Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nick Whittaker, Tutor of International Relations, University of Sussex

Having thus far taken a highly cautious line with the capricious Donald Trump, Keir Starmer broke with the US president this week over the latter’s desire to acquire Greenland.

With the dust settling on Trump’s address to Davos and his ruling out of military force and tariffs, the UK prime minister congratulated his own approach. Starmer remarked: “We’ve got through the last few days with a mix of British pragmatism, common sense, but also that British sense of sticking to our values and our principles.”

In foreign policy, pragmatism means a lack of ideology or simply “doing what works”. It is related to conservative traditions in political thought, with roots in political philosopher Edmund Burke’s scepticism of the French Revolution.

Twentieth century philosopher Michael Oakeshott characterised his ideal, pragmatic society as a ship in a boundless ocean. The crew should simply be trying to keep afloat and on an even keel, rather than being guided by any grand ideological framework.

Pragmatism has long been associated with UK foreign policy, as both an explanatory framework and something that UK foreign policymakers claim to embody. This was exemplified by Lord Salisbury’s 19th-century posture of “splendid isolation” – having no permanent allies or friends, just permanent interests.

But, as I have written, this approach is problematic – not least because of the significant geopolitical identity that has coloured centuries of UK foreign policy.

All foreign policy is guided by values of some sort, and the UK’s is no exception. Think of the oft-repeated notions of fair play, trading and sovereignty. Prime ministers may come into office wanting to reshape the global or local landscape, only to quickly come up against the need to act in a pragmatic way in response to a sudden crisis.

Pragmatism v idealism

In recent decades, British foreign policymakers have wrestled with an ongoing tension between pragmatism and more ideological approaches. Margaret Thatcher contrasted her own apparently steely-eyed approach to European integration with the “romantic” and “misty” Europeanism of one of her foreign secretaries, Geoffrey Howe.

Thatcher’s successor, John Major, argued that it was his far more positive approach to the EU that represented the truly British posture of pragmatism.

Tony Blair too was wont to burnish his pragmatic credentials, not least over Europe. But this sat uncomfortably alongside his brief flirtation with foreign secretary Robin Cook’s “ethical foreign policy”, and his subsequent part in the highly ideological war on terror, with its unshakeable beliefs in democracy promotion and regime change.

David Cameron rejected the crusading influences of Blair by putting the UK’s involvement in strikes against Bashar al-Assad’s Syria to a Commons vote, which he lost. His subsequent calling of a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU defined anew a long-running debate between pragmatists and idealists. Here, both sides claimed pragmatism as their own.

For Remainers, continued membership of an EU that broadly “worked” for the UK was the sensible, rational and pragmatic course. They saw those who wanted to leave as overly dogmatic and willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater for so-called principles.

Brexiteers pointed to growing patterns of prosperity in markets beyond Europe. They argued that regaining lost sovereignty was nothing if not pragmatic – and that their opponents had been hopelessly duped by the unrealistic (and in their eyes, dangerous) schemes of Europeans and globalists.

Starmer’s pragmatism?

How then can we characterise Starmer’s foreign policy?

The closer alignment with the EU that he has led can be read as the ideological move of a convinced Remainer. Like his Conservative predecessors, he has made much of the UK’s support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. This signifies the foregrounding of values such as sovereignty, nationhood and the rules-based international order.

Similarly, the 2024 deal with Mauritius over the Chagos islands has been represented as the righting of a historic colonial wrong.

Yet there is a trace of pragmatism in all these policies, too. The realignment with the EU has taken place slowly, with great caution and many accompanying reassurances of red lines. The tough stance over Ukraine can also be read in a pragmatic fashion, given the perceived need to align with European and Nato allies amid Trump’s ratcheting up of tensions.

For all of the appealing whiff of decolonial justice surrounding the Chagos deal, this too was infused with a healthy dose of pragmatism. In spite of Trump’s sudden condemnation of it, he had initially backed the deal precisely because of its pragmatism. It protected the US-led base at Diego Garcia and ensured a vital strategic foothold in the Indian Ocean.

Further instances of foreign policy under Starmer ultimately demonstrate the limits of idealism in British foreign policy. The reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been characterised by outrage and (especially under Boris Johnson) a Churchillian “whatever it takes” attitude in favour of self-determination. But other situations have been approached with far more caution.

Starmer and his first foreign secretary, the usually loudly principled David Lammy, dragged their feet over condemnation of Israel in Gaza, infuriating some of the Labour party’s leftwing base. Lammy had earlier sought to resurrect Cook’s ethical foreign policy. Yet, whatever their instincts, pragmatically siding with the US tends to win out when it comes to Israel.

Statements on Venezuela were also couched with extreme caution: pragmatism recognising the lack of British interest, let alone clout, in South America.

Starmer’s post-Davos remarks exemplify the seemingly contradictory melding of pragmatism with principle. In reality, these concepts can be difficult to entangle. They are (as with Brexit) often a matter for the eye of the beholder: one man’s pragmatism is another’s principle.

When it comes to the cornerstones of UK policy, such as Nato and the transatlantic alliance, the line is particularly blurry. But over Greenland and the rollercoaster relationship with Trump, Starmer has indeed had to walk a careful line between pragmatism and principle. This is a rare example of a politician’s comment that one can take at face value.

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

– ref. Starmer’s response to Trump’s Greenland outburst shows good old British pragmatism only goes so far – https://theconversation.com/starmers-response-to-trumps-greenland-outburst-shows-good-old-british-pragmatism-only-goes-so-far-274137

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Adam Behr, Reader in Music, Politics and Socieity, Newcastle University

The UK government has announced a £1.5 billion funding package for the arts, which it says marks a turning point after a decade of underinvestment. Spread across five years from 2025 to 2030, the money includes £600 million for national museums and other organisations backed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. A further £160 million has been set aside for regional and local museums.

While many cultural leaders have applauded the move, others are more critical, pointing to UK National Audit Office reports that the culture department consistently underspends. We asked three industry experts to weigh in.

