news, new scholarship & more from around the world
Malawi is struggling to contain a devastating mental health crisis, with official police statistics revealing that at least 2 014 people have killed themselves between 2022 and September 2025…. The data reveals that those committing suicide are predominantly aged 20 to 39, the country’s most economically and socially productive age group and overwhelmingly male.
Today, most research is done collaboratively. But research finds that when individual scholars have less academic freedom and universities’ autonomy declines, global research collaborations are also threatened. The prevalence and complexity of those collaborations that optimize human and material resources has grown, with substantial impact on scientific productivity — what we call the global “collaboration dividend.” Collaborations foster solutions to complex problems, from vaccine development to renewable energy. Diminishing academic freedom erodes these collaboration dividends, which then reduces the quantity and quality of scientific discovery worldwide.
In September, Adams presented a graphic about white supremacy during her graduate-level social work class titled “Diversity, Human Rights and Social Justice.” A student filed a complaint against her that drew issue with the inclusion of Make America Great Again on the graphic.
Scientists found that people who use both cannabis and tobacco show a distinct brain pattern tied to mood and stress regulation. Their scans revealed higher levels of an enzyme that reduces a natural feel-good molecule in the brain. This imbalance may help explain why co-users experience more anxiety and struggle more when quitting.
Dr. Wade Luquet, a Professor of Social Work at Gwynedd Mercy University, recently had the honor of introducing the keynote speaker at The Pennsylvania Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers conference. Civil rights pioneer Dr. Leona Tate… shared how her place in America’s history inspired her life of service. Above: The middle house is the childhood home of Dr. Wade Luquet, inset with Dr. Leona Tate, in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, across the street from McDonogh 19 Elementary School.
Labour claims that boosting military spending will produce employment growth. Far from it, argues Richard Norton Taylor, it funnels money to private contractors that should fund public services. Above: UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer aboard the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales as it is deployed for duty
Conventional economics – with its reliance on GDP growth – cannot respond to the global “polycrisis”. This is the overlap between climate change, biodiversity loss, energy and food insecurity and extreme inequality – all amplified by geopolitical instability. Recent research my colleagues and I conducted shows that a “new economics” is needed in the face of these challenges. Drawing on hundreds of sources across 38 schools of thought, we distilled ten principles focused on wellbeing, justice and ecological resilience that could offer a way to rethink national economic strategies.
GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy may extend the lives of colon cancer patients, according to a major UC San Diego study. Patients on the medications had less than half the mortality rate of non-users. Researchers suspect the drugs’ anti-inflammatory and metabolic effects contribute to improved outcomes. They’re now calling for clinical trials to test whether these findings reflect a true anti-cancer mechanism.
This article is my personal account. I am an education researcher nearing the end of my doctoral studies at Durham University in the United Kingdom. As a transnational academic, I maintain strong connections with my home country, Vietnam, by building professional communities and sharing academic knowledge with practising teachers.
Alaska has unique challenges that differentiate it from the Lower 48, but the struggles that rural residents in particular face to access food are indicative of a larger pattern across the country. The lack of investment in the social safety net on the federal and state levels will have consequences for all low-income Americans, but especially those in states like Alaska that are already struggling to successfully administer benefits. Above: Like many communities in Alaska, Unalakleet—completely disconnected from the state’s road system—is only accessible by plane.
At the core of Campaign University is the idea that there is no separation between what happens within the church and what happens in the government. Students are taught to interpret the First Amendment’s establishment clause on the separation of church and state as a protection against government involvement in religion, rather than vice versa. Previously, churches risked losing their tax-exempt status by discussing or engaging in politics. Then this summer, the Internal Revenue Service decided to allow religious leaders to endorse political candidates from the pulpit, a decision Schatzline took as a green light for him and other pastors to ramp up political activity.
In a 2023 meta-analysis of electronic performance monitoring, psychologist Daniel Ravid and his colleagues found that watching workers tends to have the opposite of its intended effect. It ultimately fails to achieve its core aim—actually improving performance. The more intense the monitoring, the more performance declines. The findings, published in Personnel Psychology, also linked surveillance to higher rates of burnout and turnover. Another report—the 2023 IPC study—found that monitored employees report significantly higher stress, heavier workloads, poorer relationships with supervisors, and greater career uncertainty than their non-monitored peers.
Anyone who reads history knows who is usually behind book burning. The film illustrates this bluntly by pairing footage of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels leading university students in burning thousands of books in Berlin in May 1933, followed by a more recent example of a pastor leading a book burning in the Nashville suburb of Mt. Juliet, Tennessee in February 2022.
The survey of more than 90,000 military personnel – including full-time personnel referred to as regulars, and part-time reservists – highlights a wide spectrum of harassment – from verbal to physical.
For many, the hardest part of dying isn’t physical pain but the fear, anxiety and sense of meaninglessness that often accompany it. While palliative care in the UK is rightly praised for easing pain and managing symptoms, patients’ emotional and spiritual suffering is often less well addressed. Standard treatments – such as antidepressants, counselling and mindfulness – may ease some symptoms but often fail to help patients accept their diagnosis or find meaning in their remaining time. This is where psychedelic therapy may offer support.
