With a little help from FUN FRIENDS young children can overcome anxiety

This paper highlights resilience as a key concept when working with young children to improve their emotional wellbeing and reduce anxieties. Supporting children aged 4-7 years with anxiety is a significant area of advancement in terms of therapeutic approaches over the last decade. This paper outlines one such approach that was implemented within a Tier 2 Community Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) within the northern region of England to determine whether findings from Australian studies could be replicated in the UK. A pilot study was undertaken with a group of young children aged 4-7 years old with symptoms of anxiety. All of the children had been referred to the service because of anxiety related issues, such as social phobia, generalised anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. They received a group intervention, FUN FRIENDS, over a period of 12 weeks. By enabling the children to become more self-sufficient this allowed greater emotional and social skills development. All the children demonstrated improved anxiety scores post intervention, as measured by the Spence Child Anxiety Scale

Re-energising the role of vitalism theory in child development, nature orientation and research

This article discusses the merits of vitalism theory in practice. It suggests a more creative and ecological approach to vitalism theory in the field of child health and development as a way of unlocking childhood potential and research innovation. By using an example from the author’s doctoral research concept (based on Deleuzian ideas) for children, viewing children socially, culturally and philosophically as ‘vectors of entanglements’, the author seeks to demonstrate and encourage the application of vitalism across health, education and participatory research

Promoting Pluralism in Counselling: an Untapped Source of Relational Mapping as Therapeutic Process

This paper discusses the merits of pluralism in practice. It argues for a wider recognition of creative and integrative approaches, such as those used in the field of children’s geographies (involving places and spaces), as a way of unlocking practitioner potential and innovation. By re-thinking child and human development, viewing it as socially, culturally and philosophically bound, through the proposed concept of ‘vectors of entanglements’, the author seeks to demonstrate and encourage the application of hybrid approaches across multi-disciplinary fields. Through the use of diagramming and mapping the interconnectedness of relationships across space and place, the therapeutic process is brought to life to encourage practitioners to explore the ‘invisible’ threads that constitute significant meanings to clients

Multiple me, the unfolding ethnographer: Multiple becomings and entanglements are a more-than-human ethnographer

This recit describes the use of visual-material methods in animating, re-enacting and highlighting the significance of human-animal interactions to well-being and flourishing. In employing creative methods and sensory ethnography, the researcher’s body is emergent as a vector of knowledge and site of multiple unfolding identities and entanglements. It therefore reveals the embodied and intra-corporeal nature of experience that is often unknown, unthought and invisible. In doing so, new insights and ways of ‘knowing’ manifest in exciting and original means. Through sketching using a multi-layered technique akin to what is known as “pentimento” brings forth the concept that we are all constantly “becoming” something other and something more through our rhythms of relating

Bodies of Knowledge, Kinetic Melodies, Rhythms of Relating and Affect Attunement in Vital Spaces for Multi-Species Well-Being: Finding Common Ground in Intimate Human-Canine and Human-Equine Encounters

In this paper, we bring together two separate studies and offer a double similitude as it were, in finding “common ground” and “common worlds” between dog–human and horse–human interactions. Appreciation of the process and mechanism of affect (and affect theory) can enable a greater understanding of child–animal interactions in how they benefit and co-constitute one another in enhancing well-being and flourishing. Studies have thus far fallen short of tapping into this significant aspect of human–animal relationships and the features of human flourishing. There has been a tendency to focus more on related biological and cognitive enhancement (lowering of blood pressure, increase in the “feel good” hormone oxytocin) such as a dog’s mere “presence” in the classroom improving tests of executive function and performance. Study A details an affective methodology to explore the finer nuances of child–dog encounters. By undertaking a sensory and walking ethnography in a North East England Primary School with Year 6 (aged 10 and 11 years) and Year 4 (aged 7 and 8 years) children (60 in total), participant observation enabled rich data to emerge. Study B involves two separate groups of young people aged between 16 and 19 years who were excluded from mainstream education and identified as “vulnerable” due to perceived behavioural, social or emotional difficulties. It used mixed methods to gather and examine data from focus groups, interviews and statistics using the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Photo elicitation was an additional source of information. This equine intervention facilitated vital spaces for social and emotional well-being. The important significance of touch to children’s and young people’s well-being suggests a need for “spaces” in classrooms, and wider society, which open up this possibility further and challenge a “hands-off” pedagogy and professional practice

Bearing Witness to the Beauty of Enactive Kinesthetic Empathy across Species in Canine-Human and Equine-Human Interactions: Participant-Observation Ethnographies