Wider support is needed

Adam Behr, Reader in Music, Politics and Society, Newcastle University

A £1.5 billion investment is welcome news for a sector buffeted by years of austerity and inflation (not to mention the long tail of pandemic shutdowns). But the devil is in the detail, as ever, and the wider context: definitions of “infrastructure” beyond the landmarks, and its relationship to cultural workers.

While the scale of this settlement is encouraging, it will need to support the wider cultural ecosystems in which headline assets sit. Culture is not a series of isolated institutions; it depends on networks of freelancers, grassroots venues and small organisations operating on tight margins. Many are reeling from rising costs, including increased employers’ national insurance contributions.

The policy ambition here, especially alongside growing recognition of the regions, is a clear step forward. But capital funding that stabilises national and regional flagships will be degraded if the surrounding ecology continues to thin out. Careful deployment of the Creative Foundations Fund for capital projects and Arts Everywhere Fund for local growth will be vital to ensure benefits flow throughout the system, supporting sustainable work and everyday cultural activity.

Consider the artists not just the buildings

Wanja Kimani, PhD Candidate in Fine Art, University of the Arts London

The £1.5 billion government commitment, particularly the £160 million for regional museums, is a vital lifeline. By addressing urgent infrastructure needs, this funding ensures the physical survival of museums and galleries after a decade of strain.

However, these spaces are more than buildings. They provide room to reconnect and reimagine our future, but this potential requires new ways of working that reflect our current reality. To truly serve communities, museums must be willing to interrogate the gap between intention and impact, becoming more experimental and open to new forms of collaboration.

Crucially, I question how this benefits artists, often the most precarious and underpaid members of the cultural ecosystem. For this significant investment to be truly effective, museums and galleries must actively create equitable opportunities, remove economic barriers for visitors and facilitate genuine community-rooted collaborations. We must invest in the people who inspire us, not just the assets that house them.

Questions remain

Charlie Gregson, Senior Lecturer in Museum Studies, Nottingham Trent University

The new funding aims to address foundational issues through its emphasis on repairing cultural venues and creating more sustainable business models. This directly responds to several pressing issues, particularly in context of the Arts Council England suggestion that they will be less prescriptive to artists and organisations and reduce grant administration.

Key details are not yet available, particularly regional distribution of funds, how recipients are prioritised and whether strategic initiatives will fill specialist skills shortages. Criticisms from the sector include lack of funding for core costs, with no news on the continuation of the funding stream for Local Authority museums facing a shortfall.

The funding represents potential opportunities to develop socially engaged decision-making. What happens when a site cannot be saved, what value do communities place in the asset and what might be the impact of radical new approaches such as “adaptive reuse or release” (giving an old building a new purpose instead of tearing it down)? Developing such co-productive approaches could embed sustainability-led practice to create a leap in resilience that the funding seeks to achieve.

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This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.

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Adam Behr has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy.

Charlie Gregson has previously received funding from Arts Council England and National Lottery Heritage Fund, and subsequently worked as for Arts Council England.

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

– ref. UK earmarks £1.5 billion in arts funding until 2030
– expert panel responds – https://theconversation.com/uk-earmarks-1-5-billion-in-arts-funding-until-2030-expert-panel-responds-274230

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Michelle Henning, Chair in Photography and Media, University of Liverpool

Researching in the archives of the British photographic company Ilford Limited, I recently came across a curious memo pasted into an experiment book by one of the company’s chemists. Dated January 19 1923, it appears as a small interruption in the page: a practical instruction that “in future, coating of any kind of emulsion must not be commenced or proceeded with during a fog”.

This brief directive was my first clue to a connection between the photographic term “fogging” and the noxious London fogs which, though often associated with the 19th-century city, persisted well into the 1950s.

The memo was attached to a page otherwise dedicated to photographic fog. In chemical photography, “fogging” describes an effect caused by chemical contamination or light leaks during the processing of prints or negatives, producing a mist-like veil across the image.

In the experiment book, the memo registers the intrusion of London smog itself – laden with chemical pollutants, not least sulphurous compounds – which reacted with the silver in photographic emulsions. The fog therefore disrupted not only photographic manufacture, but also the taking and processing of photographs.

London’s fog literally fogged photographs with the yellowish hue of the capital’s notorious “pea-soupers”. This presented difficulties for early “orthochromatic” photographic emulsions, which were insensitive to orange and red (which appear darker in a positive print).

In the 1920s and 30s, British press photographers sent out to capture the winter fog found it hard to prevent the fog from appearing very dark because of this. But it was also difficult to get decent exposures because of the reduced light.

Press photographers also struggled to protect their glass plates and films within the camera or the darkroom. The fog seemed to penetrate even the interior of portrait studios, via chimneys or even keyholes.

Movie studios similarly found it virtually impossible to keep out the fog, which both softened the picture and muffled the sound, just as the talkies were being introduced. Yet despite these difficulties there is a proliferation of fog photographs from the interwar period and from the 1950s. Many still circulate today in online collections devoted to historical images of London.

The fogs were significant, newsworthy events. They were highly toxic: it’s estimated that more than 4,000 people died as a result of the fog of 1952, which led to the Clean Air Act of 1956. Yet far from communicate the poisonous dangers of urban atmospheric pollution, the press photographs often seem to emphasise the beauty and mystery of the fog.

The photographs in the magazine Picture Post’s photo-feature “Foggy Morning” (January 21 1939), as in many press photos, made the most of the picturesque opportunities given by artificial lighting in the fog: headlamps, flares, neon advertising lights and traffic lights.

They also made use of the ways in which fog transforms familiar figures and landmarks into silhouettes. The accompanying text claimed the images represented a “natural beauty … the beauty of atmosphere”, going so far as to say: “A foggy morning in London is as beautiful as an Arctic night, if shorter.”

One reader of Picture Post, Ernest Restell, wrote to complain about the feature. He objected not simply to the claims made in the article but to the fact that the “pictures were so beautiful, for fog is an ugly harmful thing”. Which – as he goes on to point out, is the concentrated result of the “inefficient combustion of raw coal” (combined with meteorological conditions).

