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Placing today's anti-fracking protests amongst previous social struggles in Lancashire, this paper explores how radical environmental movements resist a capitalist drive for cheap Nature that endangers human and extra-human reproduction. Hydraulic fracturing encroaches on parts of nature that in the common sense of people have not yet completely lost their ontology of a commons. Clean water, air, silence and accessibility are not yet ontologically detached from the conditions for healthy lives and a vibrant community. Like the peasants who revolted in early-modern England because enclosures deprived them of access to firewood and land for grazing cattle, today local communities revolt to the new enclosures that deprive them and future generations from a clean environment, necessary for a healthy life. One of the more subtle and underexposed strategies of radical environmental movements is to emphasize and (re-)create an ontological unity between nature and humanity-in-nature as a reaction to the duality of modernity. This paper's approach, which combines the political economic history of enclosures with anthropologically inspired research on changing conceptions of nature, shows how radical environmental movements object to material conditions that result from ontological dualisms. This helps to better understand the strategies and aspirations of radical "environmental" movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the concept of the social imaginary as a means for understanding how bodies and worlds interact in the production of therapeutic spaces. The 'body that imagines' is discussed through an engagement with Foucault's writing on subjectivation and Spinoza's theory of knowledge and the imagination. This focus on the 'body that imagines' allows a consideration of social imaginaries as processual and collective entities, and reveals how imaginaries are worked on and through, and invested in affectively by bodies. Two case studies consider the employment and negotiation of social imaginaries in constituting a relation to the self through the embodied experience of walking along a coastal footpath. These imaginaries contribute to a therapeutic framing of specific assemblages of bodies and landscapes. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the subject's capacity to work with and through imaginaries is central to both the production of meaningful space and a politics and ethics of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the treatment of ontology offered by critical realism. It addresses much of the material elaborated upon in two editions of this journal. Three main groups of criticisms are made here of the critical realist treatment of open systems. It is argued that critical realism, particularly in the project in economics emanating from Cambridge, UK, tends to define systems in terms of events. This definition is shown to be problematic. The exemplar of a closed system provided by critical realism of the solar system is shown to be flawed in that it is not closed according to the closure conditions identified by critical realism. Second, the negativity of the definitions adopted is problematic for heterodox traditions attempting to build positive programmes. Furthermore, the dualism of the definitions is also inconsistent with Dow's approach, which has ramifications for the coherence of post Keynesianism. Third, the definitions tend to polarize open and closed systems and ignore the degrees of openness evident in reality. The polarization of systems leads to polarized methodology and unsustainable arguments to reject so-called “closed-systems methods.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scandals in the NHS have undermined confidence in this institution. A key factor in substandard care is the competing demands on practitioners. Individualised care may be hindered by paternalism and collective organisation, while practitioners are expected to pursue evidence-based practice and person-centred care without acknowledging their differing goals. Drawing on a common theme from major philosophical conflicts in health services, this paper argues that instead of increasing managerial control, organisations should be empowering nurses to provide compassionate, person-centred care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jones' (2002) discussion of polarised transitions and the 'fast and slow lanes to adulthood' espoused by Bynner et al. (2002) are good examples of how dualistic language often permeates youth transitions discourses. This often results in transitions research concentrating on a dichotomy of experience during the youth phase. The primary purpose of this article is to develop the argument for the inclusion of detailed documentation and analysis of the transitions of intermediate groups who fall between the lines of this dualism. These young people constitute a 'missing middle' in relation to youth studies and UK educational policy. To support this argument, the paper turns to the results of a qualitative study of 18-24-year-old, male, front-line, retail employees in the South-East of England to illustrate how some young people do not find themselves neatly situated on one side of such categorical cleavages. These young men are following neither a NEET (not in education, employment or training) pathway nor a 'tidy', government preferred, route through post-compulsory education. Thus, studying such seemingly ordinary young people can contribute towards developing a more holistic understanding of youth in the contemporary period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years a group of researchers at Cambridge (UK) have (re)introduced conceptions of open and closed systems into economics. In doing so they have employed these categories in ways that, in my assessment, both facilitate a significant critique of current disciplinary practices and also point to more fruitful ways of proceeding. In an issue of this journal, Andrew Mearman has advanced three criticisms of the Cambridge position which, if valid, would seriously undermine this assessment. Below I defend the Cambridge position against Mearman's criticisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]