Alan Bainbridge

This chapter argues that higher education's significant potential to innovate and promote sustainable living in an increasingly fragile world has been reduced, or ‘tamed’. Through the use of ecological metaphors of tame/wild, it is suggested that the ‘taming’ of education, and in particular higher education, has led to a pedagogical monoculture, quasi-competitive league tables and the certainty of progress towards excellence. This has been at the expense of supporting ‘wild’ psychological attributions able to focus on complexity, serendipity, and civic responsibility. Wild education will require a move from ego-logical thinking, where individual success dominates decision making, to eco-logical thinking that is able to consider the needs and desires of human and more-than-human others. Such a shift will move away from education processes that focus on predictive and directional intention to deliver a particular curriculum in a particular manner, to a more attentional embracing of messiness, confronting difficult questions, encouraging debate, and being able to live with uncertainty and dissent. Despite the use of ecological metaphors, the chapter does not argue that education needs to be in natural ecological settings but rather is more contingent on different psychological ways of encountering and paying attention to the world.

This chapter draws on two novels – People of the Black Mountains (I: The Beginning and II: The Eggs of the Eagle) – by the cultural theorist Raymond Williams as they provide an evocative insight into contemporary environmental challenges through a fictional account that details the interactions between humans and wild places, including the local and everyday life alongside the development of the powerful economic forces of capital – what today has become known as ‘ecosocialism’. Drawing on academic research, Williams imagines what life might have been like at the very local level across a time period of almost 25,000 years, providing a perspective on the connection and interaction between humans and nature. Whilst admitting that some of Williams’ theoretical writing can be challenging and a bit dated, the novel form allows access to the complexity of Williams’ configuration of the embeddedness of the human condition. It also provides opportunities to elide larger cultural aspects alongside individual feelings of lived experience. It is here that epistemological assumptions can be seen to merge with ontological realities and the novel can be argued to represent an onto-epistemological account of how people, places and spaces might be experienced.

In the Introduction to this interdisciplinary volume, the authors consider the psychological and political elements of human-wilderness relationships during a time of planetary poly-crisis. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, critical ecology, and post-humanist thought, the authors examine how capitalism and its neoliberal iteration have commodified and alienated humans and the more-than-human world, establishing a ‘metabolic rift’ between them. Their work interrogates binary responses to ecological emergency – both ‘business-as-usual’ high-tech solutions and romanticised ‘heroic salvation’ narratives – which present themselves as contributing directly to environmental actions but in essence reinforce anthropocentric domination. Bringing together psychoanalysis, phenomenology, political ecology, and ecopsychology, the authors craft a wild ethics that acknowledges the ways in which humans are always already embedded within ecological systems while respecting the irreducible otherness of non-human beings. They advance ‘re-naturing subjectivity’ as praxis that disrupts anthropocentric enclosures by engaging in wildness as cultivated both within and without. Their theoretical framework offers conceptual tools for reimagining ecological restoration beyond both human exceptionalism and naive romanticism that is valuable to both critical environmental humanities and therapeutic practice.

In the concluding chapter, the authors propose a ‘wild psychology’ which opposes the capitalist commodification of care and calls for radical therapeutic praxis. Drawing on their collaborative reflections as psychotherapists, the authors critique the individualistic pathology models that manualised interventions such as CBT have enshrined by neoliberalising mental health services whilst concealing from view collective sources of distress. In sharp contrast to ‘data-ism’ and systematisation, they argue for the benefits of therapeutic slowness, materiality, and relational depth as forms of political resistance against capitalist temporality. They also introduce the notion of ‘hospicing modernity’ – acknowledging capitalism's death while midwifing post-capitalist alternatives – and advocate for radical openness that transcends liberal tolerance. Through integrating death acceptance, transformative empathy, and ‘sympoietic’ practice, wild psychology challenges anthropocentric healing models. In positioning their kitchen-table collaboration as the play of wild imagination beyond algorithmic fantasy, the authors do not provide prescriptive solutions but threshold practices for collective liberation. This framework contributes to critical psychology, ecotherapy, and posthumanist therapeutic approaches which consider psychological distress to be inherently ecological/political.