Today, some writers argue that sublime beauty is a way to make photographs of environmental destruction more impactful, while others share Restell’s concern that spectacular images detract from attention to the causes of pollution and climate change.

It’s tempting to see beauty as intrinsic to the photograph or to the scene itself, but it was a technical struggle to photograph the London fog, and photographers drew on existing pictorial traditions to do so, in the process suppressing and concealing the foulness of the air.

The art of fog

There was already a nostalgia associated with the London fog in which the romantic visual effects of the filthy air were inseparable from ideas about the might of the industrial, imperial centre at its 19th-century peak.

Impressionist painters, notably Claude Monet, had been drawn to the London fog. And in photography, the pictorialists (photographers keen to establish the medium as an expressive art form) followed the impressionists in their attraction to mist and fog as a means to convey emotional as well as physical atmosphere.

By the 1930s, pictorialism was a popular aesthetic in Britain. Encouraged by magazines such as The Amateur Photographer and Cinematographer, the amateur photography scene was dominated by an aesthetic of atmosphere. The British Journal of Photography, as early as 1898, lambasted “mud-and-slush photographers” who would seek out bad weather conditions and foggy atmosphere for aesthetic effect.

Fog allowed photography to be expressive, it introduced mystery through softening and blurring effects but also a shallowness to the pictorial space, an aesthetic of silhouettes and lighting effects anticipating film noir, especially films like The Third Man (1949), with their dramatic use of night-time urban lighting, smoke and shadow.

In the hands of the press photographers, it gave rise to a distinctive repertoire, of London buses and archways, policemen with their distinctive helmets and white gloves, lamplighters and classical buildings outlined in the mist. The fog appeared as an opaque backdrop against which an increasingly cliched and nostalgic image of the imperial city could emerge, at a time when Britain’s colonies were fighting for independence.

As the historical geographer Stephen Legg argues, when a severe “black smoke fog” plagued the first India Round Table Conference in November and December 1930, the press commented on developments in the conference in relation to differences in climate and dress, interpreting Indian “difference as inferiority or nonmodernity”.

As Legg and other writers on atmosphere and climate have shown, ideas about weather and climate, and especially fog, go hand in hand with ideas about race and empire. As well as making the polluted atmosphere appear picturesque, and despite the difficulties involved in photographing in fog, photographs of foggy London reproduce and circulate an ideological vision of the British empire.

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The climate crisis has a communications problem. How do we tell stories that move people – not just to fear the future, but to imagine and build a better one? This article is part of Climate Storytelling, a series exploring how arts and science can join forces to spark understanding, hope and action.

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Michelle Henning received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for some of the work informing this article, under grant no. AH/R014639.

– ref. How romanticised images of London fog shaped the way we see polluted air – https://theconversation.com/how-romanticised-images-of-london-fog-shaped-the-way-we-see-polluted-air-272851

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Pauline Sophie Heinrichs, Lecturer in War Studies, Climate and Energy Security, King’s College London

In the middle of Ukraine’s fiercest winter of the war, many Ukrainians are unable to prepare hot meals or are unable to heat their homes while temperatures have dipped as low as -20C in the past few weeks. Harsher weather is forecast.

Russia has once again targeted Ukraine with sustained attacks on power stations, energy grids and heating nodes affecting electricity, as well as heating systems and water pumps.

Following the Russian strikes on January 20, around 5,600 apartment buildings in Kyiv were left without heating and almost half of Kyiv was believed to be without heat and power, affecting around one million people. The situation is so dire that the city has set up “heating tents” to help people stay warm in the freezing temperatures. Other cities have also been attacked.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky declared the situation an energy emergency.

One factor is that as a legacy of Ukraine’s membership of the Soviet Union, Russia probably holds deeper knowledge about Ukraine’s centralised energy systems than an outside nation would generally have.

For decades Ukraine’s energy system was linked to Russia and Belarus as part of a centralised grid, and was “tightly connected to Russia’s energy architecture”. While this did not mean Ukraine was dependent on Russia for its energy supply, it did mean that Russia played the central role in coordinating frequency and balancing supply and demand across the whole network.

Some Ukrainian officials have argued that the nature of these attacks suggests that Russian knowledge of Soviet-era energy systems has helped it to target Ukraine’s energy centres.

There’s another big factor for the Ukrainian authorities to struggle with.

While Ukraine’s authorities were quick to restore heating in around 1,600 buildings, an estimated 4,000 remained without heating on January 21. The challenge in Ukraine is more severe than it might be in other countries because of the centralised systems for water, sewage and heating used by its urban neighbourhoods, known as district heating.

What is district heating?

Ukraine still relies heavily on Soviet-era thermal heating systems using mostly gas. The percentage of households that rely on district heating varies by region and city, with a particularly high percentage of these buildings, mostly built in the 1960s, in densely populated urban cities including Kyiv.

Thermal power plants usually heat water which is then piped around districts and to individual pumping stations. It is then distributed to apartment buildings. But if the pipes are full of water and power for heating is off, the pipes can burst if the water freezes. Right now, with temperatures spiralling downwards this is a major threat.

Each district heating system can serve tens of thousands of citizens across multiple buildings and, when powered with renewable energy, they can be significantly more efficient, cost-effective and low-carbon than individual boilers. District heating systems depend much more on fixed physical infrastructure, including large pipes and pumping stations, to circulate hot water.

But centralised infrastructure is inherently vulnerable to physical attack. Damage to a major transmission pipe or the loss of a key pumping station can disable heating across entire neighbourhoods, particularly during winter.

Russia has damaged around 8.5GW of Ukraine’s power generation since October 2025, or around 15% of pre-war capacity. With the amount available nearly matching the amount generated there’s little room to redistribute energy within the system.

Whatever the system’s weaknesses may be, no energy system in the world is built to sustain continued bombardment.

