Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Beverley O’Hara, Lecturer in Nutrition, Leeds Beckett University

Since Wegovy received approval as a weight loss treatment in 2021, there has been huge demand for GLP-1 drugs. These drugs reduce hunger and suppress the “food noise” that can make it difficult to lose weight.

But while these drugs have been a gamechanger for many who have struggle to lose weight, it wasn’t long before the backlash against them started. In response, high-profile celebrities such as Serena Williams have opened up about using these drugs in the hopes that it would counter the rising stigma of using them.

Sadly, it’s probably going to take more than celebrity endorsement to change the way society views people who are overweight. Weight-loss drug stigma is just the latest form of “fatphobia”.

Weight and obesity have long been stigmatised in our society. Obesity is even considered by some to be a moral failing, rather than a result of an person’s unique biology interacting with complex societal and environmental forces. This misconception has contributed to weight stigma and weight bias, where people may hold negative attitudes towards people who are overweight and may even discriminate against them.

While popular initiatives in recent years have aimed to advocate for the acceptance of all bodies regardless of size (such as the body positivity movement), stigma against larger bodies is still the norm, as our work has shown.

Earlier this year, we conducted research on perceptions of health and weight. As part of our survey, we asked 143 participants to describe photos of adults of varying body weights. These photos depicted people engaging in so-called “healthy” and “unhealthy” behaviour – such as exercising or lying on a couch.

The results were stark. Photos of slender people elicited more friendly or warm comments from participants. However, photos of people with obesity were consistently described using negative and stigmatising language, such as “lazy”, “dirty”, “slobbish” and “unappealing”.

The message was clear. You’re only as healthy and desirable as your body size. Even though body size is not a good indicator of metabolic health, our work shows that slimness is still highly valued and seen as a marker of being healthy – regardless of a person’s actual health status.

Although most participants understood that the causes of obesity are complex and not just due to lifestyle choices, this insight did not affect their attitudes towards people with obesity. Weight bias still appears to be a permissible form of discrimination to some.

With the use of weight loss drugs becoming increasingly more common, one research team hypothesised that these drugs might change attitudes towards obesity – helping our society see that weight is more related to biology than willpower. They conducted two surveys to uncover whether weight loss drugs had any effect on reducing weight bias.

The results from that survey showed that nothing has changed when it comes to weight stigma. Participants overwhelmingly thought that obesity is controllable through willpower – and that the use of weight loss drugs is unfair and the “easy way out”.

Judging people for taking weight loss drugs is merely a new variation of weight stigma. People are first negatively judged for being overweight in the first place – but then judged again for undergoing the “wrong sort” of treatment.

Although significant and long-lasting weight loss through behavioural changes alone is extremely rare, taking weight loss drugs is seen by some as “cheating”.

What people want to see is “good old-fashioned hard work”. Research shows that people are more likely to see someone in a negative light if they don’t think that person is putting in the effort to lose weight.

The “right way” is often thought of as exercising willpower, being more physically active and eating less. Using weight-loss drugs is seen by some as evidence that people with obesity are “too weak” or “too lazy” to lose weight in a way that is perceived as being correct.

The harm of GLP-1 stigma

Using a GLP-1 drug as a weight loss method is judged more harshly than losing weight through traditional methods.

Fear of this negative judgement is reportedly driving some users to take GLP-1 drugs in secret, even hiding their use from loved ones.

We currently don’t know the full scale and effect of weight loss drug stigma. It’s possible that it could deter people from seeking treatment with these medications or even increase social isolation as users withdraw for fear of being judged.

Weight stigma is already harmful to physical and psychological health – leading to poorer wellbeing and even depressive symptoms. The burden of keeping use of these drugs private could further increase risk of these harms.

Worryingly, it could even stop people from seeking medical attention for any side-effects they may experience, whether that’s mild gastrointestinal problems to rare, potentially severe complications such as thyroid tumours, severe gastrointestinal complications and a rare eye condition that may result in vision loss.

People using weight-loss drugs must also navigate the potential psychological aspects of GLP-1 treatment. Alongside negative judgement of taking the drugs, there may be anxiety about supply and affordability, the spectre of weight regain and an altered relationship with food.

It’s darkly ironic that, despite the increased awareness and use of GLP-1 drugs in our society, weight stigma is still so prevalent. The social, emotional and physical effects of using these drugs amounts to a costly commitment and is not, in fact, an “easy way out”.

Beverley O’Hara is affiliated with The Association for the Study of Obesity.

Jordan Beaumont receives funding from NIHR. He is affiliated with the Association for the Study of Obesity.

– ref. Weight loss drug stigma shows society still holds negative attitudes towards body weight and obesity – https://theconversation.com/weight-loss-drug-stigma-shows-society-still-holds-negative-attitudes-towards-body-weight-and-obesity-265019

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Bran Nicol, Professor of English, University of Surrey

Awarding the Nobel prize for literature to László Krasznahorkai today, the Swedish Academy commended the author’s “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”. But in itself their decision is also a commitment to the value of serious and intellectual writing in an age characterised by immediacy, the distractions of digital culture and the entertainment industry.

Krasznahorkai was first propelled into literary fame in Hungary, his home country, with his first novel Satantango (1985), a novel about a squalid, rain-soaked village visited by a mysterious man. He could be a prophet, Satan or merely a con man.

This book established the coordinates for the subsequent series of ambitious novels that cemented Krasznahorkai’s status as one of the great contemporary global writers.

The Melancholy of Resistance (2019) features a mysterious, charismatic figure, the Prince, who brings a rebellious carnival to a small community and tears it apart. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016) tells of an eccentric aristocrat returning to Hungary after exile in Argentina.

He is greeted by the townspeople as a great benefactor who will enrich the town. Little do they know he has returned saddled with a crippling gambling debt.

The 2014 work Herscht 07769 centres on a baker in a neglected eastern German town who is drawn into the world of a cleaning company, which is a front for a neo-Nazi gang.

