Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Samuel Shaw, Lecturer in History of Art, The Open University

Earlier this year I found myself stood among a sea of swaying ox-eye daises in a floodplain meadow on the Attingham estate in Shropshire, on land owned by the National Trust. I noticed other plants growing here: the sunny yellows of meadow buttercup, the wine-reds of great burnet and the furry seed heads of meadow foxtail. The sounds of birds and insects bubbled in the background.

It felt like a thriving environment, but I knew that this meadow could be so much more. Floodplain meadows are hugely important spaces, supporting rare plant communities and providing food for animals to eat during the winter months.

The soils of floodplain meadows are recognised by scientists as an important carbon store, helping to slow floodwaters and absorb nutrients. Many remaining floodplain meadows have been managed in the same way for more than 1,000 years. However, such sites are rare and most meadows are in serious need of restoration.

The diversity and abundance of the plants and animals I encountered at Attingham did not indicate a flourishing ecosystem. While birds such as lapwing had been seen passing through the site, they not been encouraged to stay and breed. The quality of the soil was improving, but only slowly.

After leaving the meadow, I visited Attingham Park, the large house that lies at the heart of the estate. As an art historian with a keen interest in the history and visual cultures of natural sciences, I was hoping to make connections across the trust’s collections. I wanted to find objects in the house that related to what I had encountered in the meadows.

I wasn’t disappointed. Attingham’s collection is large and deep, encompassing paintings, ceramics, furniture, rare books and much more besides. Some objects relate specifically to the house and to the Berwick family who lived there, while others form part of a broader story.

Evidence of meadows and meadow ecosystems appears everywhere: in the famous paintings of cattle hanging on the walls, in the representation of grasses in an early 20th-century fan, and in the tiny beetles that adorned an Italian paperweight. In the delicate lithographic plates of a 19th-century guide to British birds, compiled by the ornithologist John Gould, I found the lapwings that had thwarted me in the meadow.

Perhaps the most interesting object I saw was the original Attingham Red Book. Created in 1798 by landscape gardener Humphry Repton, this red leather-bound book documented his plans for the estate, via a series of charming and clever before-and-after watercolours. Could Repton’s book help me understand how this meadow has changed over centuries, and how it might change again?

The art of meadow restoration

It can be tempting to divide the National Trust’s holdings and activities into natural heritage on the one hand, and cultural heritage on the other. But the trust’s highly significant art and cultural collections (what is found inside) can be used to draw attention to what is going on in the estates (what is found outside). The trust owns thousands of historic objects that can help engage audiences with the past, present and future of its natural spaces.

Since 2006, my colleagues at the Floodplain Meadows Partnership, an initiative at the Open University, have been working with conservation organisations and landowners to ensure that floodplain meadows are protected, restored and successfully managed. By feeding into government agricultural funding schemes such as the countryside stewardship higher tier, the partnership’s research supports sustainable farming and nature restoration across the UK.

Current partners include the National Trust which, as one of the UK’s largest landowners and with ambitious nature recovery targets, is uniquely placed to lead the way in meadow restoration. Together, we have identified 121 fields at English estates, including Attingham, that could be suitable for floodplain meadow restoration.

The trust’s current emphasis on people and nature, as laid out in its new ten-year strategy, hints at a certain nervousness over how to situate the organisation’s significant holdings of art, design and architecture. Yet there’s a strong argument for bringing cultural and natural heritage closer together. Historic objects, such as those I explored at Attingham, do not stand apart from nature restoration, but can stimulate and shape it.

For example, Repton’s Red Book designs directly tackle issues – such as how to manage rivers and their floodplains – that remain at the heart of the estate’s management. But Repton liked his rivers to be ample and majestic, cutting through the landscape cleanly, rather than meandering messily. This goes against what is needed to create thriving river habitats, such as those envisaged by Attingham’s current nature recovery project.

Looking through the Red Book and the collections at Attingham provides much more than a window into the past. These objects show how the past is still so entwined with the present, and how it may inform what we do in the future.

My research at Attingham, as highlighted in the short film above, shows how art and visual culture can help us better understand and engage audiences with nature restoration. Art objects offer a fresh perspective on environmental debates, helping people to visualise complex ideas in ways that inspire, surprise and change the direction of conversations.

The restoration of key environments such as floodplain meadows may be led by scientists, but the arts nevertheless have an essential role to play.

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Samuel Shaw has received funding from the AHRC in the past

– ref. How the National Trust’s art collections can shape meadow restoration – https://theconversation.com/how-the-national-trusts-art-collections-can-shape-meadow-restoration-266395

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jen Harvie, Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance, Queen Mary University of London

American film actress Diane Keaton, who has died aged 79, was an icon of style but also character. She challenged the boundaries and range of what it was possible for women to play and be, especially in American cinema’s new wave of the 1970s and 80s.

