Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Magda Osman, Professor of Policy Impact, University of Leeds

Several pieces of legislation across the world are coming into effect this year to tackle harms experienced online, such as the UK’s Online Safety Act and Australia’s Online Safety Act. There are also new standards, regulations, acts and laws related to digital products (including smart devices such as voice assistants, virtual headsets) and services such as social media platforms.

Of the many harms these types of legislation are designed to address, “psychological harm”, “mental distress” or similar terms are commonly included.

Unfortunately, when psychological harm and the like are referred to, there is typically no detailed corresponding definition of them. But while we might have an intuitive understanding of what psychological harm is, we still need precision on what it means in law. This means evidencing what it is, agreeing on how to measure it and designing the best methods to tackle it.

How do we do this? An obvious place to look is psychological science.

The origin story

The earliest reference to psychological harm was made in the 1940s. Back then, it was about the destabilising impact of war propaganda and the use of psychology to subvert people’s understanding of reality. Psychological harm was a broad term, which also applied to those witnessing the horrors of war on the front line.

In the 1950s and 1960s, psychological harm was more associated with advertising tactics that aggressively exploit people’s emotions and insecurities.

Fast forward to the early 2000s, and tools for assessing psychological harm emerged alongside clinical assessments of mental health disorders. For instance, research on abuses experienced online, such as cyberbullying and cyberstalking, documented several psychological impacts. These ranged from withdrawal from social groups, self-doubt and reduced self-esteem to mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety and PTSD.

More terms entered into clinical and forensic lexicons, such as “psychological distress”, “psychological damage” and “psychological injury”. All of them concern some form of mental adverse experience which may happen immediately or as a delayed reaction to traumatic events.

Where we are now

In reviewing the 80 years’ worth of work in clinical, forensic and cognitive psychology, here is what I see as the major issues concerning psychological harm.

There is no agreement as to where to draw the boundary between psychological harm or related concepts and mental disorders outlined in the diagnostic manual called DSM-5-TR (such as depression, anxiety or personality disorders).

There is also no standardised measure of psychological harm or psychological distress or damage. For instance, if we just take social media, there are different metrics that vary even on how they measure negative mental experiences on Tiktok, Instagram and Threads, Facebook, Youtube and Weibo.

Why does this matter? Take for example cyberbullying. There are 17 tools in existence to measure psychological harm. And because the tools don’t all align, we don’t have an accurate picture of rates of psychological harm. Some tools are too narrow in scope – they fail to include severe cases that require psychiatric treatment. And other assessments are too broad – failing to exclude those that are malingering.

What’s more, how we perceive and experience adverse events, which can be very serious and debilitating, vary – they are subjective in nature. Research in clinical and forensic psychological recognises this. These disciplines have spent time establishing standards of assessment when supporting legal decisions for ensuring appropriate punitive measures when we face terrible situations.

Three practical suggestions

For legislation to do the job of guarding against psychological harm from serious adverse experiences online and through digital technologies, forensic psychology offers a path forward.

The first thing is to have an agreed definition. For example, in 2025, the psychologist Amanda Heath proposed a viable general-purpose definition as “a sustained drop in stable functioning, negatively impacting wellbeing”.

This works in the same way as legal requirements for defining physical harm, which needs a baseline of functioning to show how an injurious event causes a change to it. The severity of the damage varies, based on, say the length of recovery (such as a week, a month, a year, never). In the same way, the length of recovery from exposure to illegal content online would indicate the severity of the psychological harm experienced.

Second, there should to be a process for demonstrating causality between a particular adverse event online and the harm itself. So far, there doesn’t appear to be any set criteria laid out in online safety or harm acts for establishing causality.

Again, legislators could learn from forensic research, which outlines two levels in psychological injury cases that establish causality – psychologically and legally. Forensic psychologists weigh the evidence for the relative ratio of pre-existing and event or post-event factors to determine causality using something called counterfactual analysis.

For example, sometimes people have pre-existing injuries, vulnerabilities, or psychopathologies. So in such cases there needs to be a baseline, where the evidence shows how an indiviudal’s conditions have been exacerbated by experiencing an injurious event. For example, if we applied this analysis to psychological harm experienced online it would work like this. Forensic psychologists would weight the evidence to determine that, in the absence of seeing the illegal content, an individual would not have experienced PTSD to the same extent that they are experiencing it currently.

Finally, there need to be standards for the evidence used to show causality between a particular adverse event online and the harm itself, which we don’t yet see in current online safety or harm acts.

In forensic psychology, on the other hand, the legal standards of evidence are high, requiring independent corroboration of psychological impacts. This is where psychiatric assessment tools of PTSD, depression and anxiety are used along with other sources of evidence. Physical outcomes (such as neurological damage) and behavioural outcomes (such as substance abuse, self-harm) are also required.

To serve the public, the law needs to improve. This can’t be achieved without a fleshed out definition of psychological harm, tools of assessment and a framework that traces a causal path from the injurious content to the harm it is considered to have caused.

Magda Osman receives funding from ESRC, EPSRC, Research England, UKRI Innovate UK, Wellcome Trust, Turing Institute, Food Standards Agency, DFG, British Academy, DSTL, Counterterrorism Policing.

– ref. Laws are introduced globally to reduce ‘psychological harm’ online – but there’s no clear definition of what it is – https://theconversation.com/laws-are-introduced-globally-to-reduce-psychological-harm-online-but-theres-no-clear-definition-of-what-it-is-263061

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Amalendu Misra, Professor of International Politics, Lancaster University

A seismic political shift has taken place in Bolivia. The country’s leftist Movimiento al Socialismo (Mas) party, which has dominated Bolivian politics for nearly 20 years, was voted out of power in a general election on August 17.