Krasznahorkai’s work began to be read more widely in the 2000s, following English translations of The Melancholy of Resistance and War and War (1999). More global fame came when he was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2015 and the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019 (for Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming).

The epithets which tend to be applied to his fiction include “hopeless”, “obsessive”, “unsettling” and “intense”. He was famously labelled, in a blurb for his book The Melancholy of Resistance, by the cultural critic Susan Sontag as the “contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse”.

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Read more:
Three novels by Nobel winner Han Kang that explain the fragile nature of South Korea

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More precisely, though, I would say that there are three distinctive features about Krasznahorkai’s writing. There’s his ability to depict social disintegration, often hastened by the influence on a community of mysterious individuals or companies.

Then there’s how he sustains a mood of dread in his fiction – a mood which lends itself to a fear of living under authoritarianism without ever being directly allegorical. This is captured powerfully in the section of his 2013 book The World Goes On entitled “How Lovely”.

This story imagines a lecture series where speakers from all over the world take their turn giving talks, only for one to give three lectures: the first by choice, the second reluctantly, after an invitation to return, and the third because he has been imprisoned in the lecture theatre.

The third distinctive feature is the innovation and complexity of his writing. Herscht 07769 contains only a single full stop in 400 pages. The World Goes On arranges its 17 stories in a Fibonacci sequence – the mathematical sequence in which each element is the sum of the two elements that precede it.

Satantango (made into a seven-hour film by his collaborator Béla Tarr) has a chapter that focuses on two characters who are not identified for nine pages. The experience of reading Krasznahorkai can feel as disorienting and alienating as the situations his characters face.

But this uncompromising literary quality, and the way it still captures the tenor of our times, is what I love about Krasznahorkai’s work. The Nobel committee’s bio-bibliography of the author references, as many critics have done, the fact that he belongs to the great “central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard”.

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Read more:
Why you should read the Hungarian master of the apocalypse

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Krasznahorkai’s is fundamentally a modernist kind of writing, one which confronts us with a world without meaning, yet still affirms its faith in beauty and art. The very writing itself is proof of this faith, because it shows that it is possible to think deeply about what matters and to articulate this.

Appropriately enough for a writer famous for his sentences, the Nobel committee’s reference to Krasznahorkai’s capacity to reaffirm the power of art “in the midst of apocalyptic terror” is an intriguingly artful piece of phrasing.

Krasznahorkai’s fiction does not really depict terror, but specialises in the apprehension of future breakdown. This suggests that the “apocalyptic terror” is not within his fiction but is the broader context for it – and contemporary literature itself. Krasznahorkai demonstrates that art can counter this.

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Bran Nicol 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. László Krasznahorkai wins Nobel prize for literature – the Hungarian novelist’s grand tales of alienation speak to our times – https://theconversation.com/laszlo-krasznahorkai-wins-nobel-prize-for-literature-the-hungarian-novelists-grand-tales-of-alienation-speak-to-our-times-267183

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Clodagh Toomey, Physiotherapist and Associate Professor, School of Allied Health, University of Limerick

Stiff knees, aching hips and the slow grind of chronic joint pain are often accepted as an unavoidable part of getting older. But while osteoarthritis is the world’s most common joint disease, experts say the way we treat and prevent it is badly out of step with the evidence.

The best medicine isn’t found in a pill bottle or an operating theatre – it’s movement. Yet across countries and health systems, too few patients are being guided toward the one therapy proven to protect their joints and ease their pain: exercise.

Exercise is one of the most effective treatments for chronic, disabling joint conditions such as osteoarthritis. Yet very few patients actually receive it.

Research across health systems in Ireland, the UK, Norway and the United States shows the same pattern: fewer than half of people with osteoarthritis are referred to exercise or physiotherapy by their primary care provider. More than 60% are given treatments that guidelines do not recommend, and around 40% are sent to a surgeon before non-surgical options have even been tried.

To understand why those figures are so troubling, it helps to understand what exercise does for joints. Osteoarthritis is by far the most common form of arthritis, already affecting more than 595 million people worldwide.

According to a global study in The Lancet, that number could approach one billion by 2050. Longer life expectancy, increasingly sedentary lifestyles and rising numbers of overweight or obese people are driving the trend.

Yet people who exercise regularly are physically and biologically protecting themselves from developing the disease and from suffering its worst effects.

The cartilage that covers the ends of our bones is a tough, protective layer with no blood supply of its own. It relies on movement.

Like a sponge, cartilage is compressed when we walk or load a joint, squeezing fluid out and then drawing fresh nutrients back in. Each step allows nutrients and natural lubricants to circulate and maintain joint health.

That is why the old idea of osteoarthritis as simple “wear and tear” is misleading. Joints are not car tyres that inevitably grind down.

Osteoarthritis is better understood as a long process of wear and repair in which regular movement and exercise are critical to healing and to the health of the entire joint.

A disease of the whole joint

We now know osteoarthritis is a whole-joint disease. It affects the joint fluid, the underlying bone, the ligaments, the surrounding muscles and even the nerves that support movement.

Therapeutic exercise targets all these elements. Muscle weakness, for instance, is one of the earliest signs of osteoarthritis and can be improved with resistance training. There is strong evidence that muscle weakness increases the risk of both developing the disease and seeing it progress.

Nerve and muscle control can also be trained through neuromuscular exercise programmes such as GLA:D® (Good Life with osteoArthritis: Denmark) for hip and knee osteoarthritis. Usually delivered in supervised group sessions by physiotherapists, these programmes focus on movement quality, balance and strength to improve joint stability and rebuild confidence.

Significant improvements in pain, joint function and quality of life have been recorded for up to 12 months after completing the programme.

Exercise is good medicine for the whole body: it has documented benefits across more than 26 chronic diseases. In osteoarthritis, it helps not only by strengthening cartilage and muscle but also by tackling the inflammation, metabolic changes and hormonal shifts that drive the disease.

