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For more than a decade now, the Stella Prize, an award celebrating Australian women’s writing, has been changing Australia’s literary landscape. It has taken a monkey wrench to the way literary esteem is bestowed in this country. Its annual whack has shifted the calibration of what kinds of books are valued.

This year’s shortlist is, as we have come to expect, a celebration of unruliness, activism and vivid writing. Reading these books back to back, my overwhelming impression was one of emotional intensity. They are full of pain, shock, desire, anger, grief, horror and joy.

They are also marked by different forms of literary experimentation, particularly in their use of personal experience – whether in fiction, memoir, autofiction or lyric essay. It is not surprising that such experimentation is found in a shortlist published almost entirely by smaller and independent publishers, whose role in Australia’s literary industry has long been to support works that push the boundaries.

This year’s shortlist draws attention to works of literature that don’t offer much in the way of consolation, but might shake up how you see the world and your place in it.

The Swift Dark Tide – Katia Ariel

Gazebo Books

The Swift Dark Tide is a lyrical memoir about love and desire, family and inheritance. It is a multi-directional love-letter addressed to the author’s parents and grandparents, her children, her husband, and her new lover, referred to in the book as “you”.

This is a coming-out story: a tender and vulnerable celebration of the realisation of queer desire in midlife. At the heart of the book is a grand and complicated love affair taking place across two established relationships. Ariel is in a loving marriage with a man when she falls for her new lover. They enter into an open relationship, with all of its complexities.

In the familiar narrative of all-consuming love, everything is swept up in its wake. Here we see love situated in a daily context of parenting and logistics across two families, but also in transnational and intergenerational contexts.

As Ariel tells the story of her love affair, she unravels the histories of family members who migrated to Australia from Odessa. Their characters are portrayed in loving detail in a memoir that does not hold back from self-disclosure.

Body Friend – Katherine Brabon

Ultimo Press

Katherine Brabon’s Body Friend is a hypnotic, uncomfortable novel about chronic pain and female friendship. The reader meets its protagonist, who lives with an autoimmune condition, as she is about to undergo surgery. The book follows her period of convalescence and pays careful attention to the details of embodied experience. What emerges is a many-sided picture of how pain shapes relationships and selfhood.

The story is based around two friendships that develop in the wake of the protagonist’s surgery. The intensity of these relationships and the forms of identification they allow feel at once surreal and lifelike.

The novel explores the deep pleasure of a friendship with someone who understands your experience and gives you permission to withdraw from the world. But it also looks at the power of friendship to open the door to new ways of being and push you to do more than you thought you could.

In addition to exploring different modes of responding to chronic pain, the relationships at the heart of Body Friend present friendship as sustaining and challenging, marked by the play of identification, attachment and jealousy.

Reading this novel was claustrophobic and compelling. Body Friend explores the difficulty of fitting pain or illness – especially that experienced by women – into available narrative frameworks. It dispenses with the notion of a satisfying plot of recovery. Its structure is cyclical and the pacing is slow, but it is gripping nonetheless.

Feast – Emily O’Grady

Allen & Unwin

You know when people say in praise of a novel, “I couldn’t put it down”? There were a few times when reading Emily O’Grady’s Feast that I had to put it down because I was so shocked by what it had revealed about its characters.

O’Grady is in full force here. She is doing something quite new with the established genre of the domestic gothic. The novel opens with the scene of a rabbit caught in a trap and goes on to plumb the question: what enables people to wield and abuse power over others?

Feast takes place in an old house in the Scottish countryside, owned by retired actress Alison and her partner, a famous musician. The house is the setting for a birthday party at which multiple pasts are revealed.

The story is triangulated through the perspectives of Alison, her stepdaughter Neve, and Neve’s mother Shannon. These women are differently implicated in a devastating story of cruelty and control. Among the many things that impressed me about Feast is its creation of characters who feel as odd and confusing, appealing and awful, as people are in real life.

Praiseworthy – Alexis Wright

Giramondo

Praiseworthy is a novel that invites – perhaps requires – its readers to rethink their approach to reading fiction. Character, plot, setting, tone: all are called into question.

Allegory is at work – a central character is named “Aboriginal Sovereignty” – but as Mykaela Saunders has written, the literal and the metaphorical are not easily distinguished in the world of the novel.

The remote town of Praiseworthy is covered in an ancestral haze that carries a slippery metaphorical meaning. A kind of hero, Cause Man Steel, is driving the town (and his wife) crazy with his plan to ensure the survival of his people through a scheme to harness the transport energy of the country’s millions of feral donkeys, anticipating a time when the petrol runs out.

Through the madcap antics of Cause and his donkeys, a sharp thread of grief and rage is evident. This focuses on questions of climate emergency and assimilation, and the novel works in complex ways to provide a sense of what it feels like to be living at the pointy end of both. The latter is given unforgettable weight through the perspective of Cause Man Steel’s youngest son, whose inhalation of media hysteria about Indigenous communities has tragic consequences.

Wright does not make it easy to know what to think of all this: the Ancestors are at work, but they might have bigger fish to fry. Written in a register that is expansive and surprising, Alexis Wright’s prose is like nothing you will encounter elsewhere.

Hospital – Sanya Rushdi

Giramondo

In Sanya Rushdi’s Hospital, the narrator – and thus the reader – is never clear about what is real. This is a work of autofiction, in which the protagonist shares a name and some biographical details with the author.

Hospital explores how Sanya, a student of psychology, navigates experiences of psychosis, medication and forced institutionalisation. She is living with and being treated for psychosis. The experience is one in which time slips, motivations are unclear, and personal agency is obstructed at every turn.

Family members call the Crisis Assessment and Treatment Team to visit Sanya at home, and their perceived role shifts from caring interlocutors to enforcers of a medication regime she actively resists. She is taken, in turn, to a group home and then to a hospital psychiatric ward, where she finds her analysis of her own situation undermined and ignored.

Translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha, Hospital is written in an understated tone that does not sensationalise the experiences it portrays. The use of first person is important in keeping the focus on Sanya’s thoughts and feelings, not on how she is diagnosed by others.

Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead – Hayley Singer

Upswell

Abandon Every Hope is a collection of lyrical essays that laments the violence meted out by humans against farmed animals. This violence is presented in brutal, shocking detail. The writing is always aware of the entanglement of human and animal lives.

Perhaps the most stunning, and shocking, essay in the collection is Inferno: an account of the effect of COVID on the interface between humans and farm animals in the United States, where restaurant closures and infections in processing plants led to the “inelastic agricultural supply chain” grinding to a halt.