Centre-right Rodrigo Paz Pereira and rightwing Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, who briefly led the country in 2001, will now compete for the presidency in a run-off vote in October. According to the electoral court’s preliminary tally, Paz Pereira won 32.2% of the vote and Quiroga won 26.9%.

Bolivia’s deeply unpopular president, Luis Arce, who was the Mas presidential candidate in 2020, chose not to run. And his pick, current interior minister Eduardo del Castillo, only won 3.16% of the vote. That is just enough for the party to avoid losing its legal status.

Beyond exhaustion with the rule of Mas, the election was dominated by two critical issues. First was the dire state of the economy. Bolivia is enduring its worst economic crisis in four decades, with US dollars and fuel in short supply. Inflation also jumped from 12% in January to 23% in June. Many Bolivians are struggling to make ends meet.

Second, voters were confronted with a decision to continue Bolivia’s old style status quo politics of patronage or opt for a new political ideology. Bolivians have long experienced divisive politics under the old order. The voters were clear; they wanted change.

Speaking after the results were announced, Paz Pereira said: “Bolivia is not only calling for a change of government, it is also calling for a change to the political system. This is the beginning of a great victory and a great transformation.”

End of an era

The results are likely to put an end to the political career of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s three-time former president and the founder of Mas. Morales first entered office in 2006 as part of the “pink tide” of leftist leaders that swept into power across Latin America during the commodities boom of the early 2000s.

He was long seen as the shining light of the Latin American left. His policies lifted millions of people, particularly Bolivian indigenous communities who have suffered centuries of marginalisation and discrimination, out of poverty.

But his critics accuse him of undermining Bolivia’s political and legal institutions by, for example, appointing loyalists to the judiciary and electoral bodies.

In 2016, when a referendum narrowly failed to lift restrictions on presidential term limits, Morales appointed a constitutional court to circumvent the rules and scrap term limits altogether. This gave him the power to run for office indefinitely.

Then, in 2019, widespread protests over a disputed election resulted in Morales losing the support of the military and police. He fled Bolivia, with his supporters saying he was forced out in a coup. Morales has remained highly active in Bolivian politics since then, though this has morphed into a contentious struggle for influence.

Mas has fallen victim to bitter infighting. Arce and Morales, who initially both wanted to be the Mas 2025 presidential candidate, became locked in a fight for control of Mas. And when a constitutional court ruling barred Morales from running, he accused the government of trying to disqualify his candidacy.

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Read more:
Bolivia slides towards anarchy as two bitter rivals prepare for showdown 2025 election

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Morales called for his supporters to boycott the vote. Preliminary results suggest 19.1% of ballots were null and void, an unusually high proportion in Bolivia’s electoral history. This followed months of regular violent protests, which were most intense in rural areas where support for Morales is concentrated.

The election outcome can be seen as representing the resolve of Bolivian citizens to prevent the further erosion of their democratic institutions and put a stop to the politics of populism. While waiting to vote at polling stations across La Paz, several people said they were choosing to vote for el menos peor, the lesser evil.

Paz Pereira was a surprise vote leader. Opinion polls had suggested Samuel Doria Medina, one Bolivia’s most successful businessman, was the frontrunner. But support for Paz Pereira seems to have surged after he teamed up with Edman Lara, a TikTok-savvy former police captain who went viral for denouncing corruption within the police.

Quiroga and Doria Medina, who has now announced he will back Paz Pereira in the run-off, used their election campaigns to warn of the need for a fiscal adjustment to save Bolivia from insolvency. This may include the elimination of food and fuel subsidies, which some analysts say risks sparking social unrest.

The road ahead for Bolivia’s incoming president will be hard and bumpy. His first task will be to rein in runaway inflation. Then he will have to put back together a fractured nation marked by racial and ideological divides.

He will also have to work on realigning Bolivia’s relationship with rest of the world – by extricating itself from its strong association with pariah regimes like Iran, Venezuela and Russia. The new leader has a mountain to climb.

Amalendu Misra 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. Bolivia election: voters bring two decades of leftist politics to an end – https://theconversation.com/bolivia-election-voters-bring-two-decades-of-leftist-politics-to-an-end-263238

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mike Watts, Professor of Education, Brunel University of London

A-level results in 2025 show the increasing popularity of Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) among students. For students taking three A-levels – the majority – the most popular combination of subjects was biology, chemistry and maths.

The subject with the greatest rise in entries from 2024 is further maths, followed by economics, maths, physics and chemistry. Maths remains the most popular subject, with entries making up 12.7% of all A-level entries.

Conversely, subjects such as French, drama, history and English literature are falling in exam entry numbers.

There is considerable incentive for young people who may be looking beyond school and university to the job market to study Stem. Research has found that Stem undergraduate degrees bring higher financial benefits to people and to the public purse than non-Stem subjects.

Many of the world’s fastest-growing jobs need Stem skills. These include data analysts, AI specialists, renewable energy engineers, app developers, cybersecurity experts and financial technology experts.

Within Stem itself, science alone is a broad church that spans astronomy to zoology and all letters of the alphabet between. Add to this the many variations of technology, engineering and maths and the range of subjects and specialisms is enormous.

It might come as no surprise, then, that young people have considerable scope in the possible careers and employment they might follow in life. From accountancy to the environment, medical engineering to computer technology, etymology to vulcanology, the possibilities are vast. There is little doubt that this very broad arena is attractive as possible employment.

What’s more, maths, engineering and the sciences are now vital parts of careers that might have once seemed unrelated. It was once the case that the division between arts and science was seen as unbridgeable: you were firmly on one side or the other. Today this is far less evident.