The Irish Congress of Trade Union have labelled the move as a “payment freeze”. Congress general secretary Owen Reidy said: “The anger of the trade union movement at this stealth cut to Jobseeker’s Pay-Related Benefit is compounded by a budget that does next to nothing to protect the living standards of the average worker.
Same-sex marriage is not allowed in China, and censorship of LGBTQ topics online and in film and literature has tightened in recent years. Conservative voices say that such groups risk creating conflict in society and are speeding up population decline.
Democracy collapses when humiliation becomes the organizing principle of politics, when revenge feels more righteous than inclusion. Above: Escape from New York (1981).
Researchers have uncovered surprising evidence that anxiety may be controlled not by neurons but by two dueling groups of immune cells inside the brain. These microglia act like biological pedals—one pushing anxiety forward and the other holding it back.
Like previous government shutdowns, the one that ended this week didn’t halt federal agencies’ work across the board. Some things were paused; others kept chugging along.
By now you’re probably familiar with the long list of sins the tech industry is committing with the machine learning models it insists on calling “Artificial Intelligence.” These tools regularly hallucinate made-up nonsense, plagiarize peoples’ art, pollute the internet with disinformation and low-quality content-slop, use multiple cities worth of electricity, consume a preposterous amount of fresh water, and have also started to induce novel forms of psychosis in the people who use them. But beyond all this, perhaps the most maddening aspect of the AI trend is that it’s being forced on us.
A north London council has brought in new social care leadership after it was revealed more than 1,000 emails had been left unread. Haringey Council received a safeguarding complaint from the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman in October. An investigation found about 1,100 emails were left unopened in the council’s social work inbox between 2019 and 2023, including 500 police reports.
As Europe races to digitalise its social protection systems, the promise of efficiency collides with the reality of exclusion—creating a paradox where the most vulnerable risk being left furthest behind.
In the wake of the USAID funding cut announcements in January 2025, confusion reigned. Although some programmes were later told they could resume limited activities, the dismantled infrastructure – ending leases, firing staff and stopping essential care – had already destroyed the system. This instability also breached work contracts, causing legal problems for employers and distress for employees. The cuts raised serious ethical concerns by demanding the end of some clinical trials without concern for the proper medical procedures for stopping patient treatment.
At the Ypsilanti city council meeting where Pedri spoke, the town voted to officially fight against the construction of the data center. The University of Michigan says the project is not a data center, but a “high-performance computing facility” and it promises it won’t be used to “manufacture nuclear weapons.” The distinction and assertion are ringing hollow for Ypsilanti residents who oppose construction of the data center, have questions about what it would mean for the environment and the power grid, and want to know why a nuclear weapons lab 24 hours away by car wants to build an AI facility in their small town.
I found myself appreciating Die My Love primarily as an antidote to tradwife propaganda. Like so many influencer accounts, the film serves up scene after scene of a beautiful blond woman — with professionally styled hair and makeup — cavorting in green fields and caring for her infant in gorgeously photographed settings. But every single one of these scenes is terrifying, cringe-inducing or both.
For the vast majority of my psychotherapy patients, the gravitational pull of phones and social media alters the most important aspects of who they are, their relationships with others and how they move through the world. This is true for most of us. Our uptake of technology has been so rapid that we are losing the ability to notice how it feels to live this way. Occasionally, in therapeutic conversations, a patient can get in touch with these feelings. It often looks like grief.
More than 15 million Canadians are single. Why are we being charged for it?
Academic censorship often begins not with overt repression but with the discursive framing of a perceived threat. Such campaigns unfold in three phases: casting dissenters as existential threats, amplifying the threat through media and political discourse, and publicly penalizing dissent to deter others. Dissent is reimagined as deviance—a danger to institutional integrity, societal order, or national security—thereby justifying repressive measures (Cohen 1972; Hall et al. 1978). Universities have historically participated in this process. During the McCarthy era, the House Un-American Activities Committee policed political ideology through public hearings and blacklists, prompting institutions to enforce conformity. At the University of California, the board of regents imposed a loyalty oath in 1950, resulting in thirty-one terminations; over 100 faculty nationwide lost positions under similar pressures (Heins 2013; Schrecker 1986). These dismissals were not isolated policy decisions—they were performative acts of ideological purification designed to signal compliance and suppress resistance.
As EU member states transpose the EU’s Platform Work directive into national law, the experience following the Spanish Rider Law reveals the challenges in adapting to an economy increasingly impacted by algorithmically managed digital platforms.
Hundreds of social workers came together… for the City of Wolverhampton Council’s 10th annual Adults and Children’s Joint Social Work Conference.
This week, BASW Cymru and SWU took our joint campaign – Stronger Social Work, Better Lives – which calls for a better supported and resourced social work profession, to the Senedd.
tates are facing an increasingly hostile USDA, which spent the shutdown threatening to retaliate against states that didn’t follow their dictates. Above: LUCHA, Lutheran Social Services, and Arizona Early Childhood Alliance hold a “Food on Every Table” press conference at the First Evangelical Church in Mesa, Arizona, November 4, 2025.
