Eurovision celebrated its 70th anniversary in Vienna amid controversy over political neutrality, voting integrity, and national withdrawals. Philip V. Bohlman considers the performances that defined Eurovision 2026 and what they reveal about the ...
The neutrality and integrity of the Eurovision Song Contest is of paramount importance to the EBU, its Members, and all our audiences. It is essential that the fairness of the Contest is always protected. We are taking clear and decisive steps to ensure the Contest remains a celebration of music and unity.
—Martin Green, Director of the Eurovision Song Contest, November 21, 2025
Where better to affirm the Eurovision Song Contest’s commitment to political neutrality and musical integrity than Vienna, with its 2026 motto, “United by Music—In the Heart of Europe?” Throughout the Cold War and the contingent history of the Eurovision, Austria had pledged itself to neutrality. If any nation were to host the annual Grand Prix, it would surely be Austria: the year before, its entry JJ (Johannes Pietsch), an operatic countertenor, had placed first, singing in a vocal style cultivated for the Baroque and Classical opera stage. The myriad public musical events of Eurovision Week (May 10–16), fringe and public alike, bore witness to Austria as the most musical of nations, unifying Europe with both song and the Eurovision Song Contest for its seventieth anniversary.
The past was so very perfect! How could Eurovision 2026 fail to unify Europe by song? Fail it did, indeed, with the abandonment and violation of the core principles upon which the Eurovision prided itself since its founding at the height of the Cold War. Rather than affirming apolitical neutrality, in recent years the parent organization of the Eurovision, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), had increasingly blurred the rules whereby political conflicts were kept away from the competition. Russia and Belarus were banned after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but calls by EBU member states to mete out sanctions to Israel because of its war in Gaza were greeted by pronouncements such as that in the epigraph above. Unconvinced by such gestures, five nations—Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain—withdrew from Eurovision 2026.
The assault on neutrality also extended to integrity, that of the song competition itself, and again, Israel had unleashed the main controversy. Voting at the Eurovision Grand Finale is two-tiered, one set of votes from national juries, the other from the general public. It was the latter that Israel—the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—employed during recent years through various campaigns to manipulate the public voting. One week after the Grand Finale in Vienna, more national broadcasting agencies were discussing the possibility of stepping out of the Eurovision Song Contest. We are left asking, “And what of Eurovision’s future?”
Yes, only yes for these days And a thousand more to come. A simple yes. Eternity is inside a single word. It will be you and me forever.
—Sal da Vinci, “Per sempre sì” / “Forever Yes” (Italy’s Eurovision 2026 entry)
Many entries in Eurovision 2026 turned to the past seventy years in search of model Eurosongs. Power ballads were in abundance; an indebtedness to the ever-present French chanson remained true; the mixture of high camp and comic took full advantage of digital stage effects; pyrotechnics consumed all in its path. Taken together as a single show, the evening performance felt like a hodgepodge of breathless song and dance. I don’t mean to throw cold water on the fiery and frenetic acts; quite the opposite, because there was much to enjoy, onstage antics and nostalgia notwithstanding. Take Italy’s entry, Sal da Vinci crooning “Per sempre sì” (Forever Yes) against a backdrop of a high-energy mock wedding ceremony. One had to believe in da Vinci’s longing for a love that would last forever, borrowed from the Sanremo Song Festival, which annually sends the Italian winner to the Eurovision. Past or perfect, both or neither, the exuberance of “Per sempre sì” well deserved its fifth-place finish.
Official video, Sal da Vinci, “Per sempre sì”
It would be wiser to get away from here, But I’m still playing with fire. How could I freeze the feelings?
—Pete Parkkonen and Linda Lampenius, “Liekinheitin”/”Flamethrower” (Finland’s Eurovision 2026 entry)
Among the most unexpected results of the Grand Finale on May 16 was the failure of many favorites to meet the expectations of their fans. No entry bore witness to that failure more than the overwhelming favorite going into Eurovision Week, the Finnish duo, Pete Parkkonen and Linda Lampenius, whose performance of “Liekinheitin” (Flamethrower) was taken dutifully from the Eurovision playbook for winning songs. After Parkkonen’s longing intro, “Liekinheitin” turned up the heat, musically to power-ballad temperatures and choreographically as Lampenius approached the burning cage that had paralyzed the singer-lover. The impact of these playbook elements seemed so well placed that EBU officials made an exception to the performance rules, allowing Lampenius to play the violin live on stage, adding a new dimension to Eurosong vocality. That new dimension had lost its luster by the time of the Grand Finale, dropping the pre-contest favorite to sixth place.
