneously with threats from below the water, across the surface and from the air.
This technology enables selective disruption. Iran is targeting the vessels of specific countries while allowing others to pass, preserving its own oil exports while exerting pressure on the US and its allies.
In theory, reopening the strait is straightforward: clear the mines, escort shipping and deter further attacks. In practice, western navies are poorly configured for this. Mine warfare has been deprioritised for decades. The US has historically devoted less than 1% of its naval budget to it, despite mines accounting for 80% of US warships sunk or damaged since 1945.
Its Avenger-class minesweepers are being retired, replaced by platforms reliant on unmanned systems. European fleets face similar constraints. The Royal Navy’s last minehunter in the Gulf, HMS Middleton, left for maintenance shortly before the current crisis. Of the seven vessels in the fleet, four are unavailable, with the remaining three earmarked to protect home waters and UK submarines.
Vulnerable to attack
Even where mine countermeasure vessels exist, they are ill-suited to Hormuz. They operate slowly and close to the threat, using sonar and remotely operated vehicles to locate and neutralise mines. In a contested environment, this places them within range of missiles and drones, requiring escort ships – which are similarly scarce.
Autonomous minehunters include the Royal Navy’s Sweep system. Instead of detecting and then destroying mines in separate stages and with separate tools, Sweep uses an uncrewed surface vessel towing three sensor boats that replicate the magnetic, acoustic and electrical signature of a ship. This effectively tricks mines into detonating harmlessly at a distance. It entered service in 2025 and can be controlled remotely from a ship or portable platform.
These systems nevertheless remain limited in number and untested in combat. The control ships and command nodes may also have to operate within range of Iranian aerial weapons.
That includes Shahed drones. With a cost of US$35,000 (£26,000) each, these are effective at overwhelming traditional air defences, exhausting expensive interceptor stocks like the Patriot, which costs $4 million per missile.
The economics are forcing the development of cheaper responses. Interceptor drones, such as the UK-produced Octopus system, use onboard sensors and AI-driven image recognition to physically collide with incoming drones like the Shahed. Costing less than a tenth of the target, they offer a far more scalable defence than high-end missiles.
The US faces challenges if it intends to go it alone on reopening the strait. Mine clearance is inherently slow. The last major western operation of this kind, after the 1991 Gulf war, took more than seven weeks. Doing this alone would concentrate risk on US forces and stretch already limited mine countermeasure capacity.
At the same time, Washington has targeted Iranian minelaying vessels and naval facilities. A marine force is also en route, raising the possibility of operations against Iranian coastal drone and missile launch sites. But this would involve putting boots on the ground – something unpalatable to many, even within the Trump administration.
Immediate impact
Europe, despite political hesitation, is unlikely to remain absent. The economic impact of disruption in Hormuz is immediate. Deploying autonomous counter-mine and counter-drone systems already in the region could be framed not as joining a controversial war, but as restoring freedom of navigation in a vital international waterway.
There are reputational factors at play, too. The untimely withdrawal of mine-hunting vessels has strained trust with Gulf partners, particularly for countries like the UK that had committed to their security. Reinforcing capabilities to the region could help repair that relationship.
However, systems like Octopus are currently needed in Ukraine. Diverting them to the Middle East to defend against Iranian Shaheds would deny Kyiv a vital capability. Already, more Patriot missiles have been launched by the Gulf states to protect their airspace than Ukraine has in four years of war.
While Trump may be right that the US does not need European assistance, that is not the most important question. The real dilemma is whether any western military – acting alone or together – can quickly, safely and sustainably secure one of the world’s most critical waterways against a layered, modern threat. That is a much harder test.
Arun Dawson 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.