Artists, in their many manifestations, are almost by default material scientists. Architects, photographers, musicians, video-makers, sound and lighting technicians are (arguably) technical engineers. Landscape gardeners are environmentalists, chefs are food scientists.

Everyday Stem

Stem affects everyday life at all levels. Wearing a smart watch to track our health and fitness, as so many of us do, requires analysis of data, averages and percentages. We need maths skills to navigate our personal finances. Following directions means programming a Satnav.

Young people take their attitudes, advice and directions from a multitude of sources. Concern about the environment may lead teens to consider careers in areas such as ecology or environmental engineering. The ubiquity of social media apps and the tech companies that run them raises awareness of the use of computer science or tech skills.

And leaving aside Instagram, TikTok and other social media, Sir David Attenborough’s TV series Blue Planet prompted a surge of interest in marine ecology and plastic pollution.

Nor are young people immune to social influences more broadly. In more diffuse ways, peers and parents are also influential in shaping career choices, as are science centres, museums, botanical gardens, planetariums, aquariums, environmental centres, city farms and such like.

Then there are teachers and schools. Positive experiences in school Stem prompt further study. There is increasing evidence that individual project work, industrial placements, role-model scientists, school outreach and class visits all play an important part in promoting career intentions and aspirations.

One important factor here is imbuing students with a positive Stem identity. When young people think they are good at Stem subjects and are able to be successful, they are much more likely to choose a Stem career.

The upshot here is that, as the world changes, and changes quickly, so does the realisation that Stem is an essential and invaluable dimension of life and that career prospects are varied and available at many, many levels. It seems little wonder that students have to come to see this and are enrolling in study and employment in greater numbers than before.

Mike Watts 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. Teenagers are choosing to study Stem subjects – it’s a sign of the times – https://theconversation.com/teenagers-are-choosing-to-study-stem-subjects-its-a-sign-of-the-times-263218

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham

At a high-stakes meeting at the White House on August 18, the US president, Donald Trump, and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, tried to hammer out the broad contours of a potential peace agreement with Russia. The tone of their encounter was in marked contrast to their last joint press conference in Washington back in February which ended with Zelensky’s humiliation by Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance.

The outcomes of the presidential get-together, and the subsequent, expanded meeting with leaders of the European coalition of the willing, were also a much more professional affair than Trump’s summit with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on August 15. The results of the meetings in the White House were still far from perfect. But they are a much better response to the reality in which Ukrainians have lived for the past more than three-and-a-half years than what transpired during and after the brief press conference held by the two leaders after their meeting in Alaska.

This relatively positive outcome was not a foregone conclusion. Over the weekend, Trump had put out a statement on his Truth Social platform that: “President Zelenskyy (sic) of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately”. But this came with the proviso that Zelensky would need to accept Ukraine’s loss of Crimea to Russia and forego his country’s future Nato membership. This, and similar ideas of land swaps between Russia and Ukraine, have already been roundly rejected by the Ukrainian president.

Importantly, Kyiv’s position has been fully backed by Ukraine’s European allies. Leaders of the coalition of the willing issued a joint statement on August 16 to the effect that any territorial concessions were Ukraine’s to make or refuse.

On Nato membership, their statement was more equivocal. European leaders asserted that Russia should not be allowed to have a veto on Ukraine’s choices.
But the coalition’s reiteration of the commitment that it is “ready to play an active role” in guaranteeing Ukraine’s future security opened up a pathway to Trump to “Article 5-like protections” for Ukraine against future Russian aggression and promising “a lot of help when it comes to security”. Nato’s Article 5 guarantees that an attack on one member is an attack on all and commits the alliance to collective defence.

A possibly emerging deal – some territorial concessions by Ukraine in exchange for peace and joint US and European security guarantees – appeared to become more certain during the televised meeting between Trump and his visitors before their closed-door discussions. In different ways, each of the European guests acknowledged the progress that Trump had made towards a settlement and they all emphasised the importance of a joint approach to Russia to make sure that any agreement would bring a just and lasting peace.

As an indication that his guests were unwilling to simply accept whatever deal he had brought back with him from his meeting with Putin in Alaska, the US president then interrupted the meeting to call the Russian president. Signals from Russia were far from promising with Moscow rejecting any Nato troop deployments to Ukraine and singling out the UK as allegedly seeking to undermine the US-Russia peace effort.

Peace remains elusive

When the meeting concluded and the different leaders offered their interpretations of what had been agreed, two things became clear. First, the Ukrainian side had not folded under pressure from the US, and European leaders, while going out of their way to flatter Trump, held their ground as well. Importantly, Trump had not walked away from the process either but appeared to want to remain engaged.

Second, Russia had not given any ground, either. According to remarks by Putin’s foreign policy advisor, Yuri Ushakov, posted on the Kremlin’s official website, Russia would consider “the possibility of raising the level of representatives of the Ukrainian and Russian parties”. His statement falls short of, but does not rule out, the possibility of a Zelensky-Putin summit, which Trump announced as a major success after the White House meetings yesterday.

Such a meeting was seen as the next logical step towards peace by all the participants of the White House meeting and would be followed, according to Trump, by what he called “a Trilat” of the Ukrainian, Russian and American presidents. The lack of clear confirmation by Russia that such meetings would indeed happen raises more doubts about the Kremlin’s sincerity.

But the fact that a peace process – if it can be called that – remains somewhat intact is a far cry from an actual peace agreement. Little if anything was said in the aftermath of the White House meeting on territorial issues. Pressure on Russia only came up briefly in comments by European leaders, whose ambitions to become formally involved in actual peace negotiations remain a pipe dream for the time being. And, despite the initial optimism about security guarantees, no firm commitments were made with Zelensky only noting “the important signal from the United States regarding its readiness to support and be part of these guarantees”.