Obesity is a major risk factor for osteoarthritis, and not merely because of the extra mechanical load on joints. High levels of inflammatory molecules in the blood and in joint tissues can degrade cartilage and accelerate disease.

For osteoarthritis, regular activity can counter this at a molecular level, lowering inflammatory markers, limiting cell damage and even altering gene expression.

Exercise first, surgery later

Currently there are no drugs that modify the course of osteoarthritis. Joint replacement surgery can be life-changing for some people, but it is major surgery and does not succeed for everyone.

Exercise should be tried first and continued throughout every stage of the disease. It carries far fewer side effects and brings many additional health benefits.

Osteoarthritis is not simply a matter of “worn out” joints. It is shaped by muscle strength, inflammation, metabolism and lifestyle.

Regular, targeted exercise addresses many of these factors at once – helping to protect cartilage, strengthen the whole joint and improve overall health. Before considering surgery, movement itself remains one of the most powerful treatments we have.

Clodagh Toomey receives funding from the Health Research Board (Ireland) for research in the area of osteoarthritis. She is affiliated with non-profit initiative GLA:D(r) (Good Life with osteoArthritis Denmark).

– ref. Joint pain or osteoarthritis? Why exercise should be your first line of treatment – https://theconversation.com/joint-pain-or-osteoarthritis-why-exercise-should-be-your-first-line-of-treatment-260638

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.

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As the world mourns Jane Goodall, the pioneering chimpanzee scientist and campaigner who died last week aged 91, it’s worth asking what chimpanzees can still teach us about climate change. They not only have a few tricks for surviving a warming planet – they’ve also helped to cool it.

Most of the world’s 200,000 or so wild chimpanzees live in the huge rainforests of west and central Africa, the second largest in the world.

As recently as 2,500 years ago, much of this rainforest had withered away, broken into scattered fragments by a sudden lengthening of the dry season. Yet within five centuries, the forest had largely recovered.

Trees didn’t do this by themselves.

Chimpanzees, among other species, had acted as the forest’s “proto-gardeners”. That’s according to Alex Chepstow-Lusty, a paleoecologist then the University of Cambridge (now at the University of Sussex).

Chepstow-Lusty looked at the oil palm tree, which “demands a lot of light and so thrives in open areas or in the gaps created in forests when the canopy opens up rather than in the dense centre”. This means it often acts as a “‘pioneer species’ allowing the forest to regrow”.

But, he notes a problem: the oil palm’s large seeds are too heavy to be blown in the wind. “They therefore need to be dispersed in the poo of animals such as chimpanzees which are able to swallow the large seeds and for whom the bright orange flesh can be an important part of the diet. And this is how chimps and other seed-dispersers played a crucial role in regenerating Africa’s rainforests.”

Without chimpanzees, the forest would have taken far longer to recover – if it ever did. “Maybe we need to consider the true value of chimp poo, and those that produce it”, says Chepstow-Lusty.

But if chimpanzees once helped the planet heal itself, today that partnership is under strain.

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Read more:
Chimpanzees once helped African rainforests recover from a major collapse

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Adaptation written in their genes

Across Africa’s mix of forest and savanna, chimpanzees have evolved with their habitats. Harrison J. Ostridge of UCL Genetics Institute and his co-authors recently wrote about their work with a team who collected faecal samples from “hundreds of wild chimpanzees across 17 African countries”.

They found different populations have developed distinct adaptations: those in wetter regions have to survive infectious diseases, for instance, while others have to cope with life in hotter and drier open woodland.

This, they suggest, means chimpanzee populations across Africa are “not interchangeable”. Genetic diversity is typically a form of resilience, but as climate zones shift and habitats shrink, some chimpanzees may find themselves trapped in the wrong place. And while it takes thousands of years for genes to change, the climate is changing in decades.

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Read more:
Chimpanzee genes have changed over time to suit local conditions – new study

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Variable habits, variable behaviour

If DNA adapts over millennia, behaviour can adapt within a lifetime.

A team from UCL, Harvard and Liverpool John Moores wrote about their work compiling data from 144 wild chimpanzee communities across Africa’s forests and savanna. They found populations that had learned to dig wells, or to take refuge from extreme heat in caves. Some chimpanzee populations used all sorts of tools, while others barely used any.

The common thread was an adaptation to local circumstances. “Chimpanzees meet variable habitats with variable behaviour”, in their words.

This flexibility may help chimpanzees weather the next degree or two of climate breakdown. But behavioural diversity depends on a strong social life. Young chimps learn by watching others, by playing and imitating. And if that social culture is lost, so is some of their ability to adapt to climate change.

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Read more:
Chimpanzees in volatile habitats evolved to behave more flexibly – it could help them weather climate change

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A cultural collapse

That same UCL–John Moores team have documented a “cultural collapse” in chimpanzees. “The more that humans had disturbed an area”, they write, “the less behavioural variants are exhibited by nearby chimpanzees”. Animals are forced to forage in smaller groups, with less long distance communication through hoots or drumming on tree trunks. This “lowers the chance of learning socially from one another” and makes it harder to spread any culture.

Why does it matter, they ask, “if the species is gradually merging into a single cultural entity that stretches all the way from Senegal to Tanzania”? After all, most animals don’t have distinct cultures.

One reason is that a loss of social learning makes chimpanzees more vulnerable: “A loss of behavioural diversity [could compromise how they respond] to changes in food availability and how they adapt to climate change.”

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Read more:
A chimpanzee cultural collapse is underway, and it’s driven by humans

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Carrying on Goodall’s legacy

Jane Goodall bridged science and society in a way very few others have managed since. One of those few is Ben Garrod, a professor of evolutionary biology and science engagement at the University of East Anglia. A BBC television presenter and a primate scientist, he’s worked with Goodall and her foundation and says we need more Jane Goodalls.