Ukraine relies on nuclear power

Ukraine’s energy system is also largely dependent on nuclear power. Around half of Ukraine’s electricity is nuclear-powered, with coal-fired power plants making 23% and gas-fired plants 9%. In all cases these are features of a highly centralised energy system.

Patterns of attacks indicate that Russian forces monitor where repairs are under way and then hit the same sites again once they are restored. This has compounded repair costs and prolonged the loss of critical services. Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko said that the situation was difficult because most of those buildings that were being reconnected for the second time were damaged as part of a previous attack on January 9.

Russia uses “double-tap” strikes, where a second attack follows closely after the first. This often endangers emergency services and repair crews rushing to restore heat and electricity. Such tactics force officials to balance the urgent need to fix infrastructure with the risk to workers and civilians.

Even before the war, there were weaknesses in Ukraine’s energy and power networks. Old water systems and heating devices — and often entire buildings — need to be reconstructed.

However, Ukraine had already started to reduce technical reliance on Russia before the war. The dependency on the post-Soviet system changed in March 2022, when Ukraine’s grid was integrated with the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity, (Entso-E), a Europe-wide association of national electricity transmission system operators.

These attacks have had significant consequences on hospitals, transport systems, and vulnerable people in their homes. This devastating cycle of repeat strikes in the middle of an incredibly cold winter has intensified Russia’s energy terror.

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

– ref. Russian knowledge of Soviet-era energy systems has helped it to target Ukraine’s heating and homes – https://theconversation.com/russian-knowledge-of-soviet-era-energy-systems-has-helped-it-to-target-ukraines-heating-and-homes-274052

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucy Gill-Simmen, Associate Dean (Education & Student Experience) Faculty of Business & Law, Royal Holloway, University of London

The UK’s proposed post-16 education and skills policy promises a nation “where nobody is left behind”. The country’s modern industrial strategy 2025 talks of a workforce ready for a decade of growth, green jobs and artificial intelligence. It is the language of momentum and modernity, but beneath the optimism of these papers and policies lies unease.

We have a plan for skills, but do we still have a philosophy of education? The refrain that “nobody gets left behind” only holds meaning if we first know where we are going.

Education is not merely about producing employable subjects, but cultivating human beings capable of judgement, imagination and democratic participation. Without that moral compass, our forward motion risks becoming little more than acceleration without direction.

In 1949, Albert Einstein lamented: “It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”

More than seven decades later, it feels prophetic. Across higher education in the UK, a quiet malaise has taken hold. Universities have become fluent in the language of metrics, policies and dashboards, while students have become fluent in anxiety and debt.

We speak earnestly of agility and alignment, yet without clear direction. Once the moral and intellectual conscience of society, the British university risks becoming something far more ordinary: an institution of conformity, competing for the same diminishing pool of students and, in doing so, becoming indistinguishable from its peers.

This creeping homogenisation reflects the global commercialisation of higher education, where institutions mirror market logics (such as supply and demand) rather than challenge them, often at the expense of curiosity, critical thinking and imagination.

US educational reformer John Dewey described education as “life itself”. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire warned that schooling without liberation (meaning here agency and active learning rather than passively absorbing information) becomes “the banking of facts”, while the feminist author and academic known as bell hooks viewed education as “the practice of freedom”.

These were not romantic slogans; they were blueprints for survival. These people understood that education is not training – it is a process of becoming. Yet today, the language of learning has been colonised by a language of logistics.

Students are “learners”, teachers “deliverers”, and curiosity has no place in key performance indicators. The university system is increasingly one of transaction and we are building a system that can measure everything except meaning.

Opportunity in a crisis

The world is moving faster than the curriculum. Recently leaked documents suggest Amazon could replace up to 600,000 workers with robots – a glimpse of a labour market where efficiency outruns employment. If automation can transform one of the world’s largest employers, then the question for higher education is urgent: what are we preparing young people for?

The answer cannot be “the jobs of tomorrow”, because those jobs may not exist. The task now is to educate for adaptability, imagination and moral judgment, the qualities no algorithm can replace. As the historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in 1961: “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.” This is the work before us.

The government has correctly diagnosed a skills shortage. But its policy misses a meaning shortage. We need not only employable graduates but capable citizens – people able to reason ethically, collaborate across cultures and invent purpose where automation erases routine.

Higher education must recover its voice as the space where society asks its most difficult questions. What is progress for? What is prosperity without dignity? What does it mean to flourish or even to matter in an age of intelligent machines? These are not rhetorical questions – they are the foundation of survival strategies for a civilisation on the cusp of reinvention.

The courage to begin again

Universities across the world are banging the drum of transformation, insisting that doing things differently is the way forward. But how many actually are doung things differently? For all the rhetoric of innovation, much of the sector remains bound by inherited models of teaching and governance.

Into this inertia steps a new generation of institutions reimagining what a university can be. The “challenger university” model exemplified by Minerva University in the US and the London Interdisciplinary School in the UK, has begun to disrupt long-held assumptions about place, teaching and purpose.

These universities treat the world itself as a campus, fusing digital delivery, experiential learning and global immersion to craft education around curiosity rather than compliance.

Traditional universities are slowly following suit, rolling out accelerated degrees and hybrid formats with experiential learning embedded in their cities. At Royal Holloway Business School, the BSc Business and Management (London Accelerated) degree was built from this conviction. It is faster – two years all in instead of three – but not shallower.

London itself becomes the campus as students collaborate with businesses and design projects that connect innovation to ethics. They learn to work with artificial intelligence as a creative partner, not a threat.

This is not a course in survival; it is a course in significance. It teaches that employability follows from imagination, and that imagination begins with purpose. At its heart lies the courage of moral imagination: the willingness to envision not only alternative futures, but better ones.

Higher education stands at a fork in the road. One path leads deeper into optimisation: faster courses, tighter metrics, closer alignment to industry. The other path leads back to truth, curiosity and moral imagination. The first path is safe but soulless. The second is uncertain but alive.

And perhaps that is what this moment demands: to make education full of wonder again. When acceleration becomes an end in itself, education becomes soulless; when it is used to support inquiry, reflection and ethical engagement, it can do the opposite.

