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Early childhood environments are spaces of human encounters. Designed to enhance learning and teaching, ideally, they are spaces that support engagement with both social and physical environments and the development of positive relationships that acknowledge culture, heritage and personal circumstances. Infants’ encounters in these spaces are inevitably complex and reflect what Nelson (Young minds in social worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 17) describes as the “active drama” of experience and learning. In this chapter, I draw on examples from video data of a 14-month-old infant/toddler to illuminate the sophistication of preverbal infants’ strategic approaches to peer encounters within an early childhood environment. In particular, I focus on the strategies Charlie (see also Sumsion, Stratigos, and Bradley, Chap. 4, this volume; McLeod, Elwick, and Stratigos, Chap. 13, this volume) used to initiate contact with similar aged peers and consider factors that contribute to such initiations within the “relational spaces” (Nelson, Young minds in social worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 93). Finally, I reflect on the educator’s role in scaffolding infant peer interaction. Before presenting the case study examples, I first address understandings about human encounter and the nature of experience.

This chapter engages with the question of how to help managers and leaders understand the emotional and political dynamics that surround and permeate their roles. Connecting learning, space, and the unconscious in the management classroom can stimulate creativity in the approaches that are used to educate managers and to underpin awareness of organizational dynamics that continuously affect management and leadership roles. A conceptual framework is presented to assist reflection on unconscious dynamics created in the relational space of management learning. The framework combines the group-analytic concept of relatedness with the spatial concept of throwntogetherness in order to reveal how conscious and unconscious emotional dynamics connect to political tensions inherent in relational space. An improved awareness of spatial relations and unconscious dynamics can provide insights into the complexities of relations that both support and undermine management and leadership roles.

Teachers’ work around the world is being hijacked, distorted and deformed almost beyond recognition—and much of it is going on largely unopposed. This chapter will do some of the stage-setting for this book by asking the question: ‘what are the “bastards” who are doing this, really up to?’ and the presentation of an alternative view around approaches to teacher education. This chapter will sketch out the major lines this grotesque deformity is taking, most noticeably: Excessive and unprecedented levels of political interference A failed attempt to harness schools to the economy The imposition of an inappropriate market model with its damaging paradigm and ideology The insertion of a consumption exchange relationship into schooling The subservience of the relational work of schools to that of management The conversion of everything to do with schools into some kind of ‘value-added’ political spectacle that has converted schools into an empty managerial husk (Seddon) There will be a particular focus on the cult of efficiency; market power; targets and outcome delivery; standards, benchmarks, performance indicators and league tables; competition and choice; and an emaciated version of skills training, vocationalism and ‘education for life’.

Introduction PART I: TRANSFORMATIVE VALUES IN THEORY 1. The Value Space of Meaningful Relations 2. Relational Space and Places of Value 3. Conserving Nature's Meanings 4. Revaluing Body and Earth 5. Holderlin and Human-Nature Relations 6. Toward History and the Creaturely: Language and the Intertextual Literary Value Space in Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals 7. The Intimacy of Art and Nature PART II: TRANSFORMATIVE VALUES IN PRACTICE 8. Embodying Climate Change: Renarrating Energy through the Senses and the Spirit 9. Make, Do, and Mend: Solving Placelessness through Embodied Environmental Engagement 10. Art and Living Things: The Ethical, Aesthetic Impulse 11. The Embodiment of Nature: Fishing, Emotion and the Politics of Environmental Values 12. Ethics and Aesthetics of Environmental Engagement Index

Drawing on a Leibnizian panpsychist ontology of living beings ­comprising both body and soul, this chapter outlines a theory of space based on the perceptual and appetitive relations among these creatures’ souls. Co-extensive with physical space founded on relations among bodies subject to efficient causation, teleological space results from relations among souls subject to final causation, and is described qualitatively in terms of creatures’ pleasure and pain, wellbeing and happiness. Particular places within this space include the kingdom of grace, where morally responsible, rational beings act as far as possible in accord with the ideal of justice as universal love and wise benevolence. However, while Leibniz considered love as properly directed only towards rational beings, it is argued here that the truly wise person will direct their love and benevolence towards all living things.

