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"Downes, Paul"
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Hobbes, sovereignty, and early American literature
\"Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature pursues the question of democratic sovereignty as it was anticipated, theorized and resisted in the American colonies and in the early United States. It proposes that orthodox American liberal accounts of political community need to be supplemented and challenged by the deeply controversial theory of sovereignty that was articulated in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). This book offers a radical re-evaluation of Hobbes's political theory and demonstrates how a renewed attention to key Hobbesian ideas might inform inventive re-readings of major American literary, religious and political texts. Ranging from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puritan attempts to theorize God's sovereignty to revolutionary and founding-era debates over popular sovereignty, this book argues that democratic aspiration still has much to learn from Hobbes's Leviathan and from the powerful liberal resistance it has repeatedly provoked\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Discussion Paper: Beyond the 'diminished self': Challenging an array of objections to emotional well-being in education
With early school leaving prevention being an agreed European Union headline target of 10% across the EU by 2020, emotional-relational dimensions to education are gaining renewed attention in European education policy. Against this backdrop, prominent criticisms of an emotional well-being agenda in education by Ecclestone and Hayes require further consideration. The key objective of this paper is to challenge and reconstruct six key arguments of Ecclestone and Hayes against emotional wellbeing in education. There is a need to move beyond paradigms of conceptual coherence that rest upon diametric oppositions - thought/feeling, healthy/sick, diminished/undiminished, optimism/pessimism, subject/negation of a subject, learning/therapy. It is argued that an emotional well-being agenda in education is a conceptually coherent one, once different levels of prevention and intervention are distinguished and the argument goes beyond flat, undifferentiated conceptions of 'therapeutic culture'. The Cartesian model supported by Ecclestone and Hayes to frame a 'diminished' self is but one selfhood. A more nuanced debate would focus on the strengths and weaknesses of different, pluralistic conceptions of selfhood. Their most substantive objections to an emotional well-being agenda in education concern deficit labelling and privacy and are important cautionary notes.
Journal Article
Extended Paper: Reconceptualising Foundational Assumptions of Resilience: A Cross-Cultural, Spatial Systems Domain of Relevance for Agency and Phenomenology in Resilience
This article seeks to amplify Bronfenbrenner's (1979) concerns with concentric structured, nested systems and phenomenology, for Ungar's (2012) extension of resilience to systems based on Bronfenbrenner's (1979, 1995) socio-ecological paradigm. Resilience rests on interconnected assumptions regarding space, agency and system blockage, as well as the role of individual phenomenological dimensions. This article proposes a specific model of dynamic spatial systems of relation to underpin agency and phenomenology in resilience, building on a reinterpretation of Lévi-Strauss' (1962, 1963, 1973) cross-cultural observations of contrasts between concentric and diametric spatial systems; space is a key bridge between material, symbolic and interpersonal domains of relevance for resilience. Agency in resilience is interpreted in terms of movement between concentric and diametric spatial systems at social and school microsystem levels, as well as for individual phenomenology. Space is not just an object of analysis but an active constituent part of educational and developmental processes pertaining to resilience, as a malleable background contingent condition for causal trajectories. This framework of spatial-relational agency shifts focus for resilience from bouncing back into shape, towards transition points in space, moving from diametric spaces of splitting to concentric spatial relations of assumed connection across different system levels.
Journal Article
Examining the Roles and Consequent Decision-Making Processes of High-Level Strength and Conditioning Coaches
Research into sports coaches has identified the valuable role they play concerning social support provided to athletes together with their contribution to social and cultural interactions within both the participation and performance domains. The purpose of the present study was to qualitatively extract and examine the knowledge and on-task cognitions of high-level coaches (HLCs) within strength and conditioning (S and C). Applied cognitive task analysis (ACTA) was used to examine ten HLCs, each purposefully sampled to reflect over eight years of work in full time environments. The analysis of responses demonstrated HLCs engage in a pattern of innovative and diverse thinking, together with adaptability and multilevel planning, designed to promote an inclusive approach from performers, coaches and management. Commonality was demonstrated within the decision making of HLCs during the design of training programs. Communication was another important consideration when connecting with athletes, observing athletes, speaking to the head coach and integrating their approach with others. A confident, flexible approach to adapting to situational demands was evident and supported by the ability to recall and select from a wide range of previously learnt and tested strategies. Evidence is offered for the importance of interpersonal and social factors in HLCs’ relationships with athletes and coaches. The incorporation of strategies to support versatile, dynamic decision making within future S and C coach development materials will support more impactful performances by coaches at all stages of the coaching process.
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An Emerging Concentric Spatial Turn for Sustainable Systems: Beyond the Diametric Spatial Frame in Bacon’s View of Humans as Apart from and above the Natural World towards Being-Alongside Nature
A spatial turn is increasingly being recognised across education, the humanities, and social sciences to critique Western Cartesian assumptions treating space as either empty or a diametric opposition bringing dualistic splits between reason/emotion and mind/body. Bacon’s vision of human subjugation of nature as a tool for human progress is examined as a diametric spatial projection, where humans are above and apart from nature, in a mirror-image inverted symmetry of above/below hierarchy and side-by-side assumed separation as diametric space. Building on an interdisciplinary synthesis between an aspect of the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, De Beauvoir’s othering, and Bronfenbrenner’s social-ecological systems in psychology, allied with a Heideggerian critique of being as needing a mode of ‘being alongside the world’, a shift in experiential and conceptual space is proposed in this conceptual review article for education. This shift is towards a framework of concentric spatial systems of sustainability. Concentric relational spaces of assumed connection and relative openness and away from diametric spaces of splitting and closure have been developed recently for sustainability concerns regarding inclusion in education. This article goes further to interrogate systems of concentric relational space for belonging with and encountering the natural world for environmental sustainability.
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The 'Mystical Cosmetic': White Light and the Ideology of Energy in Moby-Dick
In his chapter on \"The Whiteness of the Whale,\" Ishmael suggests that he joined Ahab's vendetta against Moby Dick in response to a kind of existential panic attack brought on by a series of associated thoughts having to do with white light. Whiteness, Ishmael concludes, is \"the mystical cosmetic\" which \"for ever remains white or colorless in itself,\" and, as such, white light threatens to dissolve all color and hence all visible difference in the universe. While noting some of the ways in which light has served as a privileged metaphor for reason or, in Ishmael's hands, as an agent of deception (effecting various tricks of the light), this paper also thinks about light in the context of the developing nineteenth-century discourse on energy. Finally, I propose that Ishmael's meditation on whiteness both registers and disavows light as the commodified product of the whale hunting industry.
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Moby Dick and 'The Ecological Thought'
To ask why Ahab seeks vengeance on Moby Dick, in other words, is akin to asking why Kant’s early man speaks to the animal he is about to shear. These archetypal humanists (Kant’s Adam, Melville’s Ahab) demonstrate exposure to what Timothy Morton calls “the ecological thought”—a “coexistentialism” that precipitates environmental deconstruction.
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