Universities must not only expand access but redefine ambition. They must teach not just for the labour market but for the human market – the realm of creativity, empathy and responsibility that automation cannot touch.

So yes, let us commit to no one being left behind. But let us also dare to ask: towards what? Towards compliance or consciousness? Towards growth or grace and fulfilment? If we want education to matter again, we must stop treating it as the servant of policy and start recognising it as the architect of possibility.

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

– ref. The big higher education question in 2026 ought to be: what are we preparing young people for? – https://theconversation.com/the-big-higher-education-question-in-2026-ought-to-be-what-are-we-preparing-young-people-for-270208

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Kate Kane, PhD Candidate in Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow

Internationally synonymous with Scottish identity, Robert Burns is Scotland’s national bard, a status he has achieved through his popularity since his death in 1796. He wrote some of the country’s most famous poems, including the satirical ode, Address to a Haggis and the rousing Scots Wha Hae. His most well-known work, the emotive Auld Lang Syne, is belted out the world over every New Year’s Eve.

On the 25th of January each year, Scots celebrate his life with good food (including the haggis he declared “Chieftain o’ the Puddin-race”) and recitations of his poetry. This Burns Night, I urge you to read one of the Bard’s lesser-known works from 1790, Lament of Mary, Queen of Scots, on the Approach of Spring.

A figure who also looms large in the Scottish cultural imagination, Mary, Queen of Scots was executed in 1587 for plotting against her cousin, the English queen, Elizabeth I. Following her execution and the death of Elizabeth, Mary’s son James was crowned king of both countries in 1603, meaning Mary is often viewed as the last distinctively Scottish monarch.

Mary’s legacy has long been contested. In her lifetime, she was depicted as either a papist jezebel, a “monstrous” female ruler, or a Catholic martyr.

Since her death, a slew of writers, including Burns, have written fictional versions of the Queen of Scots according to their own beliefs about her cultural significance. However, Burns’ poem, written 200 years after her execution, played a large part in shaping her legacy.

Mary was the subject of heated debate among Scottish men in the 18th century. Figures such as the philosopher David Hume labelled Mary “a whore” who had “murdered her husband”.

Hume was using the same smears weaponised by Mary’s contemporary political enemies to control her public reputation. The Scottish lords at the time implicated the queen in the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley. Her marriage to the man accused of Darnely’s killing just months after his death seemed to support perceptions of her guilt. They denounced her as a murderer and adulteress, and she was forced to abdicate in 1567.

Burns’ representation of the “amiable but unfortunate” Mary is, by contrast, sympathetic. His lament first appeared in a letter in 1790 to his friend the heiress Francis Dunlop. He went on to describe the work, in another letter, this time to Lady Winifred Maxwell Constable in 1791, as “a tribute to the memory of our greatly injured, lovely Scottish Queen”.

Burns’ sympathy for the queen was probably influenced by the popular defence of her written by his friend William Tytler. Challenging accounts from the likes of Hume, Tytler critically re-examined the evidence used to condemn Mary for her second husband’s death.

Burns’s portrayal of Mary was also influenced by his Jacobite sympathies – he believed that the exiled Stuart dynasty, represented by Mary, should be restored to the British throne. A burgeoning romantic literary tradition, oriented around natural imagery and individualistic emotional expression, also informed his representation of the Queen.

Written in Mary’s voice as she awaits execution, Burns’ Mary contrasts her youthful happiness as “the Queen o’ bonie France” (she became Queen of France through her first marriage in 1558 to the French dauphin, Francis II) with her current imprisonment in “foreign bands” in England. She decries “mony [many] a traitor” in Scotland and wishes “kinder stars” for her son James.

The Lamentation of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots by the female poet Anne Hunter (1742-1821) may also have influenced Burns’ depiction of the queen. Published around 1780, it bears marked similarities to Burns’ later lament.

Hunter and Burns both write as Mary in the first-person, describe Elizabeth I as a “false woman”, use nature-based imagery, and conclude with Mary’s defiant belief that she will live on after her death. Unfortunately, the likely influence of Hunter’s work on the bard has largely been forgotten, as her poem was often published anonymously.

With his lament, Burns cemented Mary’s status as a tragic figure ripe for romantic literary representation. Burns’ work inspired the romantic poet William Wordsworth to write three poems about the queen of “weeping captivity” in the early 1800s – one remarkably similar lament and two works that also appropriated her voice.

With Burns’s Mary declaring Elizabeth to be a lesser woman as “the weeping blood in woman’s breast / Was never known to thee”, he also helped to create an enduring trope that presents womanly, incompetent Mary as having been the victim and opposite of cold and shrewd (unwomanly) Elizabeth.

This idea has been perpetuated in works from Walter Scott’s The Abbot (1820) to Phillipa Gregory’s The Other Queen (2008). Liz Lochhead’s 1987 play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off is the most significant work to date to take issue with this portrayal of the queens as two “mean girls locked in a catfight to the death”.

Both Mary and Burns were poets, both of their corpses were exhumed in attempts to redefine their cultural reputations, and both are now profitable attractions for Scotland’s tourism and heritage industries.

As Burns Night comes around again and Mary’s last letter goes on display for the first time in Perth, now is the time to read Lament of Mary, Queen of Scots, on the Approach of Spring and remember two figures whose lives and mythologies have shaped Scotland greatly.

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

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Kate Kane receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council via the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities.

– ref. Robert Burns and Mary, Queen of Scots: how the poet shaped the enduring cultural legacy of the executed monarch – https://theconversation.com/robert-burns-and-mary-queen-of-scots-how-the-poet-shaped-the-enduring-cultural-legacy-of-the-executed-monarch-273950

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Will de Freitas, Environment + Energy Editor, The Conversation

This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage was first published in our award-winning weekly climate action newsletter, Imagine.