Keaton was most famous for her performance as the title character in Woody Allen’s 1977 satirical romantic comedy-drama, Annie Hall. Her Annie could have been the love child of Katharine Hepburn and Charlie Chaplin.

She had Hepburn’s strength, intelligence, hair in a bun, and gender non-conforming trousers and tie; Chaplin’s comedy, goofiness and charm; and the idiosyncrasy of them both. Annie – like many more of Keaton’s characters – was kooky but smart, troubled and flawed, sweet but sensuous. And always endearing and complex.

Keaton won an Oscar for Annie. She physically overshadowed Allen despite being the same height (according to Allen), and her character’s awkward flirtatiousness, delight and curiosity balanced his character’s neurosis. Allen cast Keaton in eight of his movies and described her as, “with the exception of Judy Holliday”, “the finest screen comedienne we’ve ever seen”.

Keaton is better known as a comedian (or, as film critic Peter Bradshaw puts it, “a comic performer of ethereally self-aware genius”). But she had an impressive record in drama as well.

Five years before Annie Hall, Keaton played the marrying-in outsider Kay to the mob family in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972). She appeared across the trilogy opposite Al Pacino.

Speaking to US broadcaster NPR in 2017, she explained that she drew on her experience as a young woman on The Godfather’s profoundly male-dominated set to understand Kay’s experience in the similarly male mob world.

The same year as Annie Hall, Keaton played Theresa Dunn in the much darker Looking for Mr Goodbar. Theresa leads a double life. By day she’s a Catholic teacher and by night, she cruises bars and discos for casual and sometimes rough sex.

Adapted from Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel, the film has been criticised for crude sensationalism, but Keaton’s portrayal of Theresa’s desire was broadly admired. Sight and Sound, for example, called her performance impressive “mainly because her strength and sensitivity as an actress seem to be operating apart from the underdeveloped character she is playing”.

Keaton also starred alongside Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson in Reds (1981), Beatty’s epic drama exploring political and personal commitment in the context of journalists’ engagement with the Russian revolution. Keaton played activist Louise Bryant, who leaves her family to join the political struggle and, let’s be honest, handsome journalist Jack Reed (Beatty).

New York Times journalist Alissa Wilkinson wrote of the performance: “We might not all be Reed, the charismatic idealist giving speeches, but we might be Bryant, just trying to catch hold as history barrels past and discovering who we are inside of it.

Keaton’s later career

It is an indictment of Hollywood that, as Keaton aged, her roles and films generally became more conventional and less challenging than some of her earlier work. That said, she admitted that her own confidence affected her career, mistakenly believing that “without a great man writing and directing for me” she was “mediocre”.

Despite this, she did find and create roles that continued to challenge expectations about how women can behave, and she made a series of successful collaborations with director Nancy Meyers.

In 1987’s Baby Boom, co-written by Meyers, Keaton played a career-committed businesswoman who inherits a baby that disrupts her life. Not only does she gradually cope, she eventually pulls off the hat-trick of growing her career, keeping the baby and snatching heartthrob Sam Shepard.

Keaton also starred in another tale of mainstream feminism triumphant, Meyers’ romantic comedy-drama Something’s Gotta Give (2003). Turning the tables on sexist stereotypes, Keaton’s successful playwright character “tames” playboy Nicholson while also attracting the much younger Keanu Reeves.

There is a sense that Hollywood couldn’t imagine Keaton’s early frisson in the body of an ageing woman. But she carried on doing what she could from within these more tame and often liberal feminist comedy-dramas, which sought gender equality but never questioned structures that were fundamentally sexist.

Keaton’s legacy persists. Some of the most influential American women television and filmmakers of the 21st century have sought to take up the mantle of her complex characterisations of smart, awkward and unconventional femininity, including Lena Dunham and Greta Gerwig. And we will always have Diane Keaton’s back catalogue to remind us of Hepburn and Chaplin’s strange, poignant, funny love child.

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Jen Harvie 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. Diane Keaton pioneered new kinds of complex femininity on screen – https://theconversation.com/diane-keaton-pioneered-new-kinds-of-complex-femininity-on-screen-267348

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Maria Småberg, Senior Lecturer, Peace and Conflict Research, Department of HIstory, Lund University

In the hills of the southern West Bank, a Swedish cooking pot has become a symbol of trust, resilience and forgotten solidarity. Half a century after it was first distributed as emergency aid, the cooking pots still gleam in the kitchens of Beit Awwa – reminding villagers of a time when Sweden stood by them in the aftermath of war.