Rural regions and small businesses are often assumed to be marginalised in relation to globalisation, which is perceived to be an urban phenomenon. However, emerging rural business network configurations contradict this commonly held view. This chapter presents an investigation of spatial and ‘relational’ structures in business networks of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in rural areas of five European countries. It argues that successful and dynamic firms derive ‘networking economies’ from frequent and effective interaction, both within the local business environment and with a more extensive set of linkages stretching out across Europe. New communication technologies allow entrepreneurs to communicate with contacts and institutional sources without the geographic limitations that would have hampered them just a decade ago. Actors such as local and county authorities, professional associations and European-funded business advisors increasingly act as ‘network brokers’ for local SMEs. In this way, ‘organised proximity’ is increasingly independent of geographic space, providing rural business with an alternative to agglomeration as a competition strategy.

This chapter uses the concept of the event as a key analytic category for developing a way of representing the social spaces made by educating. Events are central to looking more closely at the interactions of people and things in activity. They provide the basis for exploring the forms, or patterns, that networked activity systems make over time, opening up to examination the social spaces that are produced by educating and the effects their production has on those who participate in their creation.

Introduction.- Section 1: From biology to society.- Ch 1: Lane, Maxfield, Read and van der Leeuw, From population to organization thinking.- Ch 2: Read, Lane and van der Leeuw, The innovation innovation.- Ch 3: van der Leeuw, Lane and Read, The long-term evolution of social organization.- Ch 4: Ginzburg, Biological metaphors in economics: Natural selection and competition.- Ch 5: White, Innovation in the context of networks, hierarchy and social cohesion.- Section 2: Innovation and urban systems.- Ch 6: Bretagnolle, Pumain, The organization of urban systems.- Ch 7: Bettancourt, Lobo and West, The self similarity of human social organization in cities.- Ch 8: Pumain, Paulus and Vacchiani-Marcuzzo, Innovation cycles and urban dynamics.- Section 3: Innovation and market systems.- Ch 9: Lane and Maxfield, Building a new market system.- Ch 10: Rossi, Bertossi, Gurisatti and Sovieni, Incorporating a new technology into agent-artifact space: The case of control system automation in Europe.- Ch 11: Russo and Rossi, Innovation policies: Levels and levers.- Section 4: Modeling innovation and social change.- Ch 12: Pumain, Sanders, Bretagnolle, Glisse, and Mathian, The future of urban systems: exploratory models.- Ch 13: Serra, Villani and Lane, Modeling innovation.- Ch 14: Ferrari, Read, van der Leeuw, An agent based model of information flows in social dynamics.- Ch 15: Villani, Bonacini, Ferrari and Serra, An agent based model of exaptive processes.- Ch 16: Helbing, Kuhnert, Lammer, Johannsen, Gelsen, Ammoser and West, Power laws in urban supply networks, social systems and dense pedestrian.- Ch 17: Knappett et al., Using statistical physics to understand relational space: A case study from Mediterranean.- Conclusion.- List of contributors

Most philosophers agree that before Kant wrote Regions in Space he was committed to a version of Leibnizian thought, including the relational theory of space. They also agree that in this first incongruent counterparts essay Kant broke abruptly with the relational theory and argued for Newton’s theory of absolute space. From there on, however, the picture becomes rather murky. Norman Kemp Smith claims, for instance, that although the 1768 argument was important for Kant’s Critical philosophy, he could not retain this Newtonian position because of its many difficulties, and that the Critical philosophy is a synthesis of all that Kant thought essential in these opposing theories. [39, pp. 162–63] Robert Wolff sees no continuity between Kant’s argument in Regions in Space and his Critical theory; he believes that in the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 Kant “struck out in a radically new direction” which eventually culminated in the Critique of Pure Reason. [66, pp. 9–11] Max Jammer thinks that Kant’s later theory addresses questions beyond those raised by the analysis of space, but also that this analysis, like Kant’s philosophy in general, “was greatly influenced by the English empiricists Locke, Berkeley and Hume, and their analytical investigations into the formation of ideas”. [38, p. 135] Probably the least popular thesis is Gottfried Martin’s in Kant’s Metaphysics and Theory of Science, in which he stresses the continuing influence of Leibniz.