“Observing Greenland from a helicopter,” one scientist wrote last year, “the main problem is one of comprehending scale. I thought we were skimming low over the waves of a fjord, before … realising what I suspected were floating shards of ice were in fact icebergs the size of office blocks. I thought we were hovering high in the sky over a featureless icy plane below, before bumping down gently onto ice only a few metres below us.”

This is the view described by Durham glaciologist Tom Chudley, when writing about his research showing the Greenland ice sheet isn’t just melting – it’s falling apart. Chudley and his colleagues found crevasses are growing fast, channelling meltwater deep into the ice sheet, accelerating its slide into the ocean.

And as the ice cracks, so does the geopolitical status quo.

Many world maps make Greenland seem even bigger than it actually is. The “Mercator projection” implies it’s almost the size of Africa, when in reality it is “only” about as big as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Over my time in this job, I have noticed Greenland having a similarly outsized role in climate science. In recent years, The Conversation has published stories, among many others, on melting ice, climate-changing microbes, fast-adapting polar bears, Chudley’s creaking crevasses, the race to map the world’s most spectacular and remote fjords, and a skyscraper-sized tsunami that vibrated through the entire planet and no one saw. All relied on scientists – often in big international teams – having access to Greenland.

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Read more:
The Greenland ice sheet is falling apart – new study

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Access denied?

But the political stability that allows these scientists to work there is also under threat. In a piece explaining why Greenland is indispensable to global climate science, Martin Siegert, a glaciologist who heads the University of Exeter’s Cornwall campus, points out that Antarctica has been governed for decades by an international treaty that ensures it remains a place of peace and science. Greenland has no such protection.

“Its openness to research”, writes Siegert, “therefore depends not on international law, but on Greenland’s continued political stability and openness – all of which may be threatened by US control.”

The stakes are high: if Greenland’s colossal ice sheet fully melted, it would “raise sea level globally by about seven metres (the height of a two storey house)”.

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Read more:
Why Greenland is indispensable to global climate science

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Why the sudden urge to take over Greenland, anyway?

Many assume America’s ambitions are ultimately about oil or other minerals. But Lukas Slothuus, who researches fossil fuel production at the University of Sussex, takes a more sceptical view on the supposed economic jackpot.

Logistical nightmares

Greenland does have vast natural resources, he says, but they won’t necessarily translate into huge profits. That’s because the logistics are so tough. Slothuus notes that: “Outside its capital Nuuk, there is almost no road infrastructure in Greenland and limited deep-water ports for large tankers and container ships.”

He contrasts this with other potential mining operations around the world, which can “exploit public infrastructure such as roads, ports, power generation, housing and specialist workers to make their operations profitable”. Greenland has none of this. That means “huge capital investment would be required to extract the first truckload of minerals and the first barrel of oil”.

This is one reason why Siegert believes “economics dictates” Greenland’s resources will “most likely be used to power the green transition rather than prolong the fossil fuel era”. The sheer cost of extraction means the commercial focus is on “critical minerals”: high-value materials used in renewable technologies from wind turbines to electric car batteries.

As Slothuus puts it, oil from Greenland is “implausible even in the event of a full US takeover”.

“There are many reasons why the Trump administration might want to dominate the Arctic, not least to gain relative power over Russia and China. But natural resource extraction is unlikely to feature centrally.”

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Read more:
Why Greenland’s vast natural resources won’t necessarily translate into huge profits

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This hasn’t stopped the superpowers, of course. And in the medium-term, Greenland looks set to host a massive military build up – whether or not the US takes over.

That’s according to Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, a professor of war studies at Loughborough University. She says Greenland is in a strategic position that will only become more important as climate change opens up new shipping lanes, enabling further conflict in the far north. “The Arctic in general,” she writes, “will become a showcase for the latest military technology the US has in its armouries.”

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Read more:
Whether or not US acquires Greenland, the island will be at the centre of a massive military build-up in the Arctic

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I’m not aware of any research on the climate impact of a military showcase on or around a pristine ice sheet. But as our glaciologist in the helicopter warned us, the ice is already fragile enough.

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To contact The Conversation’s environment team, please email imagine@theconversation.com. We’d love to hear your feedback, ideas and suggestions and we read every email, thank you.

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Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 45,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

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– ref. Why Greenland plays an outsized role in climate change science – https://theconversation.com/why-greenland-plays-an-outsized-role-in-climate-change-science-274053

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor, The Conversation

This newsletter was first published in The Conversation UK’s World Affairs Briefing email. Sign up to receive weekly analysis of the latest developments in international relations, direct to your inbox.

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Fears that Donald Trump’s newly minted “Board of Peace” might supplant the United Nations appear to have been premature. The US president has touted his brainchild as “an international organization” that aims to “secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict”. This, of course, is a mission that is central to the UN’s raison d’etre.

But António Guterres, the UN’s secretary-general, is unlikely to lose much sleep over Trump’s new vehicle for global governance. Just 19 countries have signed up of the 60 invited, ranging from Argentina to Uzbekistan. From Europe, just Hungary and Bulgaria have joined. None of the major European powers were represented, neither were Russia or China.

The board’s charter amounts to what must be one of the more bizarre documents doing the diplomatic round at the moment. Despite being set up and given a mandate by the UN security council as a vehicle to oversee the future governance and rebuilding of Gaza, you’d search in vain in the charter for mentions of the embattled Palestinian territory.

Instead it confers on the US president some extraordinary powers as chairman of the board. He can dictate who is eligible to join (just not, as we have seen, who actually joins). He will occupy the chair for as long as he wishes and has the power to choose his successor. He will choose when to meet and what to discuss. In the event of a decision before member states being tied, he gets a casting vote.

Membership is for three years, and can be turned into a permanent seat for a fee of US$1 billion (£740 million). Funds will be controlled by the executive board, selected by the chairman, with a chief executive officer, nominated by the chairman. The chairman also has the power to remove or renew the tenure of members of the executive board.

It is, writes Stefan Wolff, like a “privatised UN with one shareholder: the US president”. And it comes a week after Trump pulled the US out of 31 UN organisations, including the peace-building commission and the peace-building fund, as well as office of the special representative for children in armed conflict. Perhaps we’ll see the Board of
Peace taking these roles on?