Pete Parkkonen & Linda Lampenius –“Liekinheitin”
Lead me to the stars, to the shattered nests, There where, amid screams, they send off soldiers. Lead me to the stars far from all the gazes.
—Lelek, “Andromeda” (Croatia’s Eurovision 2026 entry)
If the geopolitics of war in Europe and beyond and a broader sense of moral responsibility for global crisis were largely absent from Eurovision 2026, the few exceptions were notable as a bridge between the Eurovision of the past and that of a future yet realized. The most striking of these exceptions was the Croatian entry, “Andromeda,” sung by the five-woman choral ensemble, Lelek. There was power in the paradox of a song that employed traditional Croatian folk-song style to speak to ethical issues stretching across national and musical borders. Singing together with an intimacy translated musically by melodic recitative and tight harmonic intervals, Lelek drew upon ecofeminism to address the horrors of war. The Croatian lyrics were rich in metaphor, and the listener recognized “Andromeda” as heir to the long tradition of women keening for the loss of humanity. The question I ask every year is whether a deeply moving and prescient ensemble like Lelek enters the Eurovision to place first. Each year, I take comfort in knowing that there are more important questions to ask of a song like “Andromeda.”
Lelek, “Andromeda”
I’m a rebel, I’m a danger, I’m a mover for freedom. Let me light you, light you up, let me light you up…. I’m the bangarang—
—DARA, “Bangaranga” (Bulgaria’s Eurovision 2026 entry)
Were I to range across many of this year’s Eurovision entries to identify songs with potential to do well in the final voting, I would have little trouble making a case for at least half of the twenty-five nations competing in the Grand Finale. Over seventy years, there have been many winning formulae, and Eurovision songwriters have learned their lessons well. If 2026 is a measure of those lessons, nonetheless, they may have learned their lessons too well, producing a corpus of songs in Vienna unsurprising in its overall sameness. The song that would eventually win would need to distinguish itself by liberating itself from the sameness. The unsurprising would undergo translation to the surprising, a song that came from nowhere only to claim victory with the largest point margin in Eurovision’s seventy-year history (173 points). That is precisely what Bulgaria’s DARA did with “Bangaranga.” There was nothing profound about the lyrics of “Bangaranga,” though the Bulgarian team constantly teased questioners about the title’s apparently meaningful meaninglessness. The performance itself was brilliant because of its tight choreography and precise use of limited rather than limitless space. For the three minutes of fame on the stage of the Vienna Stadthalle, Bulgaria and “Bangaranga” provided one answer—one affirmative answer—to the questions seventy years had raised about the future of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Environmental change is no longer an abstract concern. It is encountered in daily life, in regional disruptions, and in global debates. Heat and cold, drought and flood, the loss of species, food insecurity, and widening inequality are not isolated phenomena; together they mark a shift in the conditions under which human societies operate. The paradox of the present moment is clear: crises are extensively diagnosed, risks are well communicated, and policy frameworks are proliferating—yet societies remain strikingly unready.
Not all change is equally visible. Some changes unfold rapidly, within days, seasons, or years; some accumulate slowly, almost without notice until thresholds are crossed. Understanding these different temporalities requires more than measuring physical processes. It demands attention to culture, institutions, economies, and systems of meaning. Environmental change and human resilience draw on all domains of knowledge—not only to establish what has happened, but to understand how it has been interpreted and how societies have responded, in the past, in the present, and for the future.
It is in this context that we introduce Environmental Change and Human Experience, a new topic in Oxford Intersections. As general editors, we conceived the topic as a deliberately interdisciplinary space, bringing together historians, geographers, literary scholars, anthropologists, and others to examine how human societies have interacted with changing environments over time.