Peace in Ukraine thus remains elusive, for now. The only tangible success is that whatever Trump imagines as the process to a peace agreement did not completely fall apart. But as this process unfolds, its progress, if any, happens at a snail’s pace. Meanwhile the Russian war machine deployed against Ukraine grinds forward.

At the end of the day, yesterday’s events changed little. They merely confirmed that Putin keeps playing for time, that Trump is unwilling to put real pressure on him and that Ukraine and Europe have no effective leverage on either side.

Trump boldly claimed ahead of his meetings with Zelensky and the leaders of the coalition of the willing that he knew exactly what he was doing. That may be true – but it may also not be enough without knowing and understanding what his counterpart in the Kremlin is doing.

Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU’s Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.

– ref. Transatlantic unity at the White House disguises lack of progress towards just peace for Ukraine – https://theconversation.com/transatlantic-unity-at-the-white-house-disguises-lack-of-progress-towards-just-peace-for-ukraine-263353

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rory Wilson, Professor of Aquatic Biology and Sustainable Aquaculture, Swansea University

Poohsticks, the game in which Piglet and Winnie the Pooh throw sticks into the river from one side of a bridge, and then rush over to the other side to see whose stick appears first, is all about current flow. Disappointingly, neither Piglet nor Pooh mention fluid dynamics despite its pivotal importance in determining who won.

Unlike sticks, though, animals can respond to those flows. The movement of water and air – with their winds and currents – can affect flying and swimming animals profoundly. And as we recently discovered, penguins are far more tuned in to these dynamics than anyone realised.

Anyone who’s ever swum in the sea will know how cross-currents can drag you along the coast, even when you’re trying to swim straight in. Magellanic penguins, a South American penguin, face this challenge daily, but they appear to have found a clever solution.

Penguins can swim far from land but seem to know exactly where they are. More importantly, they seem to know how to get back to their breeding colonies, whether currents are confounding them or not.

To understand how they do this, our team – which included researchers from Argentina, Germany, Japan and the UK – fitted high-tech tracking tags to Magellanic penguins breeding in Argentina. These birds often forage up to 43 miles offshore, far beyond the range of visual landmarks. And it’s unlikely they’re using the seafloor as a map, as Magellanics rarely dive that deep.

The tech we placed on the penguins recorded some pivotal information. Global positioning systems (GPS) gave the birds’ positions when they were at the surface between dives. And trajectories underwater could be calculated using dead reckoning. This is what a car navigation system does when it goes into a tunnel – it starts with the last GPS position and uses vectors on the car heading and speed to work out the path.

Our team did this with the penguins’ data, calculating the underwater pathways for every second of their one to three day trips. We then integrated this with the currents. This was no simple undertaking because currents change dramatically over the tidal cycle and vary with position.

So what could the penguins do in such a dynamic environment? One option (assuming they somehow knew both where they were and where home was) would be to head straight for the colony. But doing this would often have meant swimming against strong currents, sometimes of up to 2 metres per second (around 4.5mph). That’s about the same speed as an Olympic swimmer.

Although penguins can cruise at that speed, going faster to beat the current would cost them a lot of extra energy.

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Read more:
Swimming in the sweet spot: how marine animals save energy on long journeys

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Interestingly, we found that during slack water, when the currents were trivial, the penguins headed directly home. So, somehow they knew where they were in relation to the colony. Theories about how animals might do this include them using magnetic field sensing, celestial cues, or even using smell to find their way but it’s a mysterious and hotly debated topic among experts.

When the current was strong, the penguins generally aimed in the right direction to return home. But they often combined this with swimming in the same general direction as the current, which typically flowed across the direct line to the nest. So, some birds appeared set to overshoot the colony, probably landing further down the coast.

However, the yin and yang of tidal currents means that what flows one way on the rising tide reverses on the ebb. The penguins seemed to understand this. They swam roughly equivalent, but mirror-imaged, trajectories on both incoming and outgoing tides, according to the direction of the current.

This strategy effectively cancels out potential overshoots over the course of a tidal cycle. Once they were close enough to the colony, the penguins launched into a final burst of power and made a direct line for home. This strategy increases the length of the path to get home. But it’s easy travelling since much of the work to move is done by the current and the increased distance gives the penguins opportunities to find prey.

Navigational experts

This suggests that Magellanic penguins can detect both the direction and speed of ocean currents. While some theories propose that animals sense small-scale turbulence to gauge flow, the mechanisms remain poorly understood.

Still, what these penguins manage is remarkable. It’s a kind of navigational party trick that helps ensure they return reliably to feed their chicks, seemingly untroubled by shifting currents.

Ocean and air circulation patterns are becoming more chaotic with climate change. If penguins, and other marine animals, can keep navigating our waters with skill and instinct, it’s one small piece of good news in a rapidly changing world.

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

– ref. Going with the flow: how penguins use tides to travel and hunt – https://theconversation.com/going-with-the-flow-how-penguins-use-tides-to-travel-and-hunt-262267

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sarah Corbett, Lecturer in Creative Writing, Lancaster University

In William Blake’s painting The Ghost of a Flea (1820) a huge muscled figure fills the frame. He steps forward, the right side of his body towards the viewer. In one outstretched hand he holds a bleeding bowl (used to catch the blood released during bloodletting) made from an acorn. In the other, a curved thorn stands in for a knife. His tongue protrudes from between his teeth and his eyes bulge from his head. His ears are pointed with frills, or gills, almost reptilian.

White paint dots his eye, so that he appears to be both looking ahead and looking at us. He is stood on a stage between curtains with a backdrop of stars, one falling in a blaze of light. He is at once light and heavy, balanced on his toes as if he is engaged in a dance, or creeping towards his victim.

