Protest practice and (tree) cultures of conflict: understanding the spaces of ‘tree maiming’ in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England

Developing understandings of protest and cultures of resistance has been a central theme of the 'new' cultural geography of the 1990s and 2000s. But whilst geographers of the here and now have been highly sensitive to the importance of acts of protest which occur outside of the context of broader social movements, geographers concerned with past protests have tended to focus overwhelmingly upon either understanding the development of social movements or highly specific place-based studies. Through a focus upon the hitherto ignored practice of 'tree maiming', this paper demonstrates not only the value of examining specific protest practices in helping to better understand the complexity of conflict, but also how in periods of acute socio-economic change the evolving relationship between humans and the non-human – in this case trees – is a central discourse to the protest practices of the poor. Such attacks often involved complex cultural understandings about the ways in which trees should – and should not – be socially enrolled.

The role of previous experience and attitudes toward statistics in statistics assessment outcomes among undergraduate psychology students

Previous research has demonstrated that students’ cognitions about statistics are related to their performance in statistics assessments. The purpose of this research is to examine the nature of the relationships between undergraduate psychology students’ previous experiences of maths, statistics and computing; their attitudes toward statistics; and assessment on a statistics course. Of the variables examined, the strongest predictor of assessment outcome was students’ attitude about their intellectual knowledge and skills in relation to statistics at the end of the statistics curriculum. This attitude was related to students’ perceptions of their maths ability at the beginning of the statistics curriculum. Interventions could be designed to change such attitudes with the aim of improving students’ learning of statistics.

Paul Karl Feyerabend Las proyecciones de la proliferación teórica en la relación ciencia-metafísica

La doctrina de la Proliferación teórica de Paul Karl Feyerabend ha sido interpretada por sus especialistas como un intento de salvaguardar el ideal del progreso científico. Aunque tales estudios hacen justicia, en parte, a la intencionalidad de nuestro filósofo no explicitan la crítica fundamental que implica para Feyerabend el pluralismo teórico. La proliferación teórica constituye en sí misma una reductio ad absurdum de los distintos intentos del positivismo lógico y del racionalismo crítico por definir la ciencia a expensas de lo metafísico. Este artículo presenta la proliferación teórica como una reivindicación del papel positivo que ocupa la metafísica en el quehacer científico. Se consigna la defensa que hace Feyerabend de la metafísica en cuanto que ésta constituye la posibilidad de superar el conservadurismo conceptual, aumentar de contenido empírico de la ciencia y recuperar el valor descriptivo de las teorías científicas.

Escaping the Cage of Ethno-National Conflict in Northern Ireland: The Importance of Transnational Networks

co-author; Cathal McCall