The core questions are longstanding. They range from long-term environmental transformations to episodes of acute disruption, and they examine how societies—under different political, economic, and cultural conditions—have understood and managed change. What is new is the intensity of collaboration across disciplines. The expansion of the environmental humanities, advances in data and modelling, and the pressures associated with climate change are reshaping how scholars work—and the range of evidence that can be brought to bear to help us understand the changes, how they affect societies and how we might be better prepared for future change.
A central premise runs through the topic. Environmental change, whether gradual or sudden, has always tested the resilience and resourcefulness of human societies. The historical record is therefore not simply descriptive; it is analytical. It offers a series of grounded cases—real-world experiments in adaptation, failure, and innovation that allow us to identify patterns, constraints, and possibilities in how societies respond to environmental stress.
This perspective is particularly relevant today. Many challenges now framed as unprecedented—climate variability, food insecurity, water management, disease, inequality, ecological degradation—have deeper histories. Examining those histories does not provide simple solutions, but it does clarify the range of responses available and the conditions under which they succeed or fail. It expands the repertoire of adaptive strategies while sharpening our understanding of their limits.
The topic is structured in nine sections: Approaches, Climate, Construction, Disasters, Land, Water, Food, Animals, and New Frontiers. Together, these sections provide a framework for analysing how humans have shaped their environments, and how those environments, in turn, have shaped human experience.
Contributors approach environmental change from multiple angles: historical, geographical, literary, religious, social, cultural, political, ecological, and anthropological. The aim is not an encyclopaedic overview, but structured analysis based on new research. Environmental Change and Human Experience will be a resource for researchers, teachers, and students around the world who seek fresh perspectives and challenging comparisons.
Featured image ‘Forestry activities in Tasmania, Australia’ by Matt Palmer via Unsplash.
Legal education, at least in the Anglosphere, has been undergoing a quiet but very recognisable transformation. The case study method, developed by Christopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard in the 1870s, is steadily giving way to ‘authentic’, ‘real life’ or ‘experiential’ learning, wherein theory and practice are intermeshed. Law is now often studied ‘in context’ (consequences, remedies, and enforcement are discussed); the gap between ‘law in theory’ and ‘law in action’ is investigated; and the ‘theory of the practice’ is incorporated into the curriculum.
Clinical legal education (CLE) takes this pedagogical approach to its logical conclusion. In CLE, law students learn through the practical application of law by providing legal services to the public and by reflecting on this experience to develop their understanding of law and legal theory. In light of the above, it is unsurprising that CLE has seen a rapid growth in the UK in the past decade. In addition to the aforementioned pedagogical shift, another driving force for this growth has been the hollowing out of public services by years of austerity politics, manifested in significant cuts in the provision of free legal services, both from the voluntary sector and from private law firms with legal contracts. These two factors combined to create a growing demand from the general public for free legal services and a growing demand from law students for some practical experience to form part of their law studies. This expansion in university law clinics has also seen a gradual move away from the law clinic inhabiting a small extra-curricular space populated by a handful of keen volunteers to larger, permanently staffed spaces where the clinic is incorporated into the curriculum, forming an assessed and credit bearing part of both undergraduate and postgraduate law programmes.
Clinical legal education is now very much a part of the twenty-first century legal education landscape, with an estimated 80% of law schools in the UK offering some form of provision. Against this background, it is somewhat surprising that there are very few textbooks available for students. It seems likely that one reason for this is that each university law clinic is unique in its offering and there is no common substantive law uniting them. A law clinic may provide advice services in one or more of the following: family law, housing, employment, criminal law, welfare benefits, special educational needs, small businesses, immigration and asylum, small claims disputes. Those services may be supervised by law school staff or by external agencies working in partnership. When you come to consider the incredible variety of models of delivery along with the range of legal topics needed, the lack of standard core textbooks becomes less surprising, as it is hard to imagine how one book might serve quite so many needs.