Painted in thick brown tempera (a pigment bound in water and egg, or oil and egg) and cracked with age, it is gold leaf that gives the painting its light. It’s in the creature’s muscles, the stars that fall behind him, the rim of the acorn bowl, the curtains he parts with his bulk and the boards of the stage that break into undulations at his step. The whole effect is one of movement, and of a creature occupying a space that is both vast and framed. But the painting is tiny – a rectangular hardwood panel measuring only 8.42 by 6.23 inches.

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This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

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The Ghost of the Flea is a development of an original sketch from a group of visionary heads (chalk and pencil drawings of historical and mythical characters seen in visions) that Blake had drawn for watercolour artist and astrologer John Varley. Blake claimed to have seen and spoken with spirits since he was a child and in a series of late night seances, Varley persuaded Blake to draw the images of these visions to illustrate his book, Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828).

My poem of the same title, in my 2018 collection, A Perfect Mirror, recalls Blake’s vision of the flea’s ghost as a way of writing about a series of terrifying experiences I had as a child. Blake’s monstrous “ghost” is the perfect embodiment of a horror I could neither name nor give shape to for many years: “The corner of the bedroom housed him / gigantic in a speck of dust.”

These experiences, triggered by trauma, involved a level of disassociation where I would lose all sense of scale, my body in space becoming both impossibly tiny and horrifically vast: “at once huge / and far away, immensely tiny and close.”

Blake’s painting captures the paradox of this disembodiment. The flea’s ghost is not what we expect of the tiniest of creatures, but instead expresses the flea’s innermost essence.

I grew up during the cold war, when the threat of nuclear annihilation was close at hand. This threat affected me deeply. My sense of horror was not only a personal one, but one that stretched to imagining the millions of souls that would be released from their bodies by nuclear catastrophe. In my poem, the white eyes of the flea’s apparition become “soft white pods of spider nests / where the million bodies might / any minute come rushing”.

While acknowledging the horror and giving it form, the poem self-consciously steps back from it. Now I am the poet, looking back on the experience and framing it through art. The process of writing, or any other artistic process, is only therapeutic in how far writing (or painting) is able to distance the traumatic experience from the writer.

The artist or writer does this through the process of shaping, crafting, rewriting and editing. The very act of “framing” draws attention to the artistic process. As Blake “frames” his monster in paint between draped curtains on the tiny hardwood panel I, the poet, frame and shape the frightening memories and images in lines and stanzas. This is the “stage” whereby experience is transmuted through the artifice of the painting or poem.

Images are central to this process in poetry and in visual art, but it is often in visual art that these images are more readily available. Powerful visual images can work like dreams, coding meaning and experience in ways that reach the subconscious mind and impart understanding that might otherwise stay hidden. Without needing to fully articulate an experience, it must be “proved upon our pulse”, as the poet John Keats put it.

This is only one of the reasons I am drawn to ekphrastic writing (writing that describes another art form). To my mind, the purpose of ekphrasis goes far beyond this. The poem must do more than simply recreate or describe the work of art – it should be a conversation between art forms that can range from discussing to expanding, or stepping off from the ideas and motifs the original works evoke. Most importantly, ekphrastic work should not only be a synthesis of the original and of new ideas and thinking, but a new work of art that stands in its own right.

My intention in my poem The Ghost of a Flea was to hold such a conversation with Blake through his painting, The Ghost of a Flea. Blake is a poet and artist who speaks profoundly to my own personal and artistic experience – and whose work remains a well of inspiration and encouragement.

Beyond the canon

As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Sarah Corbett’s suggestion:

An image of the doomsday clock opens Laurie Anderson’s artwork, the “opera” Ark, which blends song and story with images in a three-hour essay about the apocalypse.

As a child, I would “see” the doomsday clock on my bedroom wall, counting me down to my own destruction. I had to count back from 100 to hold in balance the second hand of the clock that threatened to strike the hour of midnight. At the last moment I would find the courage to escape from my room, and the nightmare would vanish, only to return the next evening.

Despite the multiple threats humanity now faces, from nuclear war to AI to climate collapse, Anderson’s performance looks for ways to bring us together in a collective healing. I found poetry – or perhaps, more accurately, poetry found me. The function of art is not only to awaken us to the truths around us, but to give us ways to re-imagine our future.

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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Sarah Corbett received funidng from the AHRC for Doctoral study, 2007 – 10

– ref. William Blake’s painting The Ghost of a Flea speaks to processing childhood trauma – https://theconversation.com/william-blakes-painting-the-ghost-of-a-flea-speaks-to-processing-childhood-trauma-234131

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Adam Smith, Senior Consultant, Universal Impact, The Conversation

Modern warfare is high-tech, violent and often incomprehensible. It is also widespread with one in eight people globally exposed to conflict last year.

The shocking images which daily fill news reports and social media feeds can leave us feeling confused and helpless. But researchers can at least offer context to help us better understand these turbulent times.

This was the motivation behind a recent series of events organised by the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF), which The Conversation UK works with via its subsidiary Universal Impact. And a common theme was the argument that imperialism laid the foundations for many contemporary power struggles.

In these lectures on decolonisation, Martin Thomas, Julia Laite and Adam Hanieh detailed how the world we know today was shaped by the rise of empire.

For centuries, the world’s wealthiest nations forcibly acquired territory and access to natural resources, not least oil.

Adam Hanieh, Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at the University of Exeter, explained how oil propelled the allies to victory in the First and Second World Wars. Not just by fuelling their militaries but also as the raw material behind the petrochemicals essential for developing the atomic bomb.

Indeed, as Hanieh revealed, the biggest individual institutional consumer of oil remains the US military. And yet its emissions were neither counted in the Kyoto Protocol nor the Paris Agreement.