In this chapter I suggest that modernity is supported by epistemologies likely to lead to planetary damaging behaviours and systems. Additionally, I will note that other epistemologies may offer possibilities for a more hopeful lens through which to view the human / more-than-human relationship. Initially I shall explore the dialectic relationship of being human, both ‘in’ and ‘of’ the world, before offering a central premise that suggests capitalist values and assumptions have initiated a fracture between humans and nature. Although this fracture has led to what some have termed a ‘polycrisis’, the situation is not irredeemable. Dreams are presented to offer the possibility of stepping off from the well-trodden path of existing hegemonic world views, to an inner world where previously censored fantasies and alternative ways of thinking can be ‘lived out’ beyond the repression of a domineering super-ego. I shall also suggest that sacred rituals and intergenerational stories that continue to influence many Indigenous cultures, can still have a significant role to provide meaning for the human / more-than-human relationship.

Brain tissue temperature is a dynamic balance between heat generation from metabolism, passive loss of energy to the environment, and thermoregulatory processes such as perfusion. Perinatal brain injuries, particularly neonatal encephalopathy, and seizures, have a significant impact on the metabolic and haemodynamic state of the developing brain, and thereby likely induce changes in brain temperature. In healthy newborn brains, brain temperature is higher than the core temperature. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) has been used as a viable, non-invasive tool to measure temperature in the newborn brain with a reported accuracy of up to 0.2 degrees Celcius and a precision of 0.3 degrees Celcius. This measurement is based on the separation of chemical shifts between the temperature-sensitive water peaks and temperature-insensitive singlet metabolite peaks. MRS thermometry requires transport to an MRI scanner and a lengthy single-point measurement. Optical monitoring, using near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), offers an alternative which overcomes this limitation in its ability to monitor newborn brain tissue temperature continuously at the cot side in real-time. Near infrared spectroscopy uses linear temperature-dependent changes in water absorption spectra in the near infrared range to estimate the tissue temperature. This review focuses on the currently available methodologies and their viability for accurate measurement, the potential benefits of monitoring newborn brain temperature in the neonatal intensive care unit, and the important challenges that still need to be addressed.

This research focuses on how members of the UK Parliament engaged with evidence in relation to the policy decision leading to the Selective Schools Expansion Fund, a policy designed to enable the existing 163 English grammar schools to apply for additional funds to expand their intake. Although a small case study, the narrow focus provides a fertile setting for analysis of the relationship between research evidence, parliamentary debates and policy decisions. The article provides contextual background in relation to the dominant political parties’ (Conservative and Labour) education policy manifesto statements and a discussion on the nature and understanding of evidence. Particular attention is given to how evidence can be used to support claims and the importance of justified warrants. Using NVivo software, we identified the thematic content of 11 parliamentary debates and analysed the findings using descriptive statistics, which we tested with a playful, carnivalesque extrapolation of the data. Argumentative analysis shows that within the debates a number of rhetorical tools are used to avoid empirical evidence, including the deployment of a ‘moral sidestep’ which discourse analysis reveals in this case to be the repeated communication that grammar schools are ‘good’. In this way, Ofsted ratings are conflated with moral goodness, leading to a disproportionate diversion of school funding in their favour. This case study exposes strengths and weaknesses of parliamentary debate, which might be relevant to educational researchers who focus on evidence‐based policy and to the policy makers and other stakeholders who engage with the evidence such researchers offer.

This article considers adult learning from a ‘long-life’ perspective. Stepping out of contemporary frames that position adult learning as ‘life-long’ or even ‘life-wide’ enables a discussion of adult learning as an evolutionary informed, ecologically meaningful activity. In taking this approach, the paper shows how adult learning has evolved and been maintained by trouble, indeed how the human condition is under continual existential threat. The paper will draw on writings that discuss the evolutionary origins of adult learning, particularly the paradox that humans are both part of, and separate from, the ‘more-than-human’ world (Abram, 1997). The focus of this paper will be on the experience, conscious or unconscious, of living under the continual threat of annihilation and how this may have provided the motive for adult learning behaviours in both our hominid ancestors and contemporary society. The paper begins with a discussion to highlight the nature of human life as one that is always under threat by drawing on religious symbolism, poetry and (in the UK at least) an ever-expanding genre of ‘nature writing’. Having explored what it may feel like to live a life where survival is uncertain, the paper then draws on ecological and evolutionary principles to provide a theoretical ‘long-life’ understanding of adult learning. It is admitted at the outset that the route set out here may appear contradictory, even confusing, but the author asks the reader to first enter into an uncomfortable and troubling world, before the author, finally – despite what might sound like a bleak prospect for humanity – provides resources of hope grounded in the paradoxical potential provided by adult learning.