But this is an industry that cannot just “stop” its work of breeding and slaughtering animals. New techniques were developed to euthanise millions of pigs and chickens. Poorly protected workers were infected in high numbers.

Like many of the essays in the collection, Inferno reveals how the farming of animals relies on a disregard for the rights of animals, and the humans who are employed to kill and “process” them.

Singer’s grief and her experiences during COVID are at the forefront of many of these essays. They are not easy reading. They take the reader directly into the slaughterhouse, and they are difficult to forget. Läs mer…

“Bluey mania” shows no sign of abating. Bluey’s season finale, The Sign, was the most viewed ABC program of all time on iView.

A “hidden” follow-up episode, aptly named The Surprise, created a storm of headlines around the world, many of which have a decidedly adult tone.

As highlighted in social media fan communities and articles, the show has struck a chord with adults, many of whom aren’t parents. What do they get from a show that is ostensibly “for kids”?

Parents love Bluey (sometimes more than kids)

Our research with children aged 7-9 and their parents provides evidence of how enraptured adults are by Bluey. Our findings also suggest it’s the parents who often drive household Bluey obsessions.

As one mum told us:

If we could tell the Australian TV gods something that we’d like to have on Australian TV, it would be more Bluey, don’t get rid of Bluey. […] Bluey is loved by mums a lot.

Another explained how the show provided learning for parents:

It’s the gentle parenting, kindness, empathy for the children, the humour […] And helping kids [and] families work through real life situations with kindness and compassion.

When one eight-year-old and his mum told us about their favourite shows, the following exchange took place:

Mum:: What about Bluey? Son: I sometimes [watch it]… Mum: You don’t want to say. He doesn’t want to say he watches Bluey. Bluey’s fantastic. Son: I sometimes- Mum: He wants to be a big boy. […] Everyone in this room probably loves Bluey. It’s not just for kids. Son: Enough about that.

Beyond families, Bluey has also attracted teen and adult fans without kids – in part thanks to a vibrant TikTok community (aka #blueytok). While some commentary suggests this adult fandom is “weird”, Bluey is only the latest in a long line of “children’s” shows with a passionate adult fanbase.

Shifting barriers in television

The distinction between “children’s” and “adult” television has long been crucial to our cultural understandings of what separates a child from an adult.

In the 1950s, academics were concerned children were watching TV content that was too mature for them, turning them into “adultised children”, and that adults watching kids’ shows were becoming “infantile adults”.

The industry took note. In 1957, a reduction in children’s TV production in the United States made space for so-called “kidult” shows designed for both age groups.

Since then, the boundaries between children’s and adult television have continually shifted. In television’s early days, science fiction was associated with child audiences (which is why many initially assumed Star Trek was a kids’ show).

These boundaries were also influenced by television scheduling. Warner Bros’ early animation shorts were initially all-ages theatrical releases, but in 1960 were packaged into the Bugs Bunny Show – pitched for kids and aired on Saturday mornings. As a result, by 1967 animation was considered kids’ fare.

The boundaries shifted again in the 1980s as adult Japanese anime such as Akira (1988) became popular in the West.

In 1989, The Simpsons debuted on TV. Our research reveals even today there is confusion regarding the show’s suitability for young children. Some of our seven-to-nine-year-old participants described secretly watching it without their parents’ knowledge.

Childhood healing

Bluey’s adult appeal is credited to the show’s playful yet emotionally complex content. One reason adults tune into today’s kids’ TV is because it’s far more diverse than the shows they could access growing up.

For many adults Bluey is a better experience of kids’ TV than what they grew up with.
ABC

Take 19-year-old Bluey fan Darby Rose, who points to an episode in which a Jack Russell terrier has ADHD. “As a neurodivergent person myself, this representation makes me ecstatic,” Rose says. This is also true of many teen programs, with the queer-friendly high-school romance Heartstopper attracting a large adult following.

It’s not just childhood nostalgia that drives adults to kids’ shows (although this is one aspect). Watching kids’ shows can be self-affirming for adults who missed out on seeing their identity onscreen growing up. Some adult fans even say Bluey has helped them heal childhood wounds.

Children’s television meets adult fan cultures

Watching “adult” television enables kids to feel more grown-up. Conversely, adults can watch children’s television to embrace aspects of their personality they feel social pressure to repress.

The latter is often the case for “Bronies” (a portmanteau for “bro” and “pony”): adult male fans of the animated kids’ show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (2010-20). The community has attracted much controversy. But research has found the reasons behind being a Brony aren’t suspicious or bizarre, but are empowering in unexpected ways.

As Bronies themselves have explained, the fandom allows them to rethink what masculinity means to them, with the support of other fans online and at events such as BronyCon.

Why can’t “manliness” include watching a cute show about ponies with friendship at its heart?

The 2012 BronyCon event in New Jersey attracted about 4,000 My Little Pony fans.
Mel Evans/AP

The changing nature of children’s television

The rise of streaming has led to yet another shift. On-demand viewing means freedom from the constraints of TV scheduling, which historically set the terms for “child” and “adult” viewing.

As our book details, Netflix has invested in the expansion of cultural expectations around what makes “child-appropriate” television.

Netflix’s mega hit Stranger Things deliberately pushes at these boundaries to attract a wide audience, from children and teens, to families, to adults without kids. As co-creator Matt Duffer explains, the aim was to get children hooked on the show, and then later in the season “scare the shit out of them. Then the parents can get mad.”

Parents certainly aren’t mad about their children getting hooked on Bluey. They may even be the secret to its global success: to keep the children watching, get the adults hooked. Läs mer…

What’s been described as the largest underpayment class action in Australian legal history has just been settled. Who was allegedly underpaid? Thousands of junior doctors who, subject to court approval, are set to share back-pay of more than a quarter of a million dollars.

Amireh Fakhouri, who brought the claim on behalf of junior doctors in New South Wales, alleged that when they worked in the state’s public health system from December 2014 to December 2020, NSW Health had failed to pay the overtime and weekend meal break entitlements she and her colleagues were owed.

More than 20,000 claimants are now set to be eligible for a share in the nearly A$230 million settlement.

But repayment was never the main goal of the class action. Fakhouri, who is now training as a GP in Victoria, said she hoped instead it would change the work culture in medicine.

A rite of passage?

Our health-care system has routinely relied on the labour of junior doctors. These include interns (those who have completed their university medical training and are in their first year of being practising doctors), residents (who have completed their internship and hold a general registration) and registrars (specialists in training).