To ensure ongoing control over oil supplies, Hanieh told how the US has forged connections in the Middle East, establishing two pillars of “influence and domination”: Israel on one side and the Gulf States, and particularly Saudi Arabia, on the other.

He said that the Middle East is one of the world’s biggest importers of arms, mainly from the US, so “petrodollar wealth is recirculating into American markets and American war making companies”.

“The centrality of both war making and the ways our lives are run through global finance gives the Middle East a central role in American power globally,” Hanieh said.

“One of the root causes of conflict, of violence, is the kind of deep ways in which global power depends upon the Middle East and controlling and building alliances with those states.”

According to Martin Thomas, this global financial order has thwarted many aspirations of the former colonies which fought for self-determination after the Second World War.

Thomas, Professor of Imperial History at the University of Exeter, explained how many newly independent countries were embroiled in “Cold War rivalries which condemned third world states to subservience to the rich world’s economic demands”.

Thomas views the Soviet Union as “undoubtedly an empire”. He argued that following its fall, Russia’s governing elite was unable to “come to terms with the reality of a decolonising world”. Consequently, it is now waging a “war of imperialism” in Ukraine.

“Central to President Putin’s claims is the fact that in his, or in the Russian leadership’s, world view Ukraine is not an authentic nation state that self-determination could legitimately apply to,” Thomas said.

“I don’t accept that. I don’t think most Western governments accept that. And therefore I do see this as, crudely put, imperial bullying with dreadful human consequences.”

Ukraine’s rare mineral reserves have been at the centre of the war, as a reason for both the Russian invasion, as well as the involvement of the United States as a self-styled peacemaker. Indeed, if there’s a consistent theme running through the history of colonialism it is this struggle over natural resources.

Another example is Newfoundland where, as Julia Laite, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, explained, cod was another prized commodity of empire. This unfashionable but extremely profitable product provided, in its dried salted form, one of the main food sources for enslaved people working on plantations.

Laite revealed how Newfoundland — which became England’s “very first transatlantic colonial possession” in 1583 — was one of the earliest places “to experience the environmental cost of this avarice”.

It was also the site of one of the most “totalising destructions of an indigenous culture in British imperial history” with Laite explaining how indigenous culture of the Beothuk people was destroyed by the “particular brand of negligent extractive colonialism” practised in Newfoundland.

Laite told the story of Shanawdithit, the final known living member of the Beothuk, and how her artwork is the last remaining first-hand account of their history and culture.

“Shanawdithit’s story is also the story of these imperial entanglements, the violence and the greed that underwrote them, and the price that people and the planet paid.

“She single-handedly ensured the survivance – however fragile and slight – of an entire culture of people. She reminds us of what an act of hope it is to tell a story, even at the end of the world.”

The ISRF’s mission is to find new solutions to some of today’s most pressing social issues.

Few things seem more pressing than halting the bloodshed in Ukraine, Palestine and Sudan. But while peace currently seems unimaginable – the end of empire once seemed unimaginable, too.

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– ref. From oil to cod – ISRF event explores what yesterday’s empires reveal about today’s wars – https://theconversation.com/from-oil-to-cod-isrf-event-explores-what-yesterdays-empires-reveal-about-todays-wars-263072

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Barbara Cooke, Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer in English, Loughborough University

It’s that time of year again. Flight costs are up, schools are out, and anyone lucky enough to afford a break is heading – literally or metaphorically – for the hills. Some might harbour visions of a beautiful stranger alone in a beach or bar, someone who takes a keen interest in them, gives them the best two weeks of their lives then disappears into the sunset. This is probably what most of us imagine when we think of a holiday romance: something magical and fleeting, but removed from everyday life.

One writer, however, proved in novel after novel that a change of scene can also inspire a lasting change of mind. It might shake the blinkered out of an unhelpful way of seeing the world, or reveal hidden depths in overlooked friends and acquaintances. It can take people away from those who do not appreciate them, and introduce them into new communities in which they thrive.

Jane Austen’s heroines are a nomadic bunch, by and large. The author is known for psychological development, but the emotional and educational progress of her romantic plot lines is almost always kick-started by a series of more literal journeys. Movements between home, “seasons” in the city and prolonged visits to family and friends map out narrative progress towards love.

Following the footsteps of one Austen protagonist, Anne Elliot of Persuasion (1817), reveals how the different narrative locations she inhabits present different opportunities for her to grow in confidence and reclaim a love that she thought lost forever. At the same time, they also enable Frederick Wentworth, her erstwhile fiancé, to reconsider his false assumptions about her and see her in a more truthful (not to mention more flattering) light.

It’s something I explore in my soon-to-be-published book, Love and Landscape: Iconic Meeting Places in Classic and Contemporary Literature.

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This article is part of a series commemorating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Despite having published only six books, she is one of the best-known authors in history. These articles explore the legacy and life of this incredible writer.

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When we meet Anne at the beginning of Persuasion, she clearly needs to get out more. She is 26 and unmarried, having been convinced at 19 by her snobbish family to end her engagement to Wentworth.

Now, she is unloved and overlooked by her father and elder sister Elizabeth and, when her family’s profligate spending means they must rent out their home and seek cheaper accommodation, it is a blessing in disguise for Anne.

She goes first to visit her other, married sister in the Somerset village of Uppercross. Mary is as self-centred as Elizabeth and their father, but does at least love and appreciate Anne. Mary’s sisters-in-law, Louisa and Henrietta Musgrove, live nearby with their parents and are fond of her too. Crucially, this kinder branch of Anne’s family is also connected to the now-Captain Wentworth, who has made a good career for himself in the Napoleonic wars and is warmly welcomed into their circle.