“There will be countless ways we can carry on with Jane’s legacy”, he writes, “but one of the most powerful is to encourage more of us to make science accessible for all of us”.

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Read more:
Why we need more Jane Goodalls

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– ref. When chimps helped cool the planet – https://theconversation.com/when-chimps-helped-cool-the-planet-267043

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christina Wilkins, Lecturer in Film and Creative Writing, University of Birmingham

Shows about men still dominate our television screens. But the stories being told are starting to change, with more room for vulnerability and portrayals of male mental illness. These changes include explicit mentions of diagnostic categories and male characters with mental illnesses in the lead role.

In the last few years in the UK and the US, male-centred shows such as The Bear (2022-), Ted Lasso (2020-), Barry (2018-23), The Boys (2019-26), Succession (2018-23), Baby Reindeer (2024) and Slow Horses (2022-) have been hugely popular. It is telling that of these series, at least four explicitly deal with male mental illness.

While researching my new book, Male Mental Illness in Contemporary Culture (due out late 2025), I found that male mental illness is made much more explicit within the comedy genre, particularly in the UK.

For series in the US, male mental illness is more often used as a plot device rather than being the focus of the story itself. And even then, it may reinforce stereotypes. For example, the Netflix show Unstable (2023) focuses on Ellis (Rob Lowe) and his mental breakdown following the death of his wife. Very often his mental health struggle is presented as eccentricity and oddness, giving him an excuse to behave strangely rather than dealing with his experience.

These stereotypes emerge from the dynamics of the television industry, particularly in the US. Men historically outnumbered women in the industry three to one in US-produced television. Despite this improving in recent years to women taking 43% of the roles onscreen in US television, traces of the past remain. Much of the research focuses on US examples, with a gap around how men onscreen are presented in the UK.

With the overrepresentation of men, it might be assumed there is more variety of masculinity onscreen. However, research in 2017 into the depiction of men onscreen in the US has shown men often upholding old-fashioned ideals of masculinity, noting that the men on our screens are “likely to be shown as dominant and in the prime of their lives”.

For mental health and mental illness, this has an impact. Men’s expected roles in society conflict with their experience of mental illness.

Differences between cultures

There appears to be a difference in UK and US portrayals. In the US, recent series that are categorised as “about mental health” include Apple TV+’s Shrinking (from the team involved with Ted Lasso, another series that engages with male mental health) as well as Unstable.

While these shows are based on the idea of the central male protagonist struggling mentally, this is due to grief from the loss of their spouses. Their struggles are mainly communicated through eccentric behaviour, rather than engaging with their emotions.

By contrast, recent UK series that have explored male mental health and illness – still in the vein of comedy – have done so with more attention to the details of illness itself. One of the best examples is Big Boys (Channel 4, and now on Netflix), which follows Jack (Dylan Llewellyn) as he starts university.

Jack is trying to navigate the death of his father, coming out and starting a new chapter. But it is the portrayal of his friend Danny (Jon Pointing) that is the most interesting. Danny is a lad type, whose swagger functions as a central part of his character. But we’re also shown his struggle with depression, including the mundanities that aren’t always covered onscreen: the alarms for medication, the side effects of that medication, the friends who check in and help out during an episode.

Unlike other portrayals of men onscreen, Big Boys presents a character whose struggles aren’t just played for laughs. Instead, Danny’s character addresses the very real details of the mental illness experience.

The differences between the UK and the US could be down to how mental health is viewed in each country. Surveys in the UK found in 2021 that nearly three quarters of people believed stigma towards those with a severe mental illness has not improved in the last decade.

Even more recently, a survey by Mind in 2024 found that 51% of the UK population believes there is a great deal or fair amount of shame associated with mental health conditions. The specifics of this stigma are highlighted by other surveys, which have found that “negative attitudes towards people with mental illness [are] more common among men”.

The American response in some surveys looks different. In 2019, the American Psychological Association claimed that Americans were becoming more open about mental health. But the same survey found that a third of respondents still saw people with mental illness as someone to be scared of.

There are many similarities here between the way mental illness is viewed between the two cultures, with stigma remaining something to be countered, and a recurrent part of charity campaigns. The differences between the portrayals on television suggests something to do with understandings of masculinity and expectations of what male mental health and illness looks like.

For now, Big Boys offers something different. But there is still room for more portrayals to engage with the experience in more detail without resorting to stereotypes.

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Christina Wilkins 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 evolution of male mental health in television – https://theconversation.com/the-evolution-of-male-mental-health-in-television-266318

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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There were emotional scenes in both Gaza and across Israel this week as people celebrated the prospect of an end to a war which has cost so many lives. Israel and Hamas agreed the first phase of a ceasefire deal which, if it holds, will bring an end to nearly two years of bitter conflict in the Gaza Strip.

The latest casualty count is devastating. On the Palestinian side, more than 67,000 people, most of them civilians and among them an estimated 20,000 children. Israel lost more than 1,800 people: about 1,200 – mainly civilians – during the Hamas attack of October 7 2023 and the rest killed during the assault on Gaza.

Footage and images from both sides show relief, joy and hope that this deal, for which Donald Trump can rightly claim much credit, will hold, that the Israeli hostages will be returned and that a process of healing can begin. For Palestinians there is also the hope that they can return to their homes and begin the process of rebuilding.

But what comes next is far from certain, as Scott Lucas, an expert in Middle East politics from University College Dublin, explains. For the ceasefire to hold, particularly once the 22 remaining live hostages and the bodies of 26 who have died in captivity are released to Israel, assumes a great deal of good faith on both sides. But particularly from Israel.

The release of the hostages removes any leverage Hamas might have had, Lucas writes. And the fact that Israel was still hitting Gaza with airstrikes hours after the US president announced that a deal had been done must cast some doubt on that good faith.