Today, that legacy stands in stark contrast to Sweden’s current policy: a sharp reduction in aid to Palestine which has been folded into a regional government strategy for all of the Middle East and north Africa region.

The origins of these pots – and the trust they symbolise – were uncovered through research into the history of Swedish civil society organisations in Palestine. In the aftermath of the six-day war in 1967, Beit Awwa was one of several villages destroyed by Israeli forces. Villagers lost their homes, belongings and livelihoods.

Beit Awwa was not alone. In the chaotic aftermath of the six-day war, entire Palestinian villages were razed. Few international observers were present to document what happened. Israeli authorities actively tried to prevent outside scrutiny.

One of the few who bore witness was Sister Marie-Thérèse, a French nun from the Companions of Jesus order, who later wrote about the devastation in her diary. Israeli journalist Amos Kenan also reported on the forced expulsions, describing elderly people and mothers with infants wandering with white flags.

By mid-July 1967, John Reddaway, Unrwa’s deputy commissioner-general, estimated that around 16,000 people had been made homeless by the destruction of villages in the West Bank. Altogether, between 200,000 and 250,000 people from the West Bank went into exile.

Just a week after the war ended, on June 10, representatives from the Swedish organisation Individuell Människohjälp (IM), including the then ambassador, Bo Siegbahn, and consul, Arnold Hjertström, visited the ruins of Beit Awwa and the neighbouring village of Beit Marsam. They witnessed the devastation and appealed for help.

Sweden’s foreign ministry did not respond. But IM acted. With funding from the Norwegian Refugee Council and donations from the Swedish public (raising more than kr544,000 (£343,000) in July alone), IM chartered two planes from Malmö.

They delivered blankets, clothing, 100 tons of wheat flour, powdered milk, food supplies, primus stoves, and kitchen utensils — including the now-legendary Skultuna pots, a brand dating back to 1607.

The village elder, or mukhtar, oversaw the distribution, ensuring that aid was shared fairly. One of the men who proudly showed the pots to a visiting development worker decades later turned out to be the mukhtar’s grandson. IM also set up two tent camps and later sent medical supplies, prosthetics, spectacles and wheelchairs.

Cleaning up

Many years after the humanitarian intervention in 1967, Sweden returned to the Beit Awwa area to help resolve a new and complex problem. Swedish representatives were met with goodwill by the villagers, apparently based on the role Sweden had played decades earlier, even though no one was old enough to have their own clear memories of what had taken place in 1967.

During the 2010s, the Swedish consulate-general in Jerusalem identified a growing environmental crisis in the occupied Palestinian territory. In the villages near Hebron, many families had turned to informal recycling of Israeli electronic waste, a hazardous livelihood born out of economic necessity and political exclusion.

After the second intifada, when Palestinian workers were largely barred from entering Israel, some turned to old contacts among Israeli junk dealers. They began importing discarded electronics, burning them to extract copper and other metals, and selling the materials back through informal networks.

The environmental cost was devastating. Thick black smoke from burning cables choked the air and toxic runoff seeped into the soil and groundwater. The intricacies of the dangerous trade were brought to light by a group of researcher led by Yaakov Garb at Ben-Gurion University. They were able to link the burn sites to rising rates of lymphoma and other illnesses among children in the area.

In response to the crisis, researchers and villagers, supported by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), developed a pilot project in 2015 to transform the informal recycling into a safer, small-scale industry.

The idea was to replace open-air burning with mechanical cable grinding, decontaminate the burn sites by removing toxic soil, and register the recycling operations as formal businesses with the Palestinian Authority. Local municipalities were also tasked with forming monitoring teams to prevent illegal burning.

The pilot project was a success. A significant area was cleaned, and a volunteer force of 60 people was quickly mobilised to enforce the new regulations. On both sides of the green line, the project earned praise – from Palestinian villagers, Israeli neighbours, and local authorities alike. In the villages, it became known as “the Swedish project”.

One cable-grinding machine remains in operation today – but like many well-intentioned initiatives in Palestine, the project eventually ran into political obstacles. Sustaining the success of the pilot project required a degree of formalised collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian authorities, but agreement on the details proved impossible and the structures of occupation left little room for long-term, trust-based governance.

Events since then, including the Israeli government’s declared intention to annex the West Bank and the trauma of October 7 2023 and its violent aftermath, have made any efforts at aid requiring collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian authorities virtually impossible.