Junior doctors often provide much of the staffing for night and weekend shifts and complete burdensome administrative tasks for consultants (senior doctors).

Overworking junior doctors has been normalised for decades. We see this depicted in books (such as The House of God and This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor) and TV shows (such as House and Scrubs).

The TV series This is Going to Hurt is based on the book by former UK junior doctor Adam Kay.

This is a safety issue. Doctor fatigue has considerable effects on patient safety through potential medical errors, poor quality patient care, longer patient recovery, reduced physician empathy and impacts on the doctor-patient relationship.

A 2020 study found that when doctors reported even moderate tiredness their chance of making a medical error rose by 53%.

Put simply, stretched, demoralised and tired doctors will do harm. Eventually, that will affect you.

It’s not just long hours

The expectation of working long hours is only part of the culture of medicine.

Our research and global evidence shows “teaching by humiliation” and other forms of verbal mistreatment have also been normalised.

A 2018 study of NSW interns and residents found more than 50% experienced bullying. Some 16-19% (mostly female) experienced sexual harassment.

Some of the junior doctors who are victims of mistreatment later become the perpetrators, perpetuating this harmful culture.

Junior doctors are suffering

The impact of long hours on junior doctors and of the abuse they are subjected to is vividly evident through research, including ours. Junior doctors have significantly high levels of depression, anxiety and thoughts of suicide.

As we’ve been saying for almost a decade, there is a desperate need for better work-life balance for junior doctors and deep culture change in our health-care system.

But there is often little sympathy for junior doctors. In 2022, one hospital threatened to remove comfortable lounges to prevent juniors napping on quiet night shifts. Just last week, we heard of a similar case involving junior doctors at another hospital, who were told “sleeping is not part of your job description”.

A culture of silence

This class action was needed because on a day-to-day basis, junior doctors mostly do not complain.

They internalise distress as failure (not being tough enough) and fear that a diagnosis of depression or anxiety will result in patients and colleagues avoiding them.

They don’t report mistreatment or reject overwork as, often, their
senior doctors control their career progression.

This is important, because contrary to perceptions of doctors as wealthy elites, our research shows junior doctors often find it hard to progress, get a job in their city of choice, or find full-time roles. The pressure on junior doctors to “make it” in an increasingly competitive environment grows stronger. Such professional problems reinforce the culture of not complaining for fear of blow-back.

Most of those who do take action, report ineffective or personally harmful outcomes when reporting to senior colleagues. This fulfils a vicious cycle of silence as junior doctors become ill but do not seek help.

We wanted to lift the silence

We used theatre to lift the culture of silence about health-care worker distress due to workplace pressure.

We conducted interviews with junior and senior doctors about their experiences and used their verbatim stories to craft the script of the play Grace Under Pressure.

The aim is for this “verbatim theatre” to facilitate conversations and actions that promote positive culture change.

What needs to be done?

It often takes brave public legal action such as this lawsuit to catalyse culture change – to nudge hospitals to prevent junior doctors from working back-to-back shifts, to protect time off for a personal life, ensure meal breaks, and provide means to hold powerful senior doctors to account.

Culture change is hard, slow and requires multi-pronged strategies. We need a safe way for junior doctors to report their concerns, and training so they know their options for responding to mistreatment. We need senior doctors and hospital managers to be trained in how to encourage and respond constructively to complaints.

Our research shows that when this happens, culture change is possible. Läs mer…

You go to the gym, eat healthy and walk as much as possible. You wash your hands and get vaccinated. You control your health. This is a common story we tell ourselves. Unfortunately, it’s not quite true.

Factors outside our control have huge influence – especially products which can sicken or kill us, made by companies and sold routinely.

For instance, you and your family have been exposed for decades to dangerous forever chemicals, some of which are linked to kidney and testicular cancers. You’re almost certainly carrying these chemicals, known as PFAS or forever chemicals, in your body right now.

And that’s just the start. We now know exposure to just four classes of product – tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods and fossil fuels – are linked to one out of every three deaths worldwide. That is, they’re implicated in 19 of the world’s 56 million deaths each year (as of 2019). Pollution – largely from fossil fuels – is now the single largest environmental cause of premature death. Communities of colour and low-income communities experience disproportionate impacts; For example, over 90% of pollution related deaths occur in low middle income countries.

This means the leading risk factor for disease and death worldwide is corporations who make, market and sell these unhealthy products. Worse, even when these corporations become aware of the harms their products cause, they have often systematically hidden these harms to boost profits at the expense of our health. Major tobacco, oil, food, pharmaceutical and chemical corporations have all applied similar techniques, privatising the profits and spreading the harms.

Tobacco companies long questioned the link between smoking and cancer.
Nopphon_1987/Shutterstock

Profit and loss statements

When companies act to conceal the harm their products do, they prevent us from protecting ourselves and our children. We now have many well-documented cases of corporate wrongdoing, such as asbestos, fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides) sugar, silica, and of course tobacco. In these instances, corporations intentionally manufactured doubt or hid the harms of their products to delay or prevent regulation and maintain profits.

Decades of empirical evidence shows these effective tactics have actually been shared and strategically passed from one industry or company to the next.

For instance, when large tobacco companies Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds bought food companies Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco in the 1980s, tobacco executives brought across marketing strategies, flavouring and colourings to expand product lines and engineered fatty, sweet and salty hyperpalatable foods such as cookies, cereals and frozen foods linked to obesity and diet-related diseases. These foods activate our reward circuits and encourage us to consume more.

Or consider how ‘forever chemicals’ became so widespread. A team of scientists (including this article’s co-author) investigated previously secret internal industry documents from 3M and DuPont, the largest makers of forever chemicals PFOA and PFOS.

The documents showed both 3M and DuPont used tactics from the tobacco industry’s playbook, such as suppressing unfavourable research and distorting public debate. Like Big Tobacco, 3M and DuPont had a financial interest in suppressing scientific evidence of the harms of their products, while publicly declaring in-demand products such as Teflon were safe.

For decades, forever chemicals PFOA and PFOS have been used to make Teflon pans, Scotchgard, firefighting foam and other non-stick materials. By the early 2000s, one of these, PFOS, ended up in our blood at 20 times the level its manufacturer, 3M, considered safe.

As early as 1961, the chief toxicologist at DuPont’s Teflon subsidiary reported the company’s wonder-material had “the ability to increase the size of the liver of rats at low doses”, and recommended the chemicals be handled “with extreme care”. According to a 1970 internal memo, the DuPont-funded Haskell Laboratory found the chemical class C8 (now known as PFOA/PFOS) was “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested”.