Nevertheless, the ceasefire is due to begin on Friday, after Israel’s cabinet meets to sign off on the hostage agreement. This is when the hard part begins, says Lucas. Hamas will be unwilling to comply with Israel’s demand to disarm and disband and take no further part in Palestinian politics. We don’t know how the future governance covered in Trump’s 20-point plan will work. We don’t know when and to what extent Israel will withdraw its troops.

And Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, still has to get the deal past the two far-right cabinet ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Smotrich has already said he will oppose the deal.

But, for now at least, there is reason to hope. And this is something that has been in painfully short supply in Gaza of late.

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Read more:
Israel and Hamas agree ceasefire deal – what we know so far: expert Q&A

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Trump’s idiosyncratic style of diplomacy may often appear hasty, clumsy and ill-judged. But it’s questionable whether this particular deal could have happened without him. Asaf Siniver believes Trump was key to getting both Israel and Hamas into line. Siniver, an expert in international security from the University of Birmingham, highlights Trump’s apparent mastery of what is known as “dead cat diplomacy”.

This is a foreign policy approach identified by James Baker, former US secretary of state, in the late 1980s. He recalled in his memoir that he employed it during his own attempts at securing a peace deal between Israel and a delegation of negotiators from Palestine.

Siniver says dead cat diplomacy requires three things: “It must be perceived by the intransigent parties as a last-chance threat, it must be perceived as a credible move by the third party and there must be internal factors which limit the intransigent party’s capacity to ignore the threat.”

All three of these were met in the case of the recent negotiations between Israel and Hamas. It was just a case, to paraphrase Baker, of “laying the dead cats at Israel’s and Hamas’s doorsteps”. In other words, to publicly blame and shame both parties for any reluctance to advance the deal.

Trump did this famously by reporting he’d told the Israeli prime minister he was “always fucking negative” about the peace process. He made sure that everyone knew that he’d forced Netanyahu to apologise to Qatar for launching the airstrikes in early September to try to kill Hamas leaders.

His constant social media messaging to Hamas that it was the major obstacle to Middle East peace fulfilled the same principles. He told Hamas that he’d given Netanyahu carte blanche to “finish the job” and was aware of quite how isolated Hamas had become – not just from its former allies in the Arab states, but with the people it was ostensibly fighting to protect, the Gazans themselves.

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Read more:
How Donald Trump’s ‘dead cat diplomacy’ may have changed the course of the Gaza war

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Two years of tragedy

There can be no doubt that, whatever the leaders on both sides thought, most ordinary people in Israel and Gaza just wanted the war to end. This week marked the second anniversary of the brutal October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel. Yuval Katz, whose research has involved speaking to a lot of Israeli citizens about the war and examining social media reports from Gaza, feels that both sets of people were caught between two visions of what peace might mean.

For the politicians, particularly for Donald Trump, a solution for Gaza was part of something else. Trump saw it as the cornerstone of a broader US-sponsored deal for the Middle East: “I’m not just talking about Gaza … the whole deal, everything getting solved. It’s called peace in the Middle East.”

For the Israeli prime minister, the war was part of a delicate political manoeuvre to retain the backing of his far-right allies and keep himself in power.

Neither gave the impression they were in touch with the trauma of the ordinary people. Israelis felt the October 7 massacre and the hostages as a constant pain. Cases of PTSD and suicide among those who served in the military have soared over the two years.

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Read more:
October 7 two years on: Israelis and Palestinians caught between two conflicting ideas of peace

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Two years of war have also reshaped the Middle East, writes Simon Mabon. Mabon, a scholar of Middle East politics at Lancaster University, outlines the profound ways the region has changed over two years. Iran and its proxies have had their wings severely clipped. In Lebanon, Hezbollah has been crippled. In Syria, Israel has taken advantage of the turmoil following the fall of Assad in December 2024 to carve itself out a buffer zone around the Golan Heights in the south.

Meanwhile, normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia – an extension of the Abraham accords which Trump saw as one of his major foreign policy achievements in his first term – has been set back considerably, certainly for years. A lot, says Mabon, will hang on what happens next in Gaza.

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Read more:
The two years of fighting since October 7 have transformed the Middle East

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Donald Trump: Nobel peace laureate?

It’s highly unlikely Trump would be recognised at Friday’s Nobel peace prize announcement for a ceasefire deal that hasn’t even yet come into force. But if it does lead to a lasting peace, there will be plenty of speculation about whether the Nobel committee will recognise the US president in the future.

After all, there have arguably been more controversial choices. Colin Alexander, an expert in political communication at Nottingham Trent University, walks us through some of them.

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Read more:
The Nobel peace prize has a record of being awarded to controversial nominees

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– ref. Gaza ceasefire and Donald Trump’s ‘dead cat diplomacy’ – https://theconversation.com/gaza-ceasefire-and-donald-trumps-dead-cat-diplomacy-267155

Source: The Conversation – UK – By David Stupples, Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Director of Electronic Warfare Research, City St George’s, University of London

For over a century, the ocean has been the ultimate refuge for those who wished to disappear. From the U-boats of the first world war to the nuclear-powered leviathans that glide through today’s deep waters, the submarine has thrived on one simple principle: stealth.

Sound waves travel further and faster in water than light or radar waves. This means sound is the most effective way to detect underwater objects. Modern anti-submarine warfare (ASW) is an ongoing cat-and-and-mouse game of detecting, tracking and deterring enemy submarines. With sound as the ocean’s only reliable language, ASW has primarily been a contest of listening.

But the game is changing. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), sensor networks, and autonomous vehicles are eroding the acoustic monopoly that submarines once enjoyed.

A new generation of tireless, networked and increasingly intelligent machines is beginning to patrol the seas. This promises a future where even the quietest submarine will find it harder to remain unseen.

As the ocean’s soundscape becomes more crowded, navies are increasingly turning to non-acoustic methods. These technologies detect the effects of a submarine rather than its noise. Satellites equipped with synthetic aperture radar can detect subtle ripples and temperature gradients on the sea surface caused by subsurface movement.

