By Savo Heleta, Researcher, Nelson Mandela University
Logan Cochrane, Associate Professor, Hamad Bin Khalifa University
Higher education institutions are frequent casualties in violent conflicts. In Palestine, Ukraine and Sudan, to mention only a few recent examples, university campuses have been bombed. Academics, staff and students have been killed, injured or displaced. Teaching, learning and research have been undermined or come to a halt.
Higher education plays a critical…
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By Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Assistant Professor, Harvard University
Lauretta Ngcobo, who passed away in 2015, left a singular and impactful literary legacy in South Africa. Even in a life of exile and resistance to apartheid and white minority rule in the country. As a novelist, feminist thinker and freedom fighter, her intellectual contributions were foundational.
Ngcobo’s work often deals with the realities of black…
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By Sharief Hendricks, Senior Lecturer Department of Human Biology, Faculty of Health Sciences , University of Cape Town
Children in South Africa are back at school after their summer holidays. My son, aged five, has just started school at Wynberg Boys Junior, a school based in Cape Town’s southern suburbs with a strong record of playing rugby.
Like most rugby-loving families in South Africa, we hope our child discovers the pleasures of the game. We would like him to enjoy the sport, but we want him to do it in the safest way possible.
As a contact sport, rugby has the potential to result in some serious injuries if players aren’t properly prepared and supervised. Full contact tackle rugby…
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By Keiichi Ohnaka, Associate professor, Universidad Andrés Bello (Chile)
Jacco van Loon, Reader in Astrophysics, Keele University
The WOH G64 star looked to be accelerating to its end of life. But now astronomers are not sure that’s the case.
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By Gemma Ware, Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation
Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest night in American sports. The 2026 NFL showdown between the New England…
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By Guest Contributor
Africa has 11 percent of the world’s population and 24 percent of the global disease burden, yet only 3 percent of the world’s health workers and less than 1 percent of global health expenditure.
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By Sangeeta Khorana, Professor of International Trade Policy, Aston University
The recently concluded EU-India free trade agreement is notable for the huge scale and ambition of the deal. Labelled the “mother of all deals” by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, it comes as India has overtaken Japan as the world’s fourth-largest economy.
Bilateral trade in goods and services between the EU and India is already worth €180…
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By Avidesh Seenath, Course Director, MSc Environmental Change and Management, University of Oxford
Scott Mahadeo, Lecturer in Economics, University of Reading
Recent storms washed away large sections of roads in the UK after sea defences were damaged. For residents, it was a shock. But for coastal scientists, it was not unexpected.
Parts of the A379 between Torcross and Slapton, in south Devon, collapsed leaving a 200-metre stretch of road broken apart and part of a nearby car park destroyed. Engineers say even steel-reinforced protection failed under repeated wave action.
The road runs along the crest of a shingle barrier beach, with the sea on one side and Slapton Ley, a freshwater lake, on the other. Recent…
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By Joan Monras, Labor Economics, IESE Business School (Universidad de Navarra)
With an upcoming amnesty for an estimated half a million undocumented workers, Spain is charting its own course on immigration policy, while also reinforcing its dependence on migrants to fuel economic growth.
“We are strengthening a migration model based on human rights, integration and coexistence, and compatible with economic growth and social cohesion,” said Elma Saiz, Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migrations, on announcing…
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By Maria C. Scott, Associate Professor of French Literature and Thought, University of Exeter
In May 2025, I came across an extraordinary photograph on the English Wikipedia site devoted to Jeanne Duval. Duval was the supposedly un-photographed Haiti-born long-term mistress and muse of the French poet Charles Baudelaire.
The portrait, showing a seated woman dressed in fine, bourgeois clothing, had been posted to Wikipedia by a student of art historian Justine de Young. De Young writes about the portrait as an example of self-fashioning in…
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