Anne’s first move having brought her into better company, she then makes a second journey, with this group, to the coastal town of Lyme Regis. Here, the fresh sea air restores her faded youth, and Wentworth is gratifyingly present when a passing stranger looks at her “with a degree of earnest admiration”.

Anne however is more than a pretty face, and her stay at Lyme also allows her to show off her pragmatism and good judgment when Louisa is knocked unconscious by a bad fall. Wentworth, who blames himself for the accident, benefits directly from Anne’s taking charge of the situation.

Their last move, to Bath, shows the nascent couple carving out small opportunities for intimacy among crowded ballrooms and claustrophobic family gatherings.

When they are finally able confirm their mutual affection, they engineer a retreat to a gravel walk which is only “comparatively quiet and retired”, and count on their fellow walkers being too wrapped up in their own business to pay them much attention.

In Northanger Abbey (1817), Austen’s most satirical novel, it is observed that “if adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad”. In Persuasion, Anne’s particular adventures bring her into a more supportive community, reinvigorate her youth and give her the chance to prove her worth.

In Austen’s footsteps

Over the past two centuries, a huge variety of writers have forged their own romantic plot lines from paths first cut by Anne Elliot, Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey and Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice (1813).

For those whose stories feature marginalised characters, for example, the value of a sympathetic and supportive community becomes even more important. So it is that author Sarah Waters imaginatively reconstructs pockets of Victorian London in Tipping the Velvet (1998) in which queer characters are visible and able to celebrate their love. The South London barbershops and jazz clubs of Open Water (2022) offer a similar respite for Caleb Azumah Nelson’s young Black lovers, who crave spaces in which they can be themselves away from the prejudices and false assumptions of mainstream society.

Jane Austen’s novels perform a kind of romantic alchemy in which travel is the catalyst. From Lyme to Bath, Hertfordshire to the Peak District, her protagonists move through a holiday atmosphere, but the transformations they undergo along the way are anything but fleeting. There might be a depressing uniformity in marriage as the inevitable, final destination, but we are left in no doubt that these are marriages – like Austen’s legacy – are built to last.

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

– ref. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, respite is a key ingredient for romance – https://theconversation.com/in-jane-austens-persuasion-respite-is-a-key-ingredient-for-romance-263070

Source: The Conversation – UK – By James Clark, Professor of Medieval History, University of Exeter

England has entered its fourth heatwave of 2025. Historical comparisons for our current weather situation have seemed to beach at 1976.

Seared into the memory of many Britons over 55, that was the year when temperatures stuck at 30 degrees and there was no rain for nearly 50 days in a row. As a result, the UK government was forced to ration water. But Britain’s longest dry spell of the 20th century was not the worst for the wider continent.

For heat intensity and human cost across Europe we need to return to 2003. Back further, the heat and drought of 1911 easily eclipsed 1976 for European impact and before that 1757. And, above all, 1540, when there was no rainfall for almost the entire year. German chroniclers recorded that it was possible to walk across the Rhine.

Reaching further into the medieval past, the North Atlantic region passed through a climate anomaly between the 10th and 13th centuries. Research temperatures rose to around one degree celsius above the level that was typical at the turn of the 21st century.

Medieval Europeans became accustomed to hot, dry seasons – and they knew how to endure them.

Sadly, their experience cannot set us on a different course but it may have something to teach us about how to survive. Researchers are beginning to recognise that there are lessons for our own sustainability in the middle ages’ management of the environment, agriculture and food production. The same may be true in how they lived and worked under the sun.

Here are six tips from the middle ages to beat the heat:

1. Work flexibly

In June, July and August, start work at the first light of dawn, advised the 14th-century shepherd, Jehan de Brie, author of Le Bon Berger (The Good Shepherd).

In fact, all three medieval estates – those who worked, prayed and fought – compressed their tasks to the cooler morning hours in the long summer days. Clergy adapted their services to fit a shorter night and longer day and after Corpus Christi (June) their worship year wound down. Knighthood curbed its taste for tournaments. They would never lift a lance in August.

2. Wear the right hat

Although hardly a habit unique to the middle ages, it is only in the past half-century or so that the hat has lost its status as a staple, everyday item.

Hats were worn daily for practical as well as social reasons in European society.

Medieval images, manuscript illuminations, murals and panel paintings, gesture at the endless variety of shaped hats, soft caps and hoods they reached for as a matter of course. For high summer, the half-metre brim of a hat like the Swedish Lappvattnett hat may have been the norm.

3. Eat to lower body temperature

In the unrefrigerated world of the middle ages, food could still be cool. Salad leaves (known then as salat) were preferred because they were palatable and digestable in the heat.

Fish and meat dishes were cooled down for the season by being doused with verjuice (pressed, unripe grapes), vinegar and perhaps even pomegranate juice.

4. Try wild swimming

Swimming was an increasingly common, communal recreation in later medieval Europe. When monasteries allowed their inmates periods of downtime, besides blood-letting, they encouraged river and sea swimming for health, hygiene and general fitness.

In late medieval European cities crowded with tens of thousands, the breadth and depth of the Danube, Rhine, Seine and Tiber were an essential lifeline. The medieval theologian Everard Digby’s manual on the Art of Swimming, first published in 1587, described what may have long been a common sight – leaping and diving through the water “just like the summer’s roach”.

5. Use aftersun

Look after those burns. The monks of Citeaux Abbey were chronicled gathering herbs and roots in summer to salve their “perished skin”.

A 10th-century book of remedies, Bald’s Leechbook , recommended stalks of ivy sauteed in butter to apply to burns. Later, the recommendation was rosewater distilled from the flower’s petals.

Today we would say a bottle of aftersun or aloe gel will do.