Until recently, magnetometers, which can measure the minute disturbances a submarine creates in Earth’s magnetic field, were constrained by physics and sensitivity limits. The magnetic anomaly detectors used for ASW could only operate effectively at low altitude and at short range.

Emerging quantum magnetometers, which make use of the strange science of quantum mechanics, promise orders-of-magnitude improvements in sensitivity. They could, in theory, detect the presence of a steel hull tens of kilometres away, especially when deployed in swarms aboard uncrewed aircraft or sea surface vessels.

A technique called distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) could turn ordinary undersea cables – primarily used for internet traffic – into vibration sensors. It works by measuring subtle changes in strain in the cables’ optical fibres.

Through DAS, a single transoceanic cable could, in effect, become an enormous underwater microphone (hydrophone). In principle, this would allow a submarine crossing a major ocean basin to be detected by subtle pressure waves recorded in the fibres beneath it.

Autonomous vessels

At the heart of the revolution in ASW are uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs). These autonomous vessels range from small, solar-powered craft to large, long endurance ships capable of spending weeks or months at sea.

Unlike crewed ships, USVs can be built cheaply and in large numbers. Armed with sonar, radar, magnetometers and communications links, they are the mobile nodes of an ocean-scale sensor network that can listen, learn and adapt in real time.

The US Navy’s Sea Hunter, an autonomous trimaran, has demonstrated its ability to track a diesel-electric submarine for extended periods without human intervention. In the UK, the Royal Navy’s Cetus project and its experimental uncrewed fleet at Portsmouth are exploring similar ideas.

But it is the integration of AI with autonomy that reshapes the picture. A single USV, even a sophisticated one, can only observe a small patch of ocean. A swarm of hundreds, each communicating via satellite, laser, or acoustic link, can share information and act cooperatively.

AI is a game changer

AI does things that human operators and legacy systems cannot. It fuses data from multiple sources into a coherent picture. A single acoustic anomaly may mean little, but when combined with other data, it may form a high confidence detection.

AI operates continuously and without fatigue. Persistence is vital when hunting for the fleeting signature of a submarine designed to operate silently for weeks.

And by learning how submarines navigate, avoid detection, and exploit environmental features, algorithms can forecast likely positions and movements. This could prompt ASW to move from being primarily reactive to predictive – a shift comparable to how meteorology evolved from observation to forecasting.

Through these capabilities, AI could move from simply assisting detection to orchestrating it.

Humans are not leaving the loop, however. The role of human operator is shifting from hands-on detection to oversight, strategy, and what’s known as trust management.

Trust is a key challenge: in this context, it’s about ensuring human decision makers understand what AI is doing and why it recommends certain actions.

Navies are therefore investing heavily in explainable AI – systems that can account for their decisions – and robust communications systems that allow human operators to intervene when needed.

A connected ocean

By the 2030s, the world’s oceans may become as transparent to sensors as the skies became to radar in the 20th century. With help from AI, multiple transmitters and receivers – mounted on ships, aircraft and USVs – will be able to triangulate the positions of submarines in real time.

Swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles – relatively small robotic drones – will patrol close to shore, relaying data to surface craft. Satellites will flag anomalies for local sensor networks to investigate. And the fibre-optic infrastructure that spans the seabed may double as a global array of undersea microphones.

For now, such a vision remains technically ambitious. The ocean is extraordinarily complex: temperature gradients, salinity layers, and seabed topography all distort signals and confound algorithms. But with every incremental improvement in AI modelling and computational power, those obstacles shrink.

As detection grows more sophisticated, so too will the submarines. The future may see submarines using propulsion systems and materials in their hulls that leave minimal thermal or acoustic signature. Decoy drones could be used to confuse detection systems.

Some analysts predict that submarines will operate deeper and slower to evade wide-area surveillance. A shift towards autonomous undersea drones that can saturate defences through sheer numbers is also possible.

The strategic implications are profound. Submarines have long been the cornerstone of nuclear deterrence and covert power projection. Their ability to vanish beneath the waves gave nations second-strike capability (the ability to retaliate after absorbing a nuclear attack) and freedom of manoeuvre.

The result of AI-driven transparency could be greater stability – reducing incentives for surprise attack – or, paradoxically, new instability as nations race to preserve secrecy.

The submarine will remain a formidable weapon, but it will no longer move unseen. The ocean, once humanity’s final hidden frontier, is becoming transparent to the eyes of machines.

David Stupples 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. AI, drone ships and new sensors could leave submarines with few places to hide in the ocean – https://theconversation.com/ai-drone-ships-and-new-sensors-could-leave-submarines-with-few-places-to-hide-in-the-ocean-266973

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Richard Whittle, University Fellow in AI and Human Decision Making, University of Salford

Some of the world’s biggest tech firms have soared in value over the last year. As AI evolves at pace, there are hopes that it will improve lives in ways that people could never have imagined a decade ago – in sectors as diverse as healthcare, employment and scientific discovery.

OpenAI is now worth US$500 billion (£373 billion), compared with US$157 billion last October. Another firm, Anthropic, has almost trebled its valuation. But the Bank of England has now warned of a possible rapid “correction” due to its concerns about these staggering valuation rises.

The question is whether these values are realistic – or based on hype, excitement and unfounded optimism for the potential of AI. Put simply, is AI’s value today a product of what AI will do in future or what people hope it may do? Ultimately, we will only really know if it’s a bubble if it bursts – though the warning signs are evident today.

With hindsight, many things that happen in a bubble may sound exceedingly optimistic. If you take many headlines and replace the word AI with the word computers it often sounds a lot more naive.

But, predicting the path of technological change is hard. Back in 2000 the Daily Mail declared the internet could be a passing fad. Just a few months earlier the dotcom boom had peaked.

A burst bubble may not change the end of the journey. The internet was not a passing fad. However, bubbles are extremely disruptive and affect people in very real ways. Stocks fall, pensions suffer, unemployment rises and investment is wasted. Real potential is crowded out in the hype and mania to focus all investment in a small number of stocks and firms.