Teflon was hailed as a wonder material, making non-stick pans possible. But the original chemicals used to make Teflon were dangerous.
Minko Dima/Shutterstock

Both 3M and DuPont did extensive internal research on the risks their products posed to humans, but they shared little of it. The risks of PFOA including pregnancy-induced hypertension, kidney and testicular cancers, and ulcerative colitis was not publicly established until 2011.

Now, 60 years after DuPont first learned of the harms these products could cause, many countries are facing the human and environmental consequences and a very expensive cleanup.

Even though the production of PFOA and PFOS is being phased out, forever chemicals are easily stored in the body and take decades to break down. Worse, PFOA and PFOS are just two of over 15,000 different PFAS chemicals, most of which are still in use.

How can we prevent corporate injury to our health?

My co-author and I work in the field known as commercial determinants of health, which is to say, the damage corporations can do to us.

Corporate wrongdoing can directly injure or even kill us.

One of the key ways companies have been able to avoid regulation and lawsuits is by hiding the evidence. Internal studies showing harm can be easily hidden. External studies can be influenced, either by corporate funding, business-friendly scientists, legal action or lobbying policymakers to avoid regulation.

Here are three ways to prevent this happening again:

1) Require corporations to adhere to the same standards of data sharing and open science as independent scientists do.

If a corporation wants to bring a new product to market, they should have to register and publicly release every study they plan to conduct on its harms so the public can see the results of the study.

2) Sever the financial links between industry and researchers or policymakers.

Many large corporations will spend money on public studies to try to get favourable outcomes for their own interests. To cut these financial ties means boosting public health research, either through government funding or alternatives such as a tax on corporate marketing. It would also mean capping corporate political donations and bringing lobbying under control by restricting corporate access and spending to policymakers and increasing transparency. And it would mean stopping the revolving door where government employees or policymakers work for the industry they used to regulate once they leave office.

3) Mandate public transparency of corporate funding to researchers and policymakers.

In 2010, the United States introduced laws to enforce transparency on how much medical and pharmaceutical companies were spending to influence the products doctors chose to use. Research using the data unearthed by these laws has shown the problem is pervasive. We need this model for other industries so we can clearly see where corporate money is going. Registries should be detailed, permanent and easy to search.

These steps would not be easy. But the status quo means corporations can keep selling dangerous or lethal products for much longer than they should.

In doing so, they have become one of the largest influences on our health and will continue to harm generations to come – in ways hard to counter with yoga and willpower. And your health is more important than corporate profits.

Read more:
Chemicals, forever: how do you fix a problem like PFAS? Läs mer…

Imagine working during a heat wave, standing over a boiling hot stove in a busy restaurant with no air conditioning, limited ventilation and no access to a break until you’ve worked five consecutive hours.

To cope, you drape a damp hand towel over your shoulders and stand in the walk-in freezer for a brief moment to cool down. While beads of sweat drip down your forehead, your employer pulls you aside and says he cannot risk having customers see you sweat. It appears unhygienic. This experience is typical for many food service workers during extreme heat.

From fields to fryers, a warming planet is intensifying occupational health and safety threats to low-wage workers across the food chain. Of particular note are migrant agricultural workers and restaurant workers in Canada who share many similar conditions.

Read more:
States are weakening their child labor restrictions nearly 8 decades after the US government took kids out of the workforce

Workers in both farms and restaurants face daunting barriers to unionization, experience hazards like sexual harassment and fear employer retaliation and job loss. Extreme heat, flooding and wildfires are exacerbating this precarity, and labour laws are failing to protect workers.

In a warming world it is essential that labour protections and climate justice go hand in hand.

On the front lines of extreme heat

Alvita is a 37-year-old mother from Jamaica who has worked in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) since 2014. She described what it was like to live in an overcrowded bunkhouse in British Columbia during the deadly 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome:

I’m telling you, if it is summer, you are going to die because you can’t sleep in it… all of that heat piercing in from the sun… It is so hot. Like naturally, just walking in the heat makes you feel dizzy. It’s like you’re in a furnace. And there is no fan, there is nothing. No windows you can open up, no nothing.

Alvita’s experience with grossly inadequate cooling and ventilation is a common story we heard in our interviews in Ontario and B.C. In both provinces the employers of migrant agricultural workers provided substandard housing which often undermined their physical and mental health.

Workers felt pressured not to complain because their work permits were precarious, and they feared repatriation.

Globally, heat stress and dehydration among agricultural workers has been associated with kidney disease. When farm workers have access to air conditioning, their sleep quality improves, with an array of potential benefits for their health.

Seasonal workers routinely face a range of health concerns as a result of poor working conditions.
(Michael Tseng), Author provided (no reuse)

Indoor workers also face hazards during extreme heat.

During the heat dome, one-third of calls to WorkSafeBC were related to high temperatures in restaurants.

A report, prepared by the Worker Solidarity Network, surveyed and interviewed restaurant workers across B.C. and found that 77 per cent of restaurant workers reported adverse physical health effects, and a lack of protective measures, during high temperatures. Some described these conditions as “abusive,” “dehumanizing” and “absolute hell.”

It is also worth remembering that these conditions are occurring in a restaurant industry which is notoriously gendered, racialized and difficult to unionize.

One restaurant cook from B.C.’s interior reflected:

I have this very specific story of this one day where it was just so hot — I couldn’t rationalize why I was still at work…so much was going around like the forest fires and the heat itself… While I was working, all I could think of was climbing over the counter and pushing my way out of the restaurant and getting the hell out of there. But I couldn’t because it’s like, how am I going to pay rent?

This sentiment captures the reality of precarious work: having to choose between persevering through poor working conditions or risking a paycheck. These stories point to other labour issues like the complexity of refusing unsafe work and the balancing of multiple jobs to make ends meet amid rising prices and unaffordable housing.

A panel discussion on climate change and labour produced by the Global Labour Research Centre at York University.

Protections for workers on a warming planet

When it comes to updating labour laws to protect workers from climate change, governments in Canada are woefully behind the curve.

Provinces like B.C. should look to places like California for examples of effective regulations to protect both indoor and outdoor workers. Washington State has also recently implemented a permanent heat rule for outdoor workers requiring bosses to, amongst other things, offer shade and cool water when the mercury rises above 27 C.

In Canada, we recommend three policy interventions that would go a long way toward protecting workers in the food industry and beyond:

1. Maximum temperature policy:

Despite the devastating lessons learned from the heat dome, there is no maximum temperature policy in B.C.