In addition to the incredible range of substantive law that can be found in university law clinics, the rationale for and underpinning values of law clinics are highly contested. Is the university law clinic a vehicle for developing deep critical thinking about values, power and justice in an unjust world, a vehicle for developing employability skills for budding lawyers, a way for law schools to help meet the legal needs of local communities, or can it be all of the above?
Undaunted by this landscape, we decided to rise to the challenge of creating a text that unites the theory and the practice of clinical legal education—and in doing so set out our own vision of what clinical legal education is and can be. We seek to champion a vision of clinical legal education that is radical and transformative for students and the communities they serve whilst also positioning ourselves on the side of promoting social justice through legal practice.
We explore the ways in which experiential learning can enrich the student experience, not only by developing key employability skills but also by creating a space in which theory can be applied and become meaningful.
Our proposition is that there are 6 features to clinical legal education:
Active participation: this is the defining feature, and thus the foundation of clinical legal education. There is no room in a clinic for students to passively absorb knowledge handed to them by a lecturer. They are active participants in their own learning experience.
Interaction in role: students play an active part in interviewing, advising, or otherwise working for a client by adopting a professional role.[CA3] By taking on such a role, students learn how to interact with others as they would in legal practice.
The dynamic nature of the problem: in legal education, we often design neatly packaged problems for students that will draw out their knowledge and understanding of a particular point of law or practice. In clinical legal education, the problem cannot be packaged, and the solution may not be clear, which pushes the students to think creatively to apply their skills and knowledge.
Part of a planned curriculum: this does not necessarily mean that the clinic needs to form part of an assessed programme, but to move from beyond experience to education, a clear learning goal needs to be identified for students and educators. Education requires theorising, extrapolating experiences, conceptualising and framing them, understanding them as part of a general structure, and trying again on the basis of that understanding.
Reflection: learning how to reflect allows students to make sense of their experience and learn from that experience.
Access to justice: this feature is present in many, but not all, clinics. Teaching students about access to justice is central to our own approaches to clinical education and is therefore also central to the book.
We live in very uncertain times, and our students come to us anxious about jobs and their futures. Many of our universities in the UK are located in cities and regions where poverty, inequality, and injustice are part of the everyday landscape. Law students are hoping to enter a world of work that is changing so fast that neither practicing lawyers nor legal academics have a clear picture of what that world will look like. It is tempting, therefore, for the legal academy to collectively put our heads down and carry on with what we have always done: give lectures, teach the black letter law, expect students to read books and judgments and sit exams at the end of the year. We hope that this book and our vision of law as a site of injustice as well as justice, clinics as a site of theory and practice, and legal practice as a form of communication and connection between people will serve to inspire and support new generations of law students and their teachers.
Over the last few decades, scholarship in the arts has undergone a significant shift towards questions and topics related to animals and our relationships with them. Referred to as ‘the animal turn’, this movement has involved various disciplines working together to critically analyse the conceptual construction and material treatment of non-human animals (and ‘nature’ more generally) in human cultures, histories, discourses, and practices. These studies focusing on human-animal relations have been interdisciplinary from the outset, since they have required communication amongst theories and methods derived from the humanities, creative arts, and social sciences—and increasingly the biological and environmental sciences as well. Accordingly, the range of approaches that has come to be called human-animal studies (or sometimes just animal studies) has tended, even before the development of explicitly ‘intersectional’ theory, to focus on fundamentally intersectional topics, seeking to analyse, measure, and account for the inter-implicated fates and interests of specific human societies as they relate to particular animal species, populations, and individuals. These dynamics are, in turn, shaped by relevant cultural and political structures and practices.
In the context of the more politicised fields of human-animal studies (HAS), such as feminist animal studies or critical animal studies (CAS), intersectional theory often explicitly underpins interrogations of power and control in human relationships with non-human species. Importantly, in these overtly political strands of HAS, intersectional theory is extended from its original anthropocentric form to now include an examination of marginalisation, discrimination, and oppression affecting all living beings, not only humans. Speciesism refers to the ideology that prioritises humans over other animals (otherwise called human exceptionalism or human supremacy) and also favours certain animal species—such as dogs—over others, such as rats (this latter aspect of speciesism is obviously affected by cultural differences). The deliberately anti-speciesist form of intersectional theory is associated with ecofeminism, which emerged in the 1960s and ’70s, alongside other counter-cultural political movements of this era, including second-wave animal rights, environmentalism, LGBTQIA+, Indigenous, civil, and disability rights.