Right now, we have the first sign of a bubble – a rapid rise in valuations. If these correct and fall we will have a bubble. If these valuations continue to rise we could be seeing a new sustained market that is focused on the technology of the future.

Of course, it might be that these valuations plateau. What happens then depends on whether people have invested in the belief that prices will always rise.

Consider a situation where people believe – as the Bank of England does – that AI firms’ valuations may be “stretched”. It’s helpful to consider what these valuations are based on. Investment is simply a bet that AI increases profitability for the firms involved. These massive valuations are bets that AI will hugely increase future profitability.

In some cases these are bets that AI will improve in capabilities towards some kind of “artificial superintelligence” that can do everything a human can do – or more. This could raise the living standards of everyone on Earth. Leading computer scientist Stuart Russell estimates the value of that at US$14 quadrillion – investors are buying a claim on that outcome too.

If investors begin to fear that AI profits won’t materialise then they will try to get their money back. This realisation can appear quite suddenly and can be prompted by seemingly minor events. It doesn’t require a big needle to pop a bubble.

A US article published in March 2000 warned that internet companies were fast running out of money. This caused many people to rethink their investments

At this stage of the bubble, investment excitement had spread to everyday investors. These regular people balanced their fear of missing out with a fear that they were investing in something new that they didn’t know much about. For many, an article in a popular magazine suggesting they may have made a mistake tipped the scales towards caution. They began to sell their dotcom stocks.

In search of profit

It may come as a surprise to some that, despite its increasing valuations, OpenAI does not yet make a profit. It may require ten times more revenue to do so.

A US$500 billion valuation is quite something for a company that reportedly lost US$7.8 billion in the first half of this year. Some of this value appears to flow from a new deal between OpenAI and Nvidia where Nvidia will invest in OpenAI and OpenAI will buy Nvidia chips. This circular financing keeps everything afloat for now, but at some point investors will need to see returns.

AI firms more generally do not appear to be profitable at the moment. Investors are not putting their money into today’s losses – they are betting on an AI future.

It is of course perfectly feasible that AI firms will develop business models to increase their profitability. OpenAI is exploring advertising options and allowing chatbots to recommend products.

Using AI to deliver these messages is a viable option, though they will have to avoid the tricks and manipulations associated with online platforms, such as when hotel websites announce that rooms are about to sell out. We believe that AI can increase the power of these manipulations and we wonder how persuasive chatbots may be in their recommendations.

However, the big four – Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon – are this year spending the equivalent of the GDP of Portugal on AI infrastructure. This is not investment in new targeted ads, it is investment in an AI future. The bubble will burst if and when this future is in doubt.

Richard Whittle receives funding from several standard sources including UKRI and Research England. No funders are likely to benefit from, or influence this work

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

– ref. What could burst the AI bubble? – https://theconversation.com/what-could-burst-the-ai-bubble-267136

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Philip Clarke, Professor of Health Economics, University of Oxford

For decades, ethicists have argued that lotteries could be the fairest way to decide who gets life-saving treatment when there isn’t enough to go around. Yet our research suggests that most people would rather leave the choice to medical experts than to luck.

Our recent study involving more than 15,000 people across 14 countries found that the public preferred allocation by expert medical committees over lotteries for scarce COVID vaccines.

Respondents were presented with a scenario: a hospital wanted to vaccinate all 1,000 of its nurses but had only 500 doses of a COVID vaccine available. Some were asked whether they agreed that an expert committee was an appropriate way to make the decision; others were asked whether they agreed that a lottery was an appropriate way. Agreement with each method was measured on a scale from zero (strongly disagree) to 100 (strongly agree).

On average, expert committees scored 61, compared with just 37 for lotteries. While expert allocation was more acceptable everywhere, support for lotteries varied sharply across countries – from strikingly low in France and Chile to relatively high in China, India and the US.

In theory, lotteries are fair when used for people who would benefit equally from treatment. They treat people with equal need equally and avoid rewarding those who happen to live closer to hospitals or who are better connected.

Many ethicists have proposed using them when it is hard to make decisions about life-saving treatments. For example, when kidney dialysis first became available in the 1960s, lotteries were discussed as a tie-breaker for equally eligible patients.

While ethicists often focus on fairness in principle, our results suggest that fairness alone may not be enough to persuade the public if the process feels random or impersonal.

During the early COVID pandemic, ethicists again argued for random allocation of potentially life-saving treatments. In the US, several National Academies even recommended lotteries for prioritising vaccines when “no further identifiable risk-based differences” existed between groups – that is, patients of the same age and health status.

Despite these arguments, lotteries were rarely used in practice during the pandemic. Our study suggests that the public was not supportive.

But cultural familiarity with lotteries also matters in terms of which nations will or won’t accept them. In India, lotteries are used to allocate school places and public housing. In China, they decide who gets car licence plates in crowded cities. And in the US, a green card lottery allocates immigration visas. In these countries, support for healthcare lotteries was noticeably higher.

Luck of the draw

It is difficult to know whether existing lotteries for public services create acceptance, or whether they were introduced because public attitudes were already favourable. Either way, familiarity seems to make lotteries more acceptable.

Scepticism about healthcare lotteries is understandable. Yet committees are not perfect either – they can be slow, inconsistent, or swayed by politics or prejudice. Importantly, during the COVID pandemic, government expert committees in different countries came up with a wide variety of recommendations on who should be prioritised to receive the vaccine first.

If used, lotteries should be implemented in conjunction with medical guidelines. For example, during the COVID pandemic, the UK government prioritised access to vaccines largely based on five-year age bands starting with the oldest groups.

While allocating COVID vaccines based on age criteria was seen as appropriate medically, the order in which people should be vaccinated within an age group is less clear. For example, when rolling out the initial COVID vaccine, there were around 3 million people aged 65 to 69 in the same risk-based priority group, and vaccinating them all simultaneously was impossible.