Still, Sweden’s name continues to carry weight in Beit Awwa and beyond. The memory of those aluminium pots – still gleaming after half a century of use – speaks to a legacy of solidarity that transcends politics. As a historian and a development worker, we believe this legacy deserves to be remembered, and reconsidered, in light of today’s shifting aid policies.

Perhaps one day, that legacy will form the foundation for a renewed Swedish contribution to just peace and prosperity in the region.

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. The cooking pot that became a symbol of Sweden’s commitment to helping Palestine – https://theconversation.com/the-cooking-pot-that-became-a-symbol-of-swedens-commitment-to-helping-palestine-266488

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rosie Young, PhD Candidate, Gut Microbes in Health and Disease, Quadram Institute

Lifting weights just two or three times a week can significantly change the trillions of bacteria living in your gut, and it might happen in as little as eight weeks.

That’s according to a recent study – not yet peer-reviewed – finding that previously inactive people who began resistance training showed notable changes in their gut microbiome, the community of microbes living in the digestive system.

Your gut is home to bacteria, fungi, viruses and other microscopic organisms, most of which live in the large intestine. These microbes help break down food that your body can’t digest on its own, allowing you to access more nutrients and vitamins.

Some bacteria are considered beneficial because they’re often found in people who are healthy, both physically and mentally. They produce compounds that appear to support wellbeing.

The makeup of your gut microbiome isn’t fixed. It changes based on factors such as what you eat, how old you are, how well you sleep – and, as this study shows, whether you exercise.

Researchers at the University of Tübingen in Germany recruited 150 people who didn’t normally exercise and asked them to do resistance training two to three times a week for eight weeks. Participants used either lighter weights with more repetitions (15 to 20) or heavier weights with fewer repetitions (eight to ten).

Both approaches produced similar improvements in strength and body composition. The exercises included chest presses, abdominal work, leg curls, leg presses and back exercises – two sets of each.

The researchers collected stool samples at the start of the programme, after four weeks and after eight weeks to track changes in participants’ gut bacteria.

Some people gained strength much faster than others. The researchers divided participants into “high responders” – the top 20%, who increased their strength by more than 33% on average – and “low responders” – the bottom 20%, who gained less than 12.2%.

The biggest factor determining whether someone was a high or low responder appeared to be their initial strength level.

But the researchers also found something interesting: the people who gained the most strength showed subtle but significant changes in their gut bacteria that the others didn’t.

High responders showed increases in 16 types of bacteria and decreases in 11 others. Two bacteria in particular stood out: Faecalibacterium and Roseburia hominis.

Both produce butyrate, a type of compound called a short-chain fatty acid. These compounds are created when gut bacteria break down fibre, and they serve multiple purposes: they provide energy for the body and help maintain a healthy gut lining, which prevents harmful bacteria from entering the bloodstream.

Similar increases in these bacteria have been found in other studies looking at exercise and the gut. However, in this study, the researchers didn’t find an actual increase in short-chain fatty acids in the stool samples – only more of the bacteria that produce them.

Not that simple

It’s tempting to label certain bacteria as “good” or “bad”, but it’s not that simple. Throughout the study, some bacteria typically associated with good health decreased, while others previously linked to poor health increased.

This highlights an important point: everyone’s microbiome is unique. The same bacteria might perform different roles in different people, depending on the individual and their overall health.

We also can’t say for certain whether the changes in gut bacteria caused the strength gains, or whether getting stronger caused the bacterial changes. Studies like this can show associations, but they can’t prove cause and effect – the microbiome is influenced by too many factors to control them all.

Diet, for instance, has a major effect on gut bacteria. Participants were told not to change their eating habits during the study, but it’s extremely difficult to accurately track what people eat.

It’s possible that some high responders changed their diet as they became more focused on fitness, and this could have contributed both to their bacterial changes and their strength gains.

What we can say with more confidence is that exercise appears to benefit overall physical and mental health and should be part of a healthy lifestyle regardless of what it does to your gut microbes.

This was a small study that still has to go through the peer-review process of being officially looke at by other scientists. But it has the potential to add to growing evidence that our lifestyle choices, including how much we move, can influence the microscopic world living inside us.

Rosie Young 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. Does resistance training really improve your gut microbiome? – https://theconversation.com/does-resistance-training-really-improve-your-gut-microbiome-265221

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Chris Waugh, Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology, Manchester Metropolitan University

When Andrew (not his real name) lost his job during the COVID-19 pandemic, he turned to work as a courier. His days became a slog – cycling for hours in rain or shine, juggling Deliveroo, Uber Eats and JustEat.

Despite the grind, he couldn’t afford to rent even a single room in his city. After months of sofa surfing and crammed bunk-bed accommodation, a friend of a friend offered him a room at a rent he could actually manage.