Current heat exposure regulations note that workers should be protected from thermal stress in environments where their core body temperature may exceed 38 C. This measure has not been updated since 2005 and does not proactively limit workers’ exposure to heat-related illness. We encourage the government to update this regulation or establish a distinct and comprehensive “too hot to work” policy that does not merely use core body temperature as a marker to refuse unsafe work.

Canada urgently requires updated climate health and safety regulations.
(Michael Tseng), Author provided (no reuse)

2. Better access to union protections:

Unions give workers a democratic voice in the workplace, such as collectively bargaining for wage and job protection during environmental disasters. Unions may also play an important social movement role in pushing governments to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate pollution.

Agricultural workers in provinces like Ontario should have the option of joining a union, and Canadian provinces should consider broader-based and sectoral bargaining. This could make unions more accessible to precarious workers in private sector jobs with high turnover like fast food.

Read more:
It is industry, not government, that is getting in the way of a ’just transition’ for oil and gas workers

3. Stronger enforcement of health and safety regulations:

Even the best labour protections for workers are useless unless they are enforced in practice.

Advocates note that when workers in B.C. file formal complaints about unfair working standards, they can face extremely long wait times — from six months to three years in some instances.

Workers in low-wage sectors need random, proactive health and safety inspections. They also need better oversight on the enforcement of personal protective equipment, heat stress assessments and worker training on exposure plans. The federal government should also co-ordinate strong, enforceable national housing standards for migrant agricultural workers that include thermal comfort.

An ongoing effort

This May Day, everyone across Canada should take a moment to reflect on past labour injustices and the growing challenges facing exploited workers. History has shown that workers can have a seat at the table and while the conditions today may be different, the solutions are nothing new.

Individual Canadians, and unions, across the country must maintain constant pressure on governments and industry to give teeth to climate change-related occupational safety standards so that everyone — and especially working people — can be healthy, safe and work with dignity on a planet changing beyond all recognition. Läs mer…

Christopher Luxon’s sacking of two struggling cabinet ministers last week was praised by pundits as a sign of decisive – even “brutal” and “ruthless” – leadership. But this week’s 1News-Verian poll suggests the public is far less convinced of his leadership performance.

Based on those poll numbers, the National-led coalition would be out of office if an election were held now. And Luxon’s “preferred prime minister” rating fell further to 23%.

Politics is often a brutalising business. Machiavelli famously argued it is safer for leaders wanting to keep their job to be feared rather than loved. Countering perceptions of weak leadership may have been the motivation for Luxon’s decision to demote two ministers this early in his government’s term.

But those perceptions have been fuelled by the manner in which the prime minister’s coalition partners have tested, if not undermined, his authority and credibility.

We can trace this back to November last year, with the press conference announcing the coalition agreement, the ministerial swearing-in ceremony and the first cabinet meeting. NZ First leader and deputy prime minister Winston Peters repeatedly stole the limelight with a series of provocative, headline-grabbing statements.

Peters is a highly experienced politician, so would have known he was taking centre stage from the prime minister. But the mere fact he could do this was an early indicator of Luxon’s tenuous grip on power.

Coalition collisions

ACT Party leader David Seymour has also more than once undermined Luxon’s authority and credibility.

When the prime minister finally confirmed National would not support ACT’s contentious Treaty Principles Bill beyond its first reading, Seymour’s response was to openly state he didn’t believe Luxon’s commitment to that position.

Luxon brushed off the incident. But more recently he sought to publicly reprimand both Seymour and NZ First minister Shane Jones for critical comments each had made about the Waitangi Tribunal, which could have breached the cabinet manual.

Seymour’s response this time was to say it was Luxon who had erred by publicly stating those concerns.

Some of this can be put down to the policy tensions and competing political ambitions inherent in a three-party coalition. It’s the first such arrangement since New Zealand adopted the MMP proportional system.

But does Luxon’s leadership style make him unusually vulnerable to these kinds of tactics from his putative parliamentary allies?

David Seymour: openly challenging Luxon’s authority and credibility.
AAP

Leadership and power

Power is a fundamental aspect of both politics and leadership. Complex, dynamic and multifaceted, it is neither a zero-sum game nor solely rooted in laws or formal authority.

Leaders can enhance their power, in the sense of securing more respect and influence, through personal characteristics that garner admiration and support. They can demonstrate expert knowledge and skills, and use reason, logic and evidence to persuade others.

They can gain power through rewarding supporters. But least effective in most circumstances is the power to punish others, which risks turning erstwhile supporters into enemies.

In theory, Luxon has access to all these bases of power. But so far he has struggled to mobilise them in ways that command the respect of his coalition partners.

According to this week’s 1News-Verian poll, this is also increasingly evident to the public: only 51% said Luxon is the decision-maker in the coalition government.

Luxon’s relative lack of political experience (compared to Peters, in particular) may be a contributing factor. But his continued low poll rating as preferred prime minister also likely weakens his sway over cabinet – possibly even his own caucus.

Live by the sword …

Should that lack of popularity continue, it imperils National’s chances of success at the next election. Regardless of the formal reality that he has the lawful mandate to be prime minister, Luxon needs to convince the public he deserves their support.

The signs so far aren’t promising. His party did not see a post-election bump in the polls and hasn’t enjoyed a traditional honeymoon effect.

Lack of judgment over his “entitlement” to an accommodation allowance preceded Luxon’s drop in “net favourability” (favourable minus unfavourable results) in the March Taxpayers Union-Curia poll – to below Labour leader Chis Hipkins, who recently led his party to a historic defeat in the election.

In a subsequent poll from Talbot Mills (one of whose clients is the Labour Party), Luxon’s net favourability was –7%. By contrast, former National prime minister John Key scored around +58% at a similar time in his tenure.

In that same survey, the words people associated with Luxon’s character are indicative of the problem. While “business” and “leader” likely hold reasonably positive connotations, “greedy”, “unsure” and “arrogant” clearly do not.

Luxon claimed his sacking of the cabinet ministers demonstrated an ability to “adapt very quickly and dynamically to changing circumstances and situations”. He will need those qualities if he is to turn around public opinion about his character and his government’s performance.

Unless his personal standing with the voting public becomes a key source of his political power, such that his colleagues feel he can carry them to re-election, Luxon may learn the hard way what “live by the sword, die by the sword” means in politics. Läs mer…

Climate models are some of the most complex pieces of software ever written, able to simulate a vast number of different parts of the overall system, such as the atmosphere or ocean. Many have been developed by hundreds of scientists over decades and are constantly being added to and refined. They can run to over a million lines of computer code – tens of thousands of printed pages.