Through observations from ethnographic fieldwork the authors seek to highlight the significance of equine-human and canine-human communication to the fields of both human- animal studies and eudaimonia theories of human well-being. As we shared our insights through academic conversations about our respective research findings, we realized that both studies explore the enigmatic and significant concept of kinesthetic empathy in communication and relationship building between horses and young people and between dogs and young children. The canine-child setting (Study A) is a primary school and classroom in which the children voted to share their environment with a school dog, and the equine-adolescent setting (Study B) is an intervention program for young people experiencing social and emotional challenges because of being excluded from the mainstream education system. Observations revealed that the notion of kinesthetic empathy is apparent across species and plays a key role in the well-being of both animal and human. These observations are described and animated through rich descriptions from field notes and photographs taken from both settings. Both studies bring to light the significance of touch, movement, and attunement in human-animal communication to further add to this emerging field. Marrying these concepts together, as we have attempted here, could prove a major step forward in strengthening this field, as the need for robust methodologies is purported. This paper will be of interest to professionals across disciplines such as education, social work, health care, sociology, and human-animal studies

Opening up the unfamiliar and enabling new pathways for movement and becoming: Through, in, and beyond attachment

The philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari opens up vast potential to disrupt and explore some of the confines of attachment theory when considering the development of enchantment, wishful, and magical thinking in childhood. Through connection with the use of the fairy-tale, the authors seek to illuminate and illustrate the lines of flight, which activate resistance against the universalism of attachment theory and linear process of child development. In using the classic tale of Peter Pan as metaphor, and by applying Deleuzian philosophy and mythology, we aim to expand current thinking about the nature of childhood. By translating text into visual meaning, thus creating a lens with which to view an alternative pathway for child development, the complexity of the spatio-temporality of relationships as a contemporary adjunct to attachment theory, is materialised to produce an affective picture of the non-linear dimension and process of development in children. This affective genre illuminates the embodied and sensory aspects of ‘becoming’ which challenges a reductionist view of relationships. In doing so, this allows a ‘state change’ that enables professionals and scholars to see see differently

Walking in rhythm with Deleuze and a dog inside the classroom: an ethnographic emsemble

This thesis-assemblage with plateau places and peaks describes children’s interspecies relation with a classroom canine, a 3-year-old Springer Spaniel in a north of England primary school, (Year 6- 9-10-year olds and Year 4- 7-8-year olds, boys and girls; 60 children in total). The class teachers’ experience of having a canine in class with them is also included. It utilises posthumanism, post structuralism and new materialism perspectives as its research paradigm in synergy with a non-representational, visual-material methodology. Once feelings are cognitised or articulated, their true essence can be lost. Therefore, elucidating moment-to-moment child–dog interactions through the lens of affect theory attempts to materialise the invisible, embodied, ‘unthought’ and non-conscious experience. Through consideration of Deleuzian concepts such as the ‘rhizome’ and ‘Body-Without-Organs’ being enacted it illuminates new, ‘situated knowledge’. This is explicated and revealed using visual methods with ‘data’ produced by both the children and their classroom dog. Photographs and video footage were taken from a GoPro micro camera mounted on the dog’s harness and on the children’s wrists, (‘wrist cam’). In addition, individual drawings, artefacts and paintings completed by the children are profound points in the research process, which are referred to as ‘planomenons’. These then become emergent as a children’s comic book where their relationship with ‘Ted’, their classroom dog, is materialised. Through their interspecies relationship both child and dog exercise agency, co- constitute and transform one another and occupy a space of shared relations and multiple subjectivities. The affectual capacities of both child and dog also co-create an affective atmosphere and emotional spaces. Through ethnographic, participant observation and the ‘researcher’s body’ as a tool, they visually create illustrations through the sketching of ‘etudes’ (drawing exercises) to draw forth this embodied experience to reveal multiple lines and entanglements, mapping a landscape of interconnections and relations. This culminates in a sense of Ted as a ‘petagogy’ and ‘pedadog’, affording the children spaces and places for wellbeing, tactile sensibility, and learning

Deleuze Becoming-Mary Poppins: Re-Imagining the Concept of Becoming-Woman and Its Potential for Challenging Current Notions of Parenting, Gender and Childhood

In this paper, we consider the major and controversial lexicon of Deleuze’s ‘becoming-woman’ and what an alternative re-working of this concept might look like through the story of Mary Poppins. In playfully exploring the many interesting aspects of Travers’ character, with her classic tale about the vagaries of parenting, we attempt to highlight how reading Mary Poppins through the Deleuzian lens of ‘becoming-woman’ opens up possibilities, not limitations, in terms of feminist perspectives. In initially resisting the ‘Disneyfication’ of Mary Poppins, Travers offered insights and opportunities which we revisit and consider in terms of how this fictional character can significantly disrupt ideas of gender performativity. We endeavour to accentuate how one of its themes not only dismantles the patriarchy in 1910 but also has significant traction in the twenty- first century. We also put forth the idea of Mary Poppins as an icon of post-humanism, a nomadic war machine, with her robotic caring, magic powers and literal flights of fancy, to argue how she ironically holds the dual position of representing the professionalisation of parenting and the need to move beyond a Dionysian view of children as in need of control and regulation, as well as that of nurturer and emancipator. Indeed, in her many contradictions, we suggest a nomadic Mary Poppins can offer a route into the ideas of Deleuze and his view of children as de-territorialising forces and activators of change

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead