Analysts are taking the pulse of the MAGA movement, seeking to understand whether it can sustain its momentum without its godfather, Donald Trump. In fact, the right-wing movement energetically was rolling along in the early 2010s, before the MAGA label ...
Analysts are taking the pulse of the MAGA movement, seeking to understand whether it can sustain its momentum without its godfather, Donald Trump. In fact, the right-wing movement energetically was rolling along in the early 2010s, before the MAGA label emerged and while Trump was starring in The Apprentice.
In the late 2000s, a group of right-wing thinkers broke off from traditional free-market conservatives and the small-government Tea Party movement. They developed instead a new focus on social issues and organized a careful, often unseen, movement to drive change by gaining power over key political institutions. Donald Trump had little—if anything—to do with the genesis of this movement, but he was extraordinarily successful in riding it to the presidency, driving historic changes in what government does and how it does it.
Trump might slowly fade from the political scene and national commentators might debate whether MAGA still lives. But the right-wing idea factory is continuing to work, especially in state and local governments. It is generating a large and ongoing collection of issues, guaranteeing that right-wing ideas will continue to live on through an ongoing campaign for political power and influence.
Here are some of the reasons why.
The money pipeline is open wider. Until recently, donors had to obey strict contribution limits to candidates. Political parties could collect piles of cash, but they couldn’t coordinate their advertising with the candidates. In a June 30 decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that donors could funnel money to the parties and the parties, in turn, could spend as much as they liked in direct coordination with candidates. That decision effectively blew off contribution ceilings. At least for the time being, that gives Republicans a huge advantage, since the party has more than $100 million more in the bank than Democrats. This will give the right-wing tremendous additional fuel for its ideas.
Transgender bans get the green light. Idaho and West Virginia have both enacted bans against transgender players on women’s and girls’ sports teams. The Supreme Court ruled that the states could indeed establish such bans. That’s sure to ignite more debates in more states about where they can draw the line on LGBTQ+ rights. The Court didn’t decide whether it was permissible for states to specifically allow transgender individuals to compete on the teams. That issue is sure to come before the Court, along with more tussles about how far the states can go in dealing with LGBTQ+ rights.
Religion creeps into the classroom. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that a Washington state school board was wrong in disciplining a former football coach, who knelt in postgame prayer in the middle of the field. That set off a scramble throughout the country to push religion into other school programs. Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas require local schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Texas went even further by building Bible study into the curriculum, beginning with Noah’s Ark in the first grade and David and Goliath in second grade. How far will they be able to go?
State policy upsets traditional higher education policies. Florida is leading a broad revolution against what colleges and universities teach and how they are run. Gender studies programs are gone. So are DEI initiatives. A “back to the classics” movement has sprung up in a bid to push out what the right-wing sees as the “woke” bias in the classroom. Tenured professors undergo new, tough, regular reviews. Undocumented students are blocked from enrolling. Similar initiatives are rolling out across the country, led by Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas, all designed to uproot what are viewed as powerful liberal forces in higher education.
The fight to prohibit abortion is red-hot. Medications, not surgical procedures, account for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the US. That compares with just a third in 2014, and it scrambles the efforts from the right to shut down abortions. When abortions take place in a clinic, it’s relatively easy to end them: close the clinic. But medication-induced abortions are far more difficult to prevent. Women can obtain a prescription and take the drugs at home. Some physicians prescribe the drugs remotely and mail them to patients, and that makes it possible to circumvent abortion bans in 41 states. Louisiana indicted a New York doctor for mail-order abortion medications, and a Texas judge fined a physician $100,000 for, the judge said, prescribing pills to a Dallas-area woman. New York countered that its “shield law” protected the doctor. The US Supreme Court might have overturned Roe v. Wade, but the abortion battles in the states are far from over.
Policy leaders are campaigning to make all public employees at-will. The Trump administration won a big victory with the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter, in which the Court ruled that the president could fire members of independent regulatory commissions. The administration followed the Court’s decision with a new regulation that would allow agency heads to fire employees if they didn’t meet “suitability and fitness” standards, as the officials chose to define them. The Trump administration says the changes are necessary to make public employees more accountable. In fact, they push accountability from effectiveness in administering the law to loyalty to the president. The decisions might seem subtle, but they are very likely to shift the balance of powers within the nation’s democratic system, in favor of the president at the expense of the Congress.
The list could easily go on—and Trump has had little to do with most of them. They are only loosely connected with the national MAGA movement, but they all have long legs in the states. And, put together, they point to why the right-wing idea factory will continue to anchor a big movement in American politics.