Not surprisingly, these models are expensive. The simulations take time, frequently several months, and the supercomputers on which the models are run consume a lot of energy. But a new algorithm I have developed promises to make many of these climate model simulations ten times faster, and could ultimately be an important tool in the fight against climate change.

One reason climate modelling takes so long is that some of the processes being simulated are intrinsically slow. The ocean is a good example. It takes a few thousand years for water to circulate from the surface to the deep ocean and back (by contrast, the atmosphere has a “mixing time” of weeks).

Ever since the first climate models were developed in the 1970s, scientists realised this was going to be a problem. To use a model to simulate climate change, it has to be started from conditions representative of before industrialisation led to the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

To produce such a stable equilibrium, scientists “spin-up” their model by essentially letting it run until it stops changing (the system is so complex that, as in the real world, some fluctuations will always be present).

An initial condition with minimal “drift” is essential to accurately simulate the effects of human-made factors on the climate. But thanks to the ocean and other sluggish components this can take several months even on large supercomputers. No wonder climate scientists have called this bottleneck one of the “grand challenges” of their field.

Can’t just throw more computers at the problem

You might ask, “why not use an even bigger machine?” Unfortunately, it wouldn’t help. Simplistically, supercomputers are just thousands of individual computer chips, each with dozens of processing units (CPUs or “cores”) connected to each other via a high-speed network.

One of the machines I use has over 300,000 cores and can perform almost 20 quadrillion arithmetic operations per second. (Obviously, it is shared by hundreds of users and any single simulation will only use a tiny fraction of the machine.)

It takes an extraordinary amount of computing power to simulate long-term change in the ocean.
andrejs polivanovs / shutterstock

A climate model exploits this by subdividing the surface of the planet into smaller regions – subdomains – with calculations for each region being performed simultaneously on a different CPU. In principle, the more subdomains you have the less time it should take to perform the calculations.

That is true up to a point. The problem is that the different subdomains need to “know” what is happening in adjoining ones, which requires transmitting information between chips. That is much slower than the speed with which modern chips can perform arithmetic calculations, what computer scientists call “bandwidth limitation”. (Anyone who has tried to stream a video over a slow internet connection will know what that means.) There are therefore diminishing returns from throwing more computing power at the problem. Ocean models especially suffer from such poor “scaling”.

Ten times faster

This is where the new computer algorithm that I’ve developed and published in Science Advances comes in. It promises to dramatically reduce the spin-up time of the ocean and other components of earth system models. In tests on typical climate models, the algorithm was on average about ten times faster than current approaches, decreasing the time from many months to a week.

The time and energy this could save climate scientists is valuable in itself. But being able to spin-up models quickly also means that scientists can calibrate them against what we know actually happened in the real world, improving their accuracy, or to better define the uncertainty in their climate projections. Spin-ups are so time consuming that neither are currently feasible.

The new algorithm will also allow us to perform simulations in more spatial detail. Currently, ocean models typically don’t tell us anything about features smaller than 1º width in longitude and latitude (about 110km at the equator). But many critical phenomena in the ocean occur at far smaller scales – tens of meters to a few kilometres – and higher spatial resolution will certainly lead to more accurate climate projections, for instance of sea level rise, storm surges and hurricane intensity.

How it works

Like so much “new” research it is based on an old idea, in this case one that goes back centuries to the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. Called “sequence acceleration”, you can think of it as using past information to extrapolate to a “better” future.

Among other applications, it is widely used by chemists and material scientists to calculate the structure of atoms and molecules, a problem that happens to take up more than half the world’s supercomputing resources.

Sequence acceleration is useful when a problem is iterative in nature, exactly what climate model spin-up is: you feed the output from the model back as an input to the model. Rinse and repeat until the output becomes equal to the input and you’ve found your equilibrium solution.

In the 1960s Harvard mathematician D.G. Anderson came up with a clever way to combine multiple previous outputs into a single input so that you get to the final solution with far fewer repeats of the procedure. About ten times fewer as I found when I applied his scheme to the spin-up problem.

Developing a new algorithm is the easy part. Getting others to use it is often the bigger challenge. It is therefore promising that the UK Met Office and other climate modelling centres are trying it out.

The next major IPCC report is due in 2029. That seems like a long way off but given the time it takes to develop models and perform simulations, preparations are already underway. Coordinated by an international collaboration known as the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, it is these simulations that will form the basis for the report. It is exciting to think that my algorithm and software might contribute.

Read more:
Noise in the brain enables us to make extraordinary leaps of imagination. It could transform the power of computers too Läs mer…

The Earth now supports over eight billion people who collectively have transformed three-quarters of the planet’s land surface for food, energy, shelter and other aspects of the human enterprise.

Wild animals must not only contend with how their habitats have been changed, but also endure the increasing presence of people in almost all environments, from expanding wildland-urban interfaces to the frontiers of outdoor recreation and nature-based tourism.

We are in the midst of a global biodiversity crisis, with high extinction rates and many wildlife populations showing clear evidence of decline (such as caribou and lions).

As a wildlife ecologist and conservation biologist, I am concerned that we are putting the squeeze on wildlife in ways that can increase conflicts and displace animals from the habitats they need.

Observing animal behaviour

If we are to protect the animals we treasure for their ecological, economic and cultural values, we must find ways to promote human-wildlife coexistence. To successfully adapt our own behaviours, we must also understand whether and how animals can adapt to us.

Two key challenges have limited this understanding. First, it is hard to observe animals in the wild. Encounters are rare because animals are elusive, and the mere presence of a human observer may influence our understanding.

Second, it is not generally feasible to conduct experiments — hallmarks of rigorous science — that manipulate human activities in varied contexts. In a recent study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, my colleagues and I set out to tackle these challenges by using the COVID-19 pandemic as a form of “unplanned experiment.”

The pandemic was a tragedy, but it created a rare opportunity to learn about human-wildlife interactions. Government lockdowns to stem the spread of the virus forced us to stay close to home, drastically changing our typical movement patterns.

This “anthropause” spurred scientists to ask how animals responded — our curiosities were piqued by unusual sightings.

Camera trap photo of a black bear stealing garbage near the town of Sooke, B.C.
(UBC WildCo), Author provided (no reuse)

Captured images

Our team recognized that such anecdotal observations could be prone to biases; we sought a more systematic approach to cover a wide range of species and locations while overcoming the elusive nature of wild animals. The popularity of motion-triggered wildlife camera traps has made it much easier to glimpse into the secret lives of animals.