More likely, it would seem, is that the transactional ethos which appears to run through Trump’s foreign policy endeavours will persist in the Board of Peace’s efforts to solve today’s international crises. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have both been appointed to the executive board (alongside, among others, Tony Blair). Kushner presented the plan for the next phase of the Gaza plan, which will focus on decommissioning Hamas.

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Read more:
Donald Trump’s ‘board of peace’ looks like a privatised UN with one shareholder: the US president

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The launch of the Board of Peace took place on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum at Davos, a gathering which had appeared to have lost traction in recent years, but which has this week been the epicentre of global diplomacy. This has largely been thanks to Trump’s threat to acquire Greenland from Denmark by fair means or foul. Given that Denmark (and the Greenlanders themselves) have resolutely insisted that the island is not for sale, fair means appear to have been ruled out and there was much consternation about what foul might mean and whether it would involve military action.

Trump addressed the gathering on Wednesday, rowing back on his earlier threat to take Greenland by force. But it what was still clear that most leaders are coming to terms with the disintegration of the world order put in place in the aftermath of the second world war and the dawn of a new era dominated by great powers acting purely in their own interests. Or as Stephen Miller, Trump’s ideologue in chief puts it, a world “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”.

It’s hard to see how America’s erstwhile close allies can resist this, writes Robert Dover. Dover, an expert in international affairs at the University of Hull, with a focus on security and intelligence, sees just how intimately entwined the US and the rest of Nato are, particularly in terms of intelligence sharing and military cooperation.

Still, he writes: “There is a dawning realisation that the US might be Europe’s adversary, not ally.” Or, as Canadian prime minister Mark Carney put it in his speech on January 20: “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” It’s up to the rest of the world to decide how to face up to the new reality.

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Read more:
Trump at Davos marks the start of a new era in world affairs

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Carney’s speech, with its quotations from Václav Havel and Thucydides, has been much praised. (Take a look at this piece from Thucydides expert Neville Morley for a detailed look on what the ancient historian really meant by the line referenced by Carney.) One journalist even put it up there with Churchill’s iron curtain speech after the second world war.

There was, writes Mark Shanahan, professor of political engagement at the University of Surrey, one venue and two speeches but Carney’s “left Donald Trump in the dust”. It was clear-sighted, determined, reasonable and fact-based. Trump, meanwhile, served up 70 minutes that had it not been for the teleprompter you could have taken for stream of consciousness, including the usual jibes against friend and foe alike and a medley of his own greatest hits, many of them imaginary.

Shanahan contrasts the style and substance of the two leaders, concluding that: “One leader donned the cloak of statesmanship at Davos this week. It wasn’t Donald Trump.”

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Read more:
One venue, two speeches – how Mark Carney left Donald Trump in the dust in Davos

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Trump 2.0: one year in

So busy a week has it been that we’ve hardly had time to stop and notice that it marked a year since Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term, promising to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.

He rode to victory in November 2024 thanks to a broad coalition with its core comprising what have become known as Maga voters – for his slogan that he will “make America great again”. Prominent among those voters were farmers and small business owners in rural communities across the heartland of America: rust-belt and rural communities drawn to his promise of economic regeneration.

But a year own there are signs that these people are becoming increasingly disillusioned, writes Inderjeet Parmar, an expert in US politics at City St George’s, University of London. The mass deportations of migrants has deprived farmers of vital labour while Trump’s regime of tariffs has increased costs for struggling families. With the midterms looming this November, the Republican party will be anxious that these crucial votes might not materialise.

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Read more:
Signs that Trump’s economic policies are alienating his rural Maga base

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Tariffs have been at the heart of Trumpian economic policy over the first year of his second term. Economists Prachi Agarwal, Jodie Keane and Maximiliano Mendez-Parra of independent research organisation ODI Global assess who are the winners from Trump’s tariff regime and who have lost out.

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Read more:
After a year of Trump, who are the winners and losers from US tariffs?

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– ref. Trump’s Board of Peace launches into a warring world – https://theconversation.com/trumps-board-of-peace-launches-into-a-warring-world-274147

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Thusha Rajendran, Professor of Psychology, The National Robotarium, Heriot-Watt University

On the arm of Swiss tennis player Stan Wawrinka is tattooed a quote by Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This excerpt from novella Worstward Ho seems motivational and suggests that perseverance is needed for success. However, the word failure carries a weight with it, especially if used as a label, as if it were an essential part of someone.

Yet, in evolution, the creative arts, engineering and education, failure is a process – without which success is not achievable.

“Error” might actually be a better term than failure, because error generates variation. And this variation is important in understanding the uniqueness of human creativity.

Generative AI can create fashion models, award-winning art and actors. But generative AI lacks the artist’s drive, their ability to reflect and know the significance about why and for whom the art is being created.

If we consider creativity as a process, then in order to create new and novel art, errors, mistakes, dead ends are required. In short, failure.

Generative AI also cannot understanding concepts such as aesthetic failure (when musicians use failure as a catalyst for improvisation), or have the desire to connect with an audience in a live performance. Creation can be outsourced but human creativity and the impulse to connect cannot.

Perfectionism is an illusion

Learning from mistakes in not a new idea in teaching, but with the rise of generative AI the temptation for both students and educators might to see generative AI as a way to eradicate failure, a guarantee of high grades at school and university.

However, this risks not providing students with the experiences they will need to be lifelong learners. British psychiatrist and cyberneticist W. Ross Ashby wrote: “The whole function of the brain is summed up in: error correction.”

Here, the key to understanding the brain is not in the error, but the process of correcting the error. Similarly, in his book To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, the engineer Henry Petroski argues that failure is vital to the advancement of engineering and design, because it drives process.

Not that anyone deliberately designs bridges to collapse, but the knowledge of how to put things right comes from understanding why things went wrong. Petroski also argues that prolonged success leads to failure, but this is because of complacency.