Specifically, feminist and critical animal studies approaches interrogate the ways in which speciesism manifests in ideological discourses as well as cultural constructions and practices. Anti-speciesist intersectional theory is also concerned with analysing and disrupting the various ways in which forms of human-to-human oppression (such as colonisation) map onto, shape, and are in turn shaped by forms of human-to-animal oppression (e.g., processes of species translocation and ecological transformation). Thus, while more human-centric forms of intersectional research have concentrated on the compounded experiences of marginalisation felt by people affected by racism, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, and classism, it is only when we embed speciesism in intersectional understandings of oppression that we get a clearer picture of how all oppressions—of humans, animals, and environments—are intricately linked, and how humancentric constructions of ‘animality’ (or animal difference) have been used in the dehumanisation of certain peoples and in the exploitation of and cruelty towards certain animals. Intersectional feminist and critical animal studies approaches are also more likely to pair with activist or advocacy outcomes with the aim of improving the lives of animals—both human and non-human ones.
In the field of CAS, the use of multiple disciplinary perspectives and approaches in combination with anti-speciesist theory has resulted in timely and potentially transformative new knowledge of human-animal relations and human-animal-environment connections. Ongoing areas of research include:
The employment of novel historiographies to account for the role of animal agency in historical change;
Feminist, critical race, disability studies, and CAS theories coming together to examine the constitutive links between discourses of animal agriculture and animal breeding and human experiences of disability, exploitation, and incarceration;
Marxist and other political theories explicating the connections between capitalism, industrialised farming, and slaughter, and the exploitation of human and animal labour;
Indigenous critiques of environmental colonisation and the marginalisation of Indigenous human–animal knowledge systems;
CAS and ecofeminist theories scrutinising the gendered components of dairy, meat, and egg farming and the ways that carnism, meat culture, and advertising of animal products rely on certain constructions of gender, class, sexuality, and ethnicity;
CAS and environmental theories examining the interrelationship between animal agriculture, environmental degradation, climate change, biodiversity loss, and species extinctions;
CAS and queer ecologies subverting mainstream environmental discourse, binary configurations of culture/nature, masculine/feminine and human/animal, and the dominance of evolutionary theory;
Critical race and Indigenous theorists decolonising western food practices and historicising plant-based Indigenous foods;
Various disciplines and scholar-activists are developing intersectional veganism in theory and practice.
Many of the articles in the forthcoming “Animals” section of Oxford Intersections: Environmental Change and Human Experience employ interdisciplinary, anti-speciesist, intersectional theories in their explorations of human-animal-environment entanglements, thereby offering nuanced, in-depth critical analysis of various domains of privilege, power, and control. Contributions range from theoretical, textual, thematic, and visual analyses through to empirical interviews and digital algorithm statistics. Authors utilise diverse approaches influenced by critical race, Indigenous and decolonial, queer, posthumanist, ecofeminist, ethological, social justice, cultural history, animalist, disability rights, Marxist, trans-species intersectional, and environmental justice perspectives. Those writing from Indigenous or decolonial perspectives prioritise deep relational connections with environments and non-human species.
Several exciting emerging trends in interdisciplinary HAS and CAS research are represented in articles appearing in the “Animals” section. One important trend is represented by scholars here who offer cutting-edge contemporary critiques of the animal—industrial complex, drawing on both the vast scientific evidence connecting animal agriculture to environmental degradation, diversity loss, and species extinction, and the ubiquity of cruel practices associated with breeding and farming animals for consumption. A second trend involves the scrutiny of anthropocentric environmental theories and mainstream conservation practices, demonstrating the ways in which they construct disrespect or deliberate disregard for the sentience and suffering of animals constructed as “unwanted”, such as so-called “pests,” as well as introduced and feral animals. For the most part, the authors in “Animals” are critiquing western cultural constructions and practices since these are closely connected to global animal and environmental exploitation, and because of their links to western capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism.