These remote cameras work diligently to capture photographs of animals — including humans — that wander past, without the need for observers to be physically present.

Recognizing this opportunity, we assembled a team of more than 200 scientists from 21 countries that were monitoring mammals before and during the lockdowns. We sifted through millions of images of 163 species of wild mammals, collected from more than 5,000 camera traps. After estimating changes in the amount and timing of activity for animals as small as snowshoe hares and as big as African elephants, some striking patterns emerged.

Contrary to popular narratives, we did not see an overall trend of wildlife running free while humans sheltered in place.

Rather, we saw great variation in the activity of people and wildlife. While some areas emptied of people as parks closed, others saw increases in use, such as urban greenspaces or rural refuges where people sought solace from pandemic pressures.

Comfort with humans

Animals had a wide range of reactions to the changes in human activity, with the strongest pattern being that their responses depended on their position in the food chain and the condition of the landscape. Predator species, like wolves and wolverines, tended to be warier of people, reducing their activity when more people were around and being lost altogether from the busiest areas.

By contrast, prey species, including large herbivores like deer or moose, often increased activity when more people were around, potentially to take advantage of the “human shield” that deterred predators.

A camera trap captures a wolverine along a hiking trail during closure of the popular Joffre Lakes Provincial Park, B.C.
(UBC WildCo), Author provided (no reuse)

Notably, animals living in wilder landscapes were more sensitive to increases in human activity, while their urban cousins tended to be more tolerant but shifted to being more active at night. This highlights that even within the same species, animals can have different responses to people depending on where they live.

We believe that wildlife managers should take note of these results. Levels of outdoor recreation and other human endeavours may need to be carefully managed in wildland landscapes to avoid displacing the sensitive animals that depend on these more remote areas.

While in more modified landscapes — such as near cities and farms — animals may become habituated to humans, even attracted to “free food” like garbage or gardens, while working to avoid conflicts by moving frequently and using the cover of darkness.

CBC looks at human-bear encounters.

Human-wildlife coexistence in these developed areas requires care to remove unhealthy attractants that may promote conflict, while limiting disturbances at night so animals can access the food, cover and mates that they need to persist.

Overall, our study highlights the tremendous complexity of animal behaviours, and the fact that there are no silver bullets when it comes to coexistence. It is clear that animals are working hard to adapt to humanity’s ever-expanding presence, and that we need to do our part to ensure we can keep sharing space with the wildlife we cherish.

Establishing and maintaining effective biodiversity monitoring systems, including the camera trap surveys that underpinned our analysis, will be critical as we strive to understand and steward our ever-changing ecosystems. Läs mer…

Many Americans think of power outages as infrequent inconveniences, but that’s quickly changing. Nationwide, major power outages have increased tenfold since 1980, largely because of an aging electrical grid and damage sustained from severe storms as the planet warms.

At the same time, electricity demand is rising as the population grows and an increasing number of people use electricity to cool and heat their homes, cook their meals and power their cars. A growing number of Americans also rely on electricity-powered medical equipment, such as oxygen concentrators to help with breathing, lifts for movement and infusion pumps to deliver medications and fluids to their bodies.

For older adults and others with health conditions, a loss of power may be more than an inconvenience. It can be life-threatening.

We study environmental health, including the effects of extreme heat and storms on people. In a new study, we analyzed data from New York City and the surrounding area to understand how severe weather drives power outages and who is most at risk, particularly in urban areas.

Low-income communities often at highest risk

How quickly power returns in a community is often shaped by history.

Discriminatory practices such as redlining and zoning, which prevented nonwhite residents from obtaining mortgages or owning homes in certain areas, left marginalized groups living in more disaster-prone areas with poorer quality infrastructure. Studies show that both factors make these communities more likely to experience prolonged power outages.

Current policies can also exacerbate outages for these populations. For example, many electric utilities prioritize power restoration to regions with community assets, such as mass transit, hospitals, police or fire stations, and sewage and water stations, as well as regions with larger populations.

Without electricity, residents can’t even run fans to cool down.
Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

Though these guidelines appear neutral, they can inadvertently prolong outages for less populated areas and areas lacking resources, including these key assets. For example, following Tropical Storm Ida in September 2021, Con Edison outlined areas with important community assets as priorities for restoring power. Manhattan had power back within hours, while many low-income and largely nonwhite parts of Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn waited for days.

Emerging evidence from studies on power outages in Texas, Florida, the Southeast and a national study, along with our new research in New York, shows that outages especially burden communities that don’t have adequate funding.

Complex weather and battery-life thresholds

Across New York state, we found that 40% of all outages from 2017-2020 followed severe weather – heat, cold, wind, rainstorms, snowstorms or lightning – within eight hours. While each type of severe weather alone could lead to prolonged outages, in combination they resulted in much longer outages.

Statewide, for example, strong winds alone led to outages lasting 12 hours on average, and heavy precipitation resulted in outages lasting six hours on average. But when wind and precipitation happened simultaneously, the outages lasted closer to 17 hours on average.

A six- to eight-hour power-restoration threshold is particularly important for people who rely on electricity to power medical equipment. Many of these medical devices have backup batteries with capacities that do not exceed eight hours. That’s one reason researchers considered eight hours to be a critical power restoration window for health.

We also looked at whether socially vulnerable communities faced more weather-driven outages than other communities. In short, the answer was yes, though the effects varied in different parts of the state and by the type of weather event.

In New York City, we found that heat-, precipitation- and wind-driven outages occurred more frequently in socially vulnerable communities, including in Harlem, Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx and eastern Queens. This matters because socially vulnerable neighborhoods have higher poverty rates and lower-quality housing. Community members may lack access to health care or suffer from underlying health conditions.

Social vulnerability and heat-driven power outages from 2017 to 2020 in New York City. Higher social vulnerability scores indicate greater vulnerability.
Nina Flores

On average, the duration of precipitation-driven outages was longest in areas of the city with the highest social vulnerability. In neighborhoods with vulnerability scores in the top 25% – meaning the most vulnerable neighborhoods – outages lasted 12.4 hours on average, compared with 7.7 hours in those neighborhoods in the bottom 25%.

In rural parts of the state, outages related to downpours or snowstorms were also longest in areas with high social vulnerability.

Outages are quick to follow heat spikes

As temperatures rise over the summer, it’s important for communities to consider the dangers that outages can present for disabled persons, older adults and others with health conditions, particularly in socially vulnerable communities.