The Ad Council’s Sound It Out campaign recently launched a new podcast, Listen In, led by Dr. Lindsey and other mental health experts. It focuses on how parents can support their children’s wellbeing through bite-sized 10- to 15-minute episodes.
National Domestic Violence Hotline: People who have experienced domestic abuse can get confidential help at thehotline.org or by calling 800-799-7233.
Measures came into force in July as part of the Online Safety Act, meaning online and social media companies are now legally responsible for keeping children and young people safe online. The experiment, in collaboration with BBC Morning Live, used the same profiles and repeated the same exercise as a May investigation. Above: A lot of the content the girls were shown was related to bullying and suicide
A sustained campaign of anti-migrant rhetoric is fuelling a growing cesspool of racism, including against international and ethnic minority nursing staff, without whom our health and care system would simply cease to function.
Rabya Kataria’s powerful reflection on the workplace bullying she experienced and the promise she made if she became a manager
JS sat on her porch near Binghamton, New York (above), with toys, furniture, garbage bags full of clothing and other possessions piled up around her. She and her partner were being evicted after falling behind on rent. So last June, they and their children — then ages three, 12 and 15 — turned to New York’s emergency shelter system for help. It was built to provide homeless residents not only beds, but also food, help finding permanent housing and sometimes child care so parents can find work, attend school or look for apartments. JS and her family received almost none of that. Instead of placing them in a shelter, the Broome County Department of Social Services cycled them through four roadside hotels over three months, where they mostly had to fend for themselves.
On November 7, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) concluded negotiated rulemaking by the Reimagining and Improving Student Education (RISE) committee focused on restructuring student loans, phasing out Grad PLUS loans for graduate and professional students, establishing new loan limits, and simplifying repayment plans as established under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). As part of this rulemaking, ED proposed and reached consensus on a definition of “professional student” that would impact borrowing capacity for current and future social work students.
The news comes with the regulator having increased its fees for practitioners by a third this year, meaning that the initial registration and annual renewal fees have both increased from £90 to £120. The decision was made despite opposition from the vast majority of about 8,000 respondents – mostly social workers – to its consultation and from the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), Social Workers Union (SWU) and UNISON.
A biography of the tech company’s founder Alex Karp reveals the philosophy behind its troubling conquest of the world
In early November 2025, it was reported that Sheffield Hallam University had paused Professor Laura Murphy’s research on Uyghur forced labour in China, later apologised, and restarted the work. Media outlets linked the pause to pressure from Chinese authorities. South Yorkshire Police have referred the allegations on to counter-terrorism police as they are thought to fall under the National Security Act. A spokesperson for Sheffield Hallam said the pause arose from insurance and other procedural issues and denied any China-related commercial motive.
Charity Karma Nirvana, who supports victims and survivors of HBA, welcomed the Government’s latest plans, warning HBA “remains one of the most hidden and complex forms of violence in our society”. New figures released by the Home Office show the Met Police recorded 539 HBA offences in the year to March, a 35% increase from 398 the year before. The force implemented a new crime recording system in February 2024, which the Home Office said is likely to have impacted local figures and driven a national increase.
Nikalie Monroe says she only had around 300 followers when she embarked on a social experiment that has left churches across the United States up in arms. Her idea was simple: call a church, tell them she’s a struggling mother who ran out of baby formula, and ask if they could help.
Jessica Adams, a lecturer in the IU School of Social Work, said a student in her class for master’s students, “Diversity, Human Rights and Social Justice,” made the complaint to the office of Sen. Jim Banks (R-Indiana).
A Texas A&M University faculty committee created in the wake of two high-profile controversies that raised concerns about political interference in academic and personnel decisions found that the recent firing of English professor Melissa McCoul violated her academic freedom.
A common trope is the idea that democratic societies are chaotic and failing. Coverage might exaggerate crime, corruption, and social disorder, or highlight public protests, economic stagnation, or governmental instability as evidence that democracies are not working. The underlying message is that democracy leads to chaos. Some stories focus on making progressive values in western societies seem weird. They ridicule progressive social change regarding, for example, LGBTQ+ rights or multiculturalism, making them seem illogical or silly.
Dr. Leonard Bright, president of the Texas A&M Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said faculty were not consulted on the proposed changes, which he called “a direct violation” of their expertise and freedom to teach. “And if that’s the case, there’s just going to be a further black eye on higher education here in Texas,” he said. Above: Texas A&M University students gather around the statue of former university President Lawrence Sullivan Ross for a protest in defense of academic freedom
Megan Garcia had no idea her teenage son Sewell, a “bright and beautiful boy”, had started spending hours and hours obsessively talking to an online character on the Character.ai app in late spring 2023…. Families around the world have been impacted. Earlier this week the BBC reported on a young Ukrainian woman with poor mental health who received suicide advice from ChatGPT, as well as another American teenager who killed herself after an AI chatbot role-played sexual acts with her.