Emma Thomas

In this paper, the author argues that combat sports hold unique value as a healing tool for those who have experienced sexual violence. Central to this argument is the ‘freeze response’ which is linked to lasting psychological impacts. Thomas theorizes that combat sports can allow survivors to confront this response and dismantle the negative feelings often associated with it. Drawing from empirical studies of survivors’ experiences in combat sports, she suggests that these sports provide a metaphorical way to reclaim one’s agency, rewriting the narrative of the body.

During the early twentieth century, British novelist and philosopher May Sinclair published two book-length defenses of idealism. Although Sinclair is well known to literary scholars, she is little known to the history of philosophy. This paper provides the first substantial scholarship on Sinclair's philosophical views, focusing on her mature idealism. Although Sinclair is working within the larger British idealist tradition, her argument for Absolute idealism is unique, founded on Samuel Alexander's new realist beliefs about the reality of time. Her metaphysics takes idealism and pantheism in new directions and provides fresh insight into 1920s debates between British idealisms and realisms.

The growing block view of time holds that the past and present are real whilst the future is unreal; as future events become present and real, they are added on to the growing block of reality. Surprisingly, given the recent interest in this view, there is very little literature on its origins. This paper explores those origins, and advances two theses. First, I show that although C. D. Broad’s Scientific Thought provides the first defence of the growing block theory, the theory receives its first articulation in Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity. Further, Alexander’s account of deity inclines towards the growing block view. Second, I argue that Broad shifted towards the growing block theory as a result of his newfound conviction that time has a direction. By way of tying these theses together, I argue that Broad’s views on the direction of