In deciding what we want from AI, complacency (not failure) is our biggest enemy. Across many domains failure is not just necessary, but vital for success.

For example, a research study has found that both AI models and human dermatologists perform worse on images of dark skin tones and uncommon diseases when presented with a set of diverse skin images. This highlights the problems of a lack of exposure to variations in skin types and rare skin diseases in both AI trained datasets and humans.

Driverless vehicles have issues with merging into traffic and halting because they do not have a mental representation of the intentions of other road users.

By contrast, humans understand driving as a social, interactional and transactional endeavour – as much as a technical one – and, so, find ways to negotiate, to yield and say thank you.

Appreciating this a powerful counter narrative to perfectionism in all its guises. The most seductive of which is perhaps the promise of an AI-created utopia.

The question is whose vision of paradise is this and what are we forsaking by not questioning it. What we do risk losing by not striving, by not making (or accepting mistakes), of seeing beauty in imperfection?

The fallacy is that we have no agency, that technology cannot be imbued with moral ambition. However, history shows us that humans can and do shape technologies. For example, the printing press was repurposed from publishing books to printing newspapers – thereby creating the means and a mechanism for a free press.

So, there is no such thing as technological inevitability. We can decide what the relationship between humans and AI will look like – through consumer choice, the ballot box and legislation – and with it all the groundbreaking, creative and beautiful mistakes it will bring.

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

– ref. Why failure is a necessary ingredient for success – especially in the era of AI – https://theconversation.com/why-failure-is-a-necessary-ingredient-for-success-especially-in-the-era-of-ai-272820

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Yasemin Kor, Beckwith Professor of Management Studies, Cambridge Judge Business School

Consumers are surrounded by food that is highly conducive to weight gain. No one likes dieting and very few have lasting success. But now weight-loss injections are seen as gamechangers, yielding results that seem miraculous for people who have struggled with their weight.

Around the world, obesity, high blood pressure, and abnormal blood sugar and lipid levels (so-called “metabolic syndrome”) have now been shown to affect 31% of women and 26% of men. The same study estimated that globally 1.54 billion adults had metabolic syndrome in 2023.

The new genre of weight loss injections (GLP-1 agonists) have been shown to reduce weight by 16-23% in roughly one year. These drugs are expensive, but some healthcare programmes cover the cost for those who need them the most.

In the UK, they are covered by the NHS for patients who are both severely obese and also suffer from specific weight-related health problems such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Some who can afford to pay may be able to get a prescription with less-pressing health conditions.

In the meantime, prices of the drugs are starting to come down thanks to commercial competition and patents expiring. And a more convenient pill form is now available in the US and likely to become available in some other markets in the near future, meaning the overall uptake of these drugs could grow exponentially.

This might all seem like bad news for the food industry. After all, the people who are taking these drugs, often for at least a year, have significantly reduced appetite. This will amount to a sizeable drop in demand for food products. So it’s interesting to consider how the food industry might react to this – with an aggressive response that revamps food product lines to promote better nutrition and health? Or with a wait-and-see approach to determine the long-term future of the drugs?

People taking weight-loss drugs still need to get enough protein, fibre and other nutrients to prevent muscle loss and to keep their digestive systems functioning. It takes tricky calculations and consistent planning to figure out how to obtain all essential nutrients in small plates day after day. This can be a new business opportunity for food companies.

Companies in the sector have introduced product lines with meals designed specifically for those on weight-loss medications – M&S (Nutrient Dense), Morrisons (Small & Balanced) and Nestle (Vital Pursuit). There are also smaller entrepreneurial companies in the mix – BistroMD, Field Doctor, Jane Plan and MealPro, for example. These specialise in meal preparation and delivery based on customers’ needs (for example, GLP-1-optimised, heart-healthy or diabetes-friendly) or taste preferences.

Others will no doubt follow – but companies like M&S and small specialised firms are the ones showing more agility and capability in this space right now.

The shadow of ultra-processed foods

However, beyond GLP-friendly ready meals, food companies must confront a major problem: they are a significant contributor to the global epidemic of metabolic syndrome due to their promotion of the ultra-processed and highly processed foods found everywhere – from supermarkets, to workplace cafeterias and food outlets.

It is not only consumers who rely on these products; food companies earn significant profits from them. GLP-1 drugs may help reduce consumers’ dependence on such foods, but could they also encourage companies to adjust their product ranges and offer more space for healthier options on shelves and menus?

And even though recent research has shown that people who stop taking the drugs often gain back the weight they lost very rapidly, these drugs will not go away. They will most probably be carefully combined with other tools for effective long-term weight and metabolic syndrome management.

Customers can expect to spot more GLP-1-friendly food products in all supermarkets this year. But unfortunately, with some exceptions, it is unlikely that consumers will see a significant reduction in highly processed or ultra-processed foods – or a big increase in the amount of healthier food on sale.

Food companies are likely to continue generating revenue from less healthy products for as long as demand remains strong. That’s the usual response of established firms that are disrupted by technology, competition and new business models. Most prefer to take a wait-and-see approach, keeping their bigger portfolio and overall business strategy intact, and plan to calibrate a response based on the perceived urgency and size of the threat.

But, in this case, that could be a big mistake. A tentative approach reinforces the already negative image of large food firms when it comes to public health. Introducing a limited range while failing to act on the damaging effects of their other product lines could further erode consumer trust.

It could also open the door to competition from pharmaceutical companies, technology startups, and speciality food firms that take alternative approaches to food and health. These could involve even more sophisticated prepared-meal options, supplements and customised meal kits. The wait-and-see approach, however, delays the development of new products and business strategy.

Ultimately, customer choices matter – and increasingly shoppers have more options. People with metabolic syndrome are more than likely to try weight-loss medications that may reverse their health problems. They are also likely to invest in approaches that will help them maintain their weight loss. Food and health companies that make it their mission to promote wellbeing are going to be tomorrow’s winners.

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

– ref. How will weight-loss jabs change the food industry? – https://theconversation.com/how-will-weight-loss-jabs-change-the-food-industry-273849