By Sarah Elaine Eaton, Professor and Research Chair, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary
Beatriz Antonieta Moya Figueroa, Assistant Professor, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary
Rahul Kumar, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education, Brock University
Robert Brennan, Professor of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Calgary
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is now a reality in higher education, with students and professors integrating chatbots into teaching, learning and assessment. But this isn’t just a technical shift; it’s reshaping how students and educators learn and evaluate knowledge.
Our recent qualitative study with 28 educators across Canadian universities and colleges — from librarians to engineering professors — suggests that we have entered a watershed moment in education.
We must grapple with…
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By Matthew Hoffmann, Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of Environmental Governance Lab, University of Toronto
Everyone who cares about climate action must now grapple with how climate politics can function in a new world of uncertainty.
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By James Horncastle, Assistant Professor and Edward and Emily McWhinney Professor in International Relations, Simon Fraser University
As the Donald Trump administration in the United States continues to threaten Canadian sovereignty — including a recent suggestion that Alberta could secede from Canada and join the U.S. — Canadians, like many others in the world, finds themselves in a period of extreme uncertainty.
Trump’s continued violations of the…
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By Aaron Thierry, PhD Candidate, Social Science, Cardiff University
In Brownsville, Texas, three members of the Galvan family died after a malfunctioning air conditioner left them exposed to extreme heat. Aged between 60 and 82, all three had chronic health conditions, including diabetes and heart disease. This makes it harder for the body to regulate temperature and increases vulnerability to heat stress.
Nobody arrived to check on them until days after they had died in their apartment in 2024. This isolation also
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By Steve Waters, Professor of scriptwriting and playwright, University of East Anglia
“One must have a heart of stone not to read about the death of little Nell without laughing” was Oscar Wilde’s notorious response to the emotional onslaught of Charles Dickens’s 1841 novel, The Old Curiosity Shop. Having watched two films in two weeks about the death of a child, it offers a clue as to why I cried in only one.
In her journals, the novelist Helen…
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By Rachael Jolley, Environment Editor, The Conversation
This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage was first published in our award-winning weekly climate action newsletter, Imagine.
“Iran is experiencing not one environmental crisis but the convergence of several: water shortages, land subsidence, air pollution and energy failure. All added together, life is a struggle for survival.”
This is the situation inside Iran as described by Nima Shokri, an environmental engineer who works on global challenges related to the environment. Shokri highlights a rarely discussed factor in relation to this year’s massive…
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By Anthony Booker, Reader in Ethnopharmacology, University of Westminster
Some of the best-known medicines come from poisonous plants. The chemotherapy drug taxol comes from the yew tree, morphine from the opium poppy and digoxin from the foxglove. These plants can have lethal toxicity if taken in their raw form. Digoxin is prescribed to treat angina at doses a thousand times more dilute than most prescription medications, highlighting the plant’s extreme potency.
Many people consider herbal medicines a safe alternative to pharmaceuticals. And it’s true that many herbal medicines…
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By Darío Moreno-Agostino, Principal Research Fellow in Population Mental Health, UCL
It’s been almost five years since the end of the COVID lockdowns. Yet the world is still continuing to learn about how mental health changed during – and after – this unprecedented time.
My colleagues and I wanted to understand how mental health had changed across the life course of baby boomers and generation X – including during and beyond the pandemic.
We also wanted to understand if (and how) gender and socioeconomic inequalities had changed throughout these periods. Previous research we’d conducted had shown that large, existing gender inequalities in mental ill-health…
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By Vanessa Corcoran, Adjunct Professor of History, Georgetown University
Medieval texts and frescoes show how Francis of Assisi’s legends formed – and why his call to poverty and care for creation still resonates.
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By C. Clare Strange, Assistant Research Professor of Criminology and Justice Studies, Drexel University
“The Real Housewives” reality TV series, which showcases the lives of a rotating cast of wealthy women in 11 cities in the U.S. and places in several other countries, is famous for its characters’ over-the-top drama and messy personal antics.
But there are also useful lessons that the characters’ lives and frequent run-ins with the law offer to casual observers and criminology students alike.
I developed the idea for The Real Housewives of Criminology…
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