Extreme heat is one of the most dangerous meteorological phenomena. It causes nearly 400 premature deaths a year in New York City, according to city estimates.

With the granular data we obtained from the state Department of Public Service, we could zoom in on how fast outages began following extreme weather.

Across the state, outages began quickly – within six hours of extremely hot temperatures spiking – likely as more people turned on their air conditioners. This means the outages likely occur while it is still hot, exposing individuals to extreme heat, without power for air conditioners or fans.

The overlap between social vulnerability and severe weather-related outages in New York. Green counties have the most social vulnerability and outages. Bright blue counties have a large number of outages but lower social vulnerability. The orange and gray areas have low numbers of outages.
Nina Flores

Coupled with higher outdoor temperatures and the prevalence of underlying health conditions, socially vulnerable communities face heightened exposure to heat-driven outages and greater risk from them.

How cities can reduce risks as temperatures rise

This outage trend will likely continue as climate change intensifies, bringing more frequent extreme weather to an aging grid in which many parts are nearing or surpassing their life spans.

There are steps communities and power providers can take to reduce people’s exposure to power outages and the health harms that can accompany them.

In the short term, cities can develop targeted plans for these communities to ensure that residents have ways to cool off during heat waves. That includes providing ample cooling centers, swimming pools and public parks with shade trees. It can also include transportation support for older adults and others with mobility issues.

Parks with shade trees and fountains, like this one in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, can offer some respite from hot buildings during heat waves.
AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez

In the long term, reducing these risks means updating the power grid, weatherizing buildings, planting trees to reduce urban heat island effects and investing in distributed energy resources, such as solar power and batteries for energy storage.

We believe this work should prioritize communities that most need these updates, following the lead of New York state’s Weatherization Assistance Program, which aims to improve energy efficiency for low-income households. Läs mer…

A record number of people will go to polls in 2024 to vote in national elections around the world. People who came of age during the last electoral cycle will have an opportunity to cast their votes for the first time.

In wealthier countries with rapidly ageing populations, such as the US and the UK, there will again be record inter-generational divisions in turnout and political preferences.

In recent elections, a high proportion of people aged 18–24 supported Democratic party candidates and the Labour party. In 2020, 61% voted for Joe Biden (compared to 37% for Donald Trump) in the US, and 62% voted Labour in the UK’s 2019 general election (compared to 19% for the Conservatives).

Ahead of the UK’s upcoming general election, which could take place as late as January 2025, successive polls have placed the Conservatives at 10% or less among young adults.

Nevertheless, the new generation of young voters in the US and the UK are disillusioned with mainstream electoral politics and are unenthusiastic about casting their votes. In fact, turnout rates for young adults (aged 18–30) are around a third lower than for adults of all ages in these countries.

Youth support for main parties in the US and UK national elections since 1990.
James Sloam, CC BY-NC-SA

Overwhelming youth support for the Democrats and Labour masks a desire for a more radical form of politics that addresses young people’s concerns. Opinion polls often do a poor job of explaining youth priorities across broad categories such as the economy and health. But my own research from 2022 with young Londoners reveals clusters of priorities relating to economic, social and environmental issues.

These issues include housing, personal wellbeing and safety, group rights for women or minorities and broader international questions around climate change and the ongoing situation in Gaza. Compared to older generations, young people are also much more comfortable with diversity in society and much less concerned about immigration.

In the US and the UK, these sentiments were effectively articulated by Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn in recent elections.

Sanders and Corbyn were both viewed by young adults as authentic and radical, believing in what they said, and offering meaningful solutions to pressing problems like low wages, unaffordable housing and university tuition fees. In the 2016 US primaries, Sanders received more votes from young Americans (aged 18–30) than Hilary Clinton and Trump (the two final candidates) put together.

Youth electoral participation (or non-participation) is also defined by a country’s electoral system. In countries with proportional representation, the trend towards socially liberal values and greater state intervention has led to increased support for alternative political parties.

For example, the Green party in Germany became the largest political party among those aged 18–24 at the 2021 federal election. It secured the votes of just under a quarter of young adults – almost as much as the two main parties (Social Democrats and Christian Democrats) combined.

A visualisation of the key political issues identified by young Londoners.
James Sloam, CC BY-NC-SA

Division among the young

Young people are, of course, not all the same. There are important divisions within this age group based on gender, socioeconomic status and ethnicity.

In the UK’s 2017 general election, 73% of young women voted Labour compared to only 52% of young men. And in the 2022 US mid-terms, 71% of young women voted Democrat compared to 53% of young men – a difference that was driven by the 2022 Supreme Court ruling allowing individual states to ban abortion.

In response to the ruling, young women registered to vote in record numbers, casting their ballots against Republican candidates who supported the decision.

These differences are reflected in participation in social movements. For example, the 2019 climate strikes were overwhelmingly comprised of young women and girls. The protests of one girl, Greta Thunberg, in a town square in Sweden, quickly spread into a global movement of millions of young people.

Socioeconomic status plays an equally important role. Young people from poorer backgrounds or with low levels of educational attainment are much less likely to turn out in elections than graduates or young people in full-time education.

In the UK, around two-thirds of university students turned out in recent general elections compared to around one-third of young people from the lowest social group. Young people from low-income backgrounds, if they do turn out, are often drawn to populist right-wing causes, such as the candidacies of Trump in the US and Marine Le Pen in France – especially in the case of young, white men.

The latter point illustrates how race or ethnicity shape youth participation. This is particularly true in the US where an estimated 87% of black youth voted for Biden in 2020 against just 10% for Trump.

However, the support of young minoritised ethnic voters for progressive candidates and parties has proved frustrating, as existential economic and security issues have not been addressed. It was the Black Lives Matter movement and citizen-generated evidence, rather than politicians and parties, that shone a spotlight on police brutality and discrimination in the US and many other countries.

Read more:
Black Lives Matter protests are shaping how people understand racial inequality

The forthcoming elections in the UK, the US and many other rich democracies are likely to be defined by inter-generational cleavages. However, it is far from certain if young people will be drawn to the polls.

There is a dilemma for progressive candidates and parties regarding how far they are willing to go to appeal to younger generations given the inter-generational divisions that exist. Yet this is fast becoming a risk worth taking.

Successive generations of young people are entering the electorate with socially liberal views and positive attitudes towards state intervention to address economic, social and environmental challenges: from poor mental health, to the cost of housing, to concerns about pollution and climate change. Läs mer…