I have long admired the example of the late Paul Farmer, MD and anthropologist. He founded Zanmi Lasante (Partners in Health), a global network of community health providers in areas of the world ravaged by social and natural disasters such as poverty, racial, class, gender-based inequality, underdeveloped or war-destroyed public infrastructure, and political violence. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tracy Kidder titled his 2003 biography of Farmer Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (NY: Random House). The phrase “mountains beyond mountains” comes, according to Kidder, from a Haitian proverb, “dèyè mòn gen mòn“, translated as “beyond mountains there are mountains”. As a hiker during my graduate school days on the Central Coast of California, I know the feeling well of gutting out a long uphill switchback, hoping that this was the last leg of the climb, only to see before me another long uphill track—a mountain beyond the mountain I thought I had ascended.
Teaching, researching, and writing about gender—about what gender relations could be in a just world if we put the work into imagining that just world into existence—feels a lot like scrabbling uphill over dangerous terrain only to find mountains beyond the mountains we have already scaled. Especially now, in the current political climate featuring anti “gender ideology” sentiment—willful misunderstandings of what should by now, in the 21st century, be noncontroversial assertions of basic human dignity for women and gender-nonconforming persons of all races, classes, faiths, sexualities, and ethnicities—the paths upward seem strewn with careening boulders.
A decade ago, I wrote an essay comparing queer feminist scholarly endeavors to the task encountered by a feminine counterpart of Sisyphus, using the feminine ending Sisyphe to set her apart from her more famous brother. Sisyphe, unlike Camus’ stoic existentialist Sisyphus, is not happy. She is understandably angry about having to continually roll a rock, made up of the sediment of ages of conscious and unconscious injustices and indignities, up a hill while attending to the already difficult everyday tasks of living. The upshot of this effort, nevertheless, is that Sisyphe has very strong arms. She handles the rock with one hand while doing the bulk of the often-unacknowledged care work of generations with the other.
Ten years after writing about Sisyphe’s strong arms, I realize that my original analogy is underdeveloped. For starters, Sisyphe is not singular. She has many siblings of many genders who move those boulders with strength, resilience, and collective ingenuity. And the boulder of the Greek myth is too contained and controlled to fit the moment. The image of an all-powerful and punitive god manifesting a daily boulder to torture Sisyphus/Sisyphe is too staid, too dignified for what we are experiencing now. In place of the figure of Zeus, modern day Sisyphes must contend with dozens of chaotic, vengeful, and comically incompetent Wile E. Coyotes hurling rocks off cliffs scattershot. It doesn’t help that we can laugh at the bathetic antics of the ranting figure behind the rock. The boulders still do damage to those in their path.
That’s what researching, writing, and teaching about gender often feels like today. Consider the self-satirizing example of a professor in the U.S. being told that he can’t teach a canonical work by Plato in a philosophy class because to read Aristophanes’ speech from circa 400 BCE is to promote “gender ideology” in 2026 CE. The rocks are falling every which way, and it is going to take a large, global community to keep them from crushing the communities, institutions, and principles we cultivate in order to make a better, if not perfect world for ourselves and our global siblings.
Gender Justice, a new topic featured in Oxford Intersections, is one such gathering of Sisyphes—a community of scholars, thinkers, and practitioners who continue the work of rigorous inquiry and analysis of systems of power that derail the quest for livable lives, with dignity and purpose, for all persons across the globe regardless of gender, sexuality, nation, race, disability, social class, faith, and other social markers that are leveraged to produce inequality rather than just relations. Divided into twelve sections like the hours of (an analogue) clock or the months in a year, Gender Justice draws together experts and community-based knowledge workers to provide reasoned and researched work on gender from a wide range of disciplines and interdisciplines: from philosophy, technology studies, politics, law, environmental studies, economics, creative arts, health and mental health, family studies, comparative religion, and intersectional queer and feminist studies. The module is ambitious in its aims but curated carefully to provide readers, researchers, and scholars access to reliable, ethical, and intellectually rigorous insights into the complex and dynamic field of gender studies. We are not hubristic enough to believe that Gender Justice will change the world by mere fact of its publication in June 2026, but we do have hope—a virtue much needed in these times—that the resources it provides will prove useful to the multifaceted conglomeration of thinkers and dreamers who continue to do the work of striving for a world that is more livable, more humane, and more just for all. We’ve got the next mountain, together.
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.