If you’re interested in getting involved in Oxford Intersections: Environmental Change and Human Experience, let us know.
Sun Awareness Week (11-17 May 2026) is the British Association of Dermatologists’ (BAD) annual week-long campaign dedicated to raising awareness of the public health risk of sun exposure, from traditional tanning to sunbed use. The week also aims to teach the public about the importance of good sun protection habits, including ways you can check for signs of skin cancer.
Tanning and sunbeds
Sun damage is normally caused by ultraviolet rays from the sun, known as UV rays.
Two types of UV rays can penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere: UVA rays and UVB rays. UVB rays are largely responsible for that perennial summer problem, sunburn. However, both types of UV rays are responsible for potentially more serious issues—specifically skin ageing and skin cancer—the most dangerous version of which is melanoma.
Tanning beds, also known as sunbeds, are well-known for allowing tanning year-round, and are also a source of those UV rays, and can provide an even greater risk for melanoma than their natural counterpart. This is because tanning beds also produce UV rays, but at a much higher concentration than normal, making tanning beds faster, but capable of far more skin damage. That is not to say that traditional tanning is safe; however, sun exposure can be harmful in any amount, to any age group.
Sun protection, prevention campaigns, and public awareness of skin health risks are vital in preventing skin cancers and premature skin ageing.
Recent research from the BAD family of journals—the British Journal of Dermatology, our educational journal Clinical and Experimental Dermatology, and our open-access journal Skin Health and Disease—offers new insights into preventing skin damage and life-threatening skin cancers. Here are some highlights.
Tanning bed trends internationally
In 2009, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified indoor tanning as a source of Class I carcinogens—the highest level known. As a result, almost 25 countries globally have banned their use for minors—though anyone using a sun bed before their mid-thirties is at a higher risk of developing skin cancer later in life. A study published in BJD showed that Ireland is one of the countries that passed the Public Health (Sunbeds) Act in 2014. Since then, Ireland has seen a dramatic 40% reduction in registered tanning businesses. The key message of the study was that a targeted multi-pronged approach is needed to inform and stop the use of sun beds.
Although the ban on younger people who use sunbeds is helpful in pre-empting later skin cancers, tanning beds are still considered sources of carcinogens, with no safe level of exposure. In the United Kingdom, the regulation of sun beds is poor, as seen in this study, with many beds in sun tanning businesses recorded at settings far higher than the legal limit. This finding also correlates to higher melanoma rates in parts of northern England, with over 50 percent of businesses in some regions over-exposing customers.
Amongst those who spend much of their time in the sun, student athletes risk over-exposure to UV rays year-round, no matter where in the world they play. Novel research from Stanford has shown that when provided with a short video explaining the risks of sun-exposure, with the free provision of sun-protection in the areas that student athletes frequent, had a positive effect on attitudes towards sun protection usage.
Sun awareness in the medical field
Sun protection awareness campaigns can also benefit healthcare workers. An observational study from Ireland demonstrated that a digitally based sun-awareness campaign targeted at healthcare workers (857 workers completed the survey) in their places of employment raised not only raised the awareness of the importance (79%) of using sun-protection, but also increased the likelihood that healthcare workers would discuss sun protection universally.
Why public health outreach for sun exposure matters
Social media is emerging as an essential tool for raising awareness of the risks of sun exposure and preventing sunbed use among younger generations. Alternatively, social media has also raised interest in sun bed use—especially in the guise of ‘wellness’ and cosmetic applications. Research has shown that individuals who frequently use sun beds are more likely to sunburn as adults and participate in higher risk sun-exposure while using lower-UV ray blocking sun protection.
Finally, there is evidence that public health campaigns on skin cancer in both the United Kingdom and Australia have had the positive effect of steadying the rate of melanoma in young adults—especially when those campaigns are based on published research that confirmed the cancer-causing nature of ultraviolet radiation from all types of tanning.
Sun Awareness Week highlights the need for sun protection, education, and awareness about the risks that can contribute to skin cancers—not just from tanning beds. If you notice any changes to skin lesions or moles, then it is best to consult your doctor.