To avoid vaccinating on a “first-come, first-served” basis that could reward proximity or privilege, a lottery could have been used to decide when each person in this group would receive their vaccine. Such a vaccine lottery featured in the 2011 film Contagion, but was hardly used during the actual pandemic.

The COVID pandemic is over, but future disease outbreaks are inevitable. We should think now about whether lotteries should play a role in allocating scarce treatments or vaccines next time.

For lotteries to be seen as a legitimate way to allocate healthcare, governments need to engage with the public and trial the approach. In 2008, the US state of Oregon used a lottery to select participants for limited Medicaid (a public health insurance programme) slots.

Lotteries remain one of the fairest tools we have when medical differences are otherwise equal. Next time, rather than treating lotteries as unthinkable, we should be ready to use them, with public understanding and trust already in place.

Philip Clarke receives funding from the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre and Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre and previously the Department of Health and Social Care, for the evaluation of the COVID-19 Oxford Vaccine Trial.

Rhys Thomas declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The study presented in this article was supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre and the COVID-19 Oxford Vaccine Trial.

– ref. Should we decide by lottery who gets a medical treatment first? – https://theconversation.com/should-we-decide-by-lottery-who-gets-a-medical-treatment-first-265454

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Aled Mark Singleton, Lecturer in Human Geography, Cardiff University

When the news broke in the autumn of 2023 that the blast furnaces at the steelworks in Port Talbot, south Wales, were closing, the headlines were laced with emotion: “devastating”, “fear”, “end of an era”. For many in the town, it wasn’t just the loss of 3,000 jobs, it was as though part of the town’s identity was being taken away.

Such emotional reactions are not just nostalgia or sentimentality. They’re a powerful example of what researchers call “place attachment”, the deep, often unspoken bonds we form with the places that shape our lives.

My own research has explored how people in Newport formed emotional attachments to the former Llanwern steelworks from when it was built in the 1960s.

We develop attachment to the places where we grow up, live, work and socialise. They could be your childhood street, the corner shop where you bought sweets, or the estate where you raised your children. These places hold memories, routines and milestones.

But our attachments aren’t just personal. As we age, they can become shared and tied to a town, a city, or a region. In south Wales, where industries like coal and steel once shaped generations, those attachments are often linked to pride, identity and social connection.

Sometimes, they’re hopeful, but other times they carry a sense of loss.

An uncertain future

In September 2024, the giant blast furnaces in Port Talbot were shut down, marking the end of traditional steelmaking in the town. A new, greener arc furnace is being built in its place, but the transition has brought fear and uncertainty. Will the next generation have jobs here? Will the town still feel like the place people knew?

Even before the closure, Cardiff University researchers described a “lingering sense of indignity and insecurity left by recent history” in the area. The emotional bonds people have with Port Talbot aren’t just rooted in the past; they’re being tested by what the future promises – or fails to.

To understand how people form and carry place attachments over time, I carried out research in Newport in 2019, nearly 50 miles east of Port Talbot. In 1962, a vast steelworks opened in Llanwern, just outside the city. Thousands of people moved there for work, and entire neighbourhoods were built around the promise of a better life. The plant remained a major employer for nearly 40 years, before most of it closed in 2001.

I wanted to understand how people who had lived through that era remembered it and how their feelings about the area had changed over time. Instead of conducting conventional interviews, I walked with residents through their neighbourhoods. We revisited places from the 1960s and 1970s, letting memories rise to the surface.

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Read more:
Walking is a state of mind – it can teach you so much about where you are

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To share public feelings, I curated two events in the community that also included guided walking tours. An important component was public performances that brought people’s stories to life, made by artist Marega Palser.

The walks and events revealed powerful stories.

A man remembered the feeling of something being taken away as habitats were destroyed to make way for houses. Another described the thrill of buying a first home near the steelworks, when “everything seemed possible”. One woman pointed out the exact spot where a car once crashed into her garden.

One participant recalled how, in the early 1970s, “people were almost fulfilling their dreams: home ownership … people getting access to cars, things like tellies”. Others remembered the chaos caused by shale lorries rumbling through the nearby town of Caerleon in the 1960s, delivering material for the foundations of the steelworks.

For many, the steel industry hadn’t just shaped their town, it had shaped their life story. But these stories weren’t only about loss. They were also about pride, belonging and everyday joys.

Why these stories matter

Place attachment helps explain why people feel so strongly when things change. It’s why the closure of a factory, the demolition of a housing estate, or the decline of a high street can hit so hard. It’s not just about jobs or buildings but identity, memory and meaning.

In Port Talbot, these feelings are still raw. The town’s future is being recast by government policy, corporate decisions and global economics. But the emotional landscape mustn’t be overlooked. Understanding how people feel about a place can help us listen more carefully to what’s at stake when that place changes.

In Newport, where the industrial decline came earlier, the picture is more mixed. The city’s population is growing, and employment levels are above the national average. Today, people may form attachments through the independent music scene, or events connected to the city’s radical history, such as the Newport Rising festival.

These newer narratives matter just as much. Without them, older identities can become frozen in time, and communities may find it harder to imagine a different future.

Of course, our homes and neighbourhoods will always matter. But we also carry bigger attachments, to towns and cities, to shared pasts and imagined futures. Understanding those attachments means looking beyond headlines about economic loss or regeneration. It means listening to what people remember, what they still cherish and what they fear losing.

As Port Talbot’s steelworks are greatly reshaped and Newport continues to evolve, one thing is clear – we don’t just live in places. We feel them too.

Aled Mark Singleton received funding the Economic and Social Research Council: Grant Number ES/W007568/1. This work was supported by Swansea University Geography Department.

– ref. Attachment to our home town runs deep – so what happens when it faces dramatic change? – https://theconversation.com/attachment-to-our-home-town-runs-deep-so-what-happens-when-it-faces-dramatic-change-263667