6. Flee

When Emperor Charles V (king of Sicily and Naples from 1516 to 1554) found himself in a sweltering Rome with his young children, who were struggling in the rising temperatures, he made the household leave the city. High society generally left city palazzos to go up country and into shadier climes.

The author Giovanni Boccaccio recalled in his Decameron how the “dames of the city fly off” in summer to their country houses. King Richard II
(1377 until 1399) of England built a summer house at Sheen Palace (now Richmond palace) on the banks of the Thames to escape the close climate of the capital.

Even round-the-clock monastic institutions sometimes broke up and decamped to outlying country priories. Of course, it was rarely an option for those beneath them on the social scale.

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Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

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James Clark 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. Six tips from the middle ages on how to beat the summer heat – https://theconversation.com/six-tips-from-the-middle-ages-on-how-to-beat-the-summer-heat-263290

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Kartikeya Walia, Lecturer, Department of Engineering, Nottingham Trent University

You might have noticed that humanoid robots are having a bit of a moment. From Tesla’s Optimus to Figure AI’s Figure 02,
these machines are no longer just science fiction – they’re walking, and in some cases, cartwheeling into the real world.

Now China’s Unitree Robotics, best known for its nimble quadruped robots, has unveiled something that’s turning heads: the Unitree R1.

For one thing, it’s a humanoid robot priced at under US$6,000 (£4,400). That’s not pocket change, but it’s orders of magnitude cheaper than most robots in its class, which can run into tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The R1 packs serious mobility, sensors and AI potential into a package that could fit in a university lab, a workspace – or even, if you’re adventurous, your living room.

What can the R1 do?

The Unitree R1 is around 1.2 metres tall and weighs roughly 25kg (similar to a packed suitcase). This makes it compact and relatively easy to move around. It’s equipped with 24 to 26 degrees of freedom (think of these as “joints” that allow it to bend, twist and rotate), giving it a surprisingly human-like range of motion. It can walk, squat, wave, balance, kick and – according to Unitree’s own demos – pull off athletic tricks like cartwheels.

It’s loaded with sensors: cameras to see in 3D, microphones to hear where sounds
are coming from, and wireless connections to talk to other devices. Its built-in
computer can handle both what it sees and hears at the same time, and you can
even give it extra computing power if you buy Nvidia’s Jetson Orin, a high-performance computer often used in AI projects which retails for about £180. It’s like adding a “turbo boost” that lets the robot handle more demanding tasks such as advanced image recognition, real-time decision-making or running complex software like real-time 3D graphics platform Unreal Engine.

Battery life is about an hour, with a quick-release system that lets you swap in a
fresh battery. That’s not a full day’s work, but it’s enough for short bursts of training, testing or demonstration. At least for most research teams, that’s plenty.

Here’s the thing: while the R1’s hardware is impressive, the software is still finding its feet. For example, Unitree’s website says that users need to “understand the limitations” of humanoid robots before making a purchase, reflecting constraints to the robot’s autonomy. This is not unique to Unitree; it’s the state of the humanoid robotics field as a whole. The challenge isn’t just making a robot move; it’s making it understand, adapt and interact safely in unpredictable real-world environments.

Right now, much of what we see in humanoid demos is either scripted routines or
teleoperation (remote control). But in research labs, there’s exciting work happening to bridge that gap – from task-specific AI such as teaching a robot to sort packages, to fundamental skills like maintaining balance, responding to uneven terrain, and fine-tuning finger dexterity for delicate object handling.

Humanoid robots like the R1 provide a platform where all these capabilities can be
tested in one body. The hardware says: “I can do it.” The software still has to figure out how.

Why a humanoid form?

Why is it necessary to have humanoid robots at all? Why not just make machines purpose-built for specific tasks? The truth is, there’s a strong argument for both approaches. The humanoid form has a big advantage in social acceptance. People are used to seeing other humans, so a machine with two arms, two legs and a head tends to feel more relatable than a box on wheels or an industrial arm.

In settings like elderly care, hospitality or public assistance, a humanoid robot might be easier for people to interact with – especially if it can use gestures, facial cues or natural conversation.

On the practical side, humanoids are designed to operate in environments built for
humans – climbing stairs, opening doors, using tools. In theory, this means you don’t have to rebuild your home, office or factory for these robots to work there.

But are they always the most practical solution? Not necessarily. A robot with wheels can be faster and more energy-efficient on flat surfaces. A specialised arm can be stronger and more precise in a factory. Humanoids often sacrifice peak efficiency for versatility and familiarity. For many applications, that trade off might be worth it. For others, maybe not.

The Unitree R1 isn’t about replacing people – it’s about making humanoid robotics
more accessible. By lowering costs, it opens the door for universities, small
companies and even hobbyists to explore everything from AI vision and balance
control to dexterous hand movements and creative performances.

Imagine students developing a robot that can walk around a care home, carrying out
small helpful tasks. Or a research team teaching it to work alongside humans in a warehouse without needing elaborate safety cages to protect the humans. Or even artists and performers using it to take part in a show.

The whole robotics community is in a golden age of experimentation. Different AI modes are being tested – some focused on single, repetitive tasks;
others on general adaptability. Some robots are learning to squat and maintain
balance under sudden pushes. Others are developing precise finger movements for
tool use. It’s a worldwide collaborative puzzle, and humanoids like the R1 give
researchers a flexible piece to work with.

For now, the R1 is not “the robot that will change everything.” But it’s a signpost
pointing toward a future where robots like it are much more common, much more
capable, and perhaps … a little more human.

Kartikeya Walia 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. A humanoid robot is now on sale for under US$6,000 – what can you do with it? – https://theconversation.com/a-humanoid-robot-is-now-on-sale-for-under-us-6-000-what-can-you-do-with-it-262183