We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent ‘canonical (...) icons’, cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations. (shrink)

Nick Hopwood, Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord , “Seriality and scientific objects in the nineteenth century”, History of Science, xlviii . Series represent much that was new and significant in the sciences between the French Revolution and the First World War. From periodical publication to the cinema, tabulation to industrialized screening, series feature in major innovations in scientific communication and the organization of laboratories, clinics, libraries, museums and field - XIXe siècle – Nouvel article.

Nick Hopwood, Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord, “Seriality and scientific objects in the nineteenth century”, History of Science, xlviii. Series represent much that was new and significant in the sciences between the French Revolution and the First World War. From periodical publication to the cinema, tabulation to industrialized screening, series feature in major innovations in scientific communication and the organization of laboratories, clinics, libraries, museums and field - XIXe siècle – Nouvel article.

Reinvestigating the work of the anatomist Wilhelm His (1831-1904) shows how engaging with models in three dimensions can revise our accounts of scientific change. His is known to historians of biology for articulating a mechanical approach to embryology and for inventing a section cutter, or microtome. Focusing on the wax models that he also made in the late 1860s shows how the other two innovations were linked; reconstructing embryos from the sections, His claimed, provided compelling evidence for mechanical views. The (...) next generation of embryologists appropriated His's work selectively. In the 1880s anatomists took up "plastic reconstruction" to visualize the complex forms of higher vertebrate, especially human, embryos. An increasingly dominant experimental embryology, by contrast, drew on His's mechanical approach but had little use for the waxes and effaced them from the history of his work. Recovering these models offers a fresh perspective on the transformation of a central science of animal life and enriches our understanding of the relations between representation in two dimensions and three. (shrink)

Icons of knowledge -- Two small embryos in spirits of wine -- Like flies on the Parlon ceiling -- Drawing and Darwinism -- Illustrating the magic word -- Professors and progress -- Visual strategies -- Schematics, forgery, and the so-called educated -- Imperial grids -- Setting standards -- Forbidden fruit -- Creative copying -- Trials and tributes -- Scandal for the people -- A hundred Haeckels -- The textbook illustration -- Iconoclasm -- The shock of the copy.

Educational researchers are increasingly striving on the edge of possibility to re-imagine and realise the future. Activist scholarship requires appropriate philosophical and theoretical bases, what Stetsenko refers to as ‘dangerous’ – useful in the struggle for a better world. How might praxis, agency and learning be charged with transgressive spirit? This paper considers the Theory of Practice Architectures and Transformative Activist Stance, established frameworks that dangerously address praxis, agency and learning. Adopting a postabyssal approach, contributions from the Global South and (...) East are drawn on to develop an epistemologically plural basis for thinking differently about praxis, agency and learning. Recent Latin American scholarship reinvigorates Freirean ideas through connections with Fals Borda and contemporary feminist pedagogues, centred on a notion of feeling-thinking. Luitel’s interpretations of Vedic philosophy provide radically different ideas of negative dialectics, chaos, responsibility and liberation. An open-minded, open-hearted, open-ended approach is crucial to making these ideas more useful in the struggle over alternative, more equitable and just futures. (shrink)

Interprofessional collaboration involves some kind of knowledge sharing, which is essential and will be important in the future in regard to the opportunities and challenges in practices for delivering safe and effective health care. Nursing assistants are seldom mentioned as a group of health care workers that contribute to interprofessional collaboration in health care practice. The aim of this ethnographic study was to explore how the nursing assistants’ knowledge can be shared in a team on a spinal cord injury rehabilitation (...) ward. Using a sociomaterial perspective on practice, we captured different aspects of interprofessional collaboration in health care. The findings reveal how knowledge was shared between professionals, depending on different kinds of practice architecture. These specific cultural–discursive, material–economic, and social–political arrangements enabled possibilities through which nursing assistants’ knowledge informed other practices, and others’ knowledge informed the practice of nursing assistants. By studying what health care professionals actually do and say in practice, we found that the nursing assistants could make a valuable contribution of knowledge to the team. (shrink)

This article presents a sociomaterial account of simulation in higher education. Sociomaterial approaches change the ontological and epistemological bases for understanding learning and offer valuable tools for addressing important questions about relationships between university education and professional practices. Simulation has grown in many disciplines as a means to bring the two closer together. However, the theoretical underpinnings of simulation pedagogy are limited. This paper extends the wider work of applying sociomaterial approaches to educational phenomena, taking up Schatzki’s practice theory as (...) a distinctive basis for doing so. The question ‘What is being simulated?’ is posed, prompting discussion of multiple bodies, performances and experiences. The potential of adopting such a framework for understanding simulation as a pedagogic practice that brings the classroom and workplace together is illustrated with reference to clinical education in nursing. (shrink)