The catch? He had to have sex with his new, live-in landlady once a week.

This is what’s known as a sex-for-rent arrangement: when someone offers free or discounted accommodation in exchange for sex. I’ve been studying the experiences of people in sex-for-rent arrangements, and will be publishing my findings over the coming year.

While such arrangements might come with a veneer of consent, research from the UK and US shows they are often exploitative and disempowering. They start with a power imbalance, usually economic, that allows one person to exploit another’s desperation for housing.

There is relatively little academic research on sex for rent in the UK. But what we do have so far is deeply concerning. A 2022 survey by campaign group Generation Rent estimated that over 200,000 women may have been offered free or discounted rent in exchange for sexual favours.

These offers sometimes appear on platforms like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, often couched in vague, euphemistic language: “reduced rent for suitable female tenant”, or “alternative arrangements can be discussed”.

Investigative journalism has shown that these ads typically target young women – especially students and those in insecure work.

While confirming that young women are heavily targeted, my ongoing research reveals how economically marginalised men are being exploited too. Through qualitative interviews with survivors of sex-for-rent, I am exploring how this exploitative practice occurs, who is targeted and why.

Participants like Andrew often work in the gig economy, where wages are low and unpredictable. Others are migrants with no access to benefits or housing assistance, making it near impossible to access stable accommodation. Their experiences of sex-for-rent are made worse by social stigma, masculine expectations of self-reliance and a lack of tailored support.

What I have found so far supports and expands on findings already established in existing research, which has found how sex-for-rent is advertised to young women online, and becoming a regular part of an insecure housing market.

Survivors told me that landladies as well as landlords were engaging in sexual exploitation via sex-for-rent. Landlords were often aware of participants’ financial struggles and framed the arrangement as “helping them out”. Participants who tried to leave said they were threatened with eviction – both legal and illegal – to trap them.

The 15 men I spoke to reported intense feelings of shame, degradation and emasculation. They were also often unaware of support services that might be able to help them, including housing charities or services for male victims of sexual violence. Many feared legal consequences, wrongly believing they had broken the law by “prostituting themselves” and doubted police would believe them.

The limits of the law

Sex-for-rent is technically illegal under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which states that sex-for-rent amounts to “controlling or inciting prostitution for gain”. Yet only two successful prosecutions have occurred – Christopher Cox in 2022 and Frederick Allyard in 2024.

It is unclear whether any further attempted prosecutions have occurred. But my research indicates that victims broadly believe that they themselves have committed an offence, rather than their landlords, grounded in the wrongful belief that sex work is a crime – it isn’t a crime to sell sex anywhere in the UK.

What is illegal is soliciting, brothel keeping and pimping, though these concepts are poorly defined in British law.

In 2023, the Home Office launched an open consultation on exchange of sexual relations for accommodation. While this is a welcome recognition of the issue, the consultation largely frames sex-for-rent as a matter of individual criminal landlords. It says little about why such exploitation persists – or how social conditions actively enable it.

Landlords hold far more power than tenants in the UK. Rents are among the highest in Europe, with projections suggesting that 2.2 million working adults could be priced out of the rental market by 2030.

The UK average rent is £1,339 per month, a more than 100% increase compared to ten years ago. People on lower incomes can spend up to 59% of their monthly wages on rent alone.

At the same time, wages have stagnated, housing benefit is inadequate, and those with insecure immigration status are locked out of public support entirely. Tenants begin from a position of reduced power, in a housing system that gives more power to the interests of landlords.

This system can be taken advantage of by predatory landlords, either through exploitation like sex-for-rent, or not keeping properties in liveable conditions.

Even if there were more prosecutions for sex-for-rent, it wouldn’t solve the problem alone. We can’t just focus on individual acts of criminality – sex-for-rent is the outcome of structural inequalities in housing, made possible by policy choices: the erosion of social housing, the deregulation of the private rental sector, the rise of precarious work and punitive immigration controls.

Properly addressing the problem would require more secure, affordable housing, an end to no recourse to public funds conditions and support services for all victims of sexual exploitation, not just women.

Over a decade of austerity has left many of these services hanging on by a thread. The current government could do worse than to reverse these trends. Sex-for-rent is not a fringe issue. It is a symptom of how deeply our housing and welfare systems have failed – and it demands a response as structural as the harm itself.

Chris Waugh 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. ‘Sex for rent’ is illegal in the UK. Why are thousands of people still affected? – https://theconversation.com/sex-for-rent-is-illegal-in-the-uk-why-are-thousands-of-people-still-affected-255744