Biologists having rediscovered amphioxus, also known as the lancelet or Branchiostoma, it is time to reassess its place in early Darwinist debates over vertebrate origins. While the advent of the ascidian–amphioxus theory and challenges from various competitors have been documented, this article offers a richer account of the public appeal of amphioxus as a primitive ancestor. The focus is on how the ‘German Darwin’ Ernst Haeckel persuaded general magazine and newspaper readers to revere this “flesh of our flesh and blood (...) of our blood”, and especially on Das neue Laienbrevier des Haeckelismus (The new lay breviary of Haeckelism) by Moritz Reymond with cartoons by Fritz Steub. From the late 1870s these successful little books of verse introduced the Neapolitan discoveries that made the animal’s name and satirized Haeckel’s rise as high priest of its cult. One song is reproduced and translated here, with a contemporary “imitation” by the Canadian palaeontologist Edward John Chapman, and extracts from others. Predating the American “It’s a long way from amphioxus” by decades, these rhymes dramatize neglected ‘species politics’ of Darwinism and highlight the roles of humour in negotiating evolution. (shrink)

Although it has not been much noticed, reproduction is the central theme of François Jacob’s important history of biology, La logique du vivant (The Logic of Life). In a book ostensibly devoted to heredity, this molecular biologist had reproduction integrate levels of organization from organisms to molecules and play a major role in each historical transition between them, not just in the influential argument for a shift “from generation to reproduction.” Moreover, I claim, La logique was the first general history (...) of (research on) reproduction. Earlier histories had tackled only aspects of generation and reproduction; none historicized the latter. Jacob’s innovation came out of the rising prominence of reproduction in neo-Darwinist studies of populations and in his own field, the cellular genetics of bacteria and their viruses, and engagement with history and philosophy of science. The discovery of bacterial “sex” enabled microbial genetics but, ironically, led Jacob to a sexless concept of reproduction. This approach molded a history that reached across the living world but slighted sex and the complexities of reproduction in multicellular organisms. Readers can learn from its strength and limitations. (shrink)

Researchers need the concept of agency to address diverse and urgent social problems of our time. Cultural-historical activity theory, originally started with Vygotsky, is widely used in education, psychology, sociology, and transdisciplinary contexts. Scholars and students in diverse disciplines will benefit from this volume.

Nursing work increasingly demands forms of expertise that complement specialist knowledge. In child and family nursing, this need arises when nurses work in partnership with parents of young children at risk. Partnership means working with parents in respectful, negotiated and empowering ways. Existing partnership literature emphasises communicative and relational skills, but this paper focuses on nurses’ capacities to facilitate parents’ learning. Referring to data from home visiting, day‐stay and specialist toddler clinic services in Sydney, a pedagogical framework is presented. Analysis (...) shows how nurses notice aspects of children, parents and parent–child interactions as a catalyst for building on parents’ strengths, enhancing guided chance or challenging unhelpful constructs. Prior research shows the latter can be a sticking point in partnership, but this paper reveals diverse ways in which challenges are folded into learning process that position parents as agents of positive change. Noticing is dependent on embodied and communicative expertise, conceptualised in terms of sensory and reported channels. The framework offers a new view of partnership as mind‐expanding for the parent and specifies the nurse's role in facilitating this process. (shrink)

This history of a statement attributed to the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert exemplifies the making and uses of quotations in recent science. Wolpert's dictum, ‘It is not birth, marriage or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life’, was produced in a series of international shifts of medium and scale. It originated in his vivid declaration in conversation with a non-specialist at a workshop dinner, gained its canonical form in a colleague's monograph, and was amplified (...) as a quotation on a poster derived from an undergraduate project. Although it drew on Wolpert's authority and he accepted his authorship, it thus represents a collective sifting of earlier claims for the significance of prenatal existence through the values of 1980s developmental biology. Juxtaposing a technical term with major life events has let teachers engage students, and researchers entice journalists, while sharing an in-joke that came to mark community identity. Serious applications include arguing for an extension of the fourteen-day limit on human-embryo research. On this evidence, quotations have been kept busy addressing every audience of specialized knowledge. (shrink)

A significant international development agenda in the practice of nurses supporting families with young children focuses on establishing partnerships between professionals and service users. Qualitative data were generated through interviews and focus groups with 22 nurses from three child and family health service organisations, two in Australia and one in New Zealand. The aim was to explore what is needed in order to sustain partnership in practice, and to investigate how the concept of practice architectures can help understand attempts to (...) enhance partnerships between nurses and families. Implementation of the Family Partnership Model (FPM) is taken as a specific point of reference. Analysis highlights a number of tensions between the goals of FPM and practice architectures relating to opportunities for ongoing learning; the role of individual nurses in shaping the practice; relationships with peers and managers; organisational features; and extra‐organisational factors. The concept of practice architectures shows how changing practice requires more than developing individual knowledge and skills, and avoids treating individuals and context separately. The value of this framework for understanding change with reference to context rather than just individual’s knowledge and skills is demonstrated, particularly with respect to approaches to practice development focused on providing additional training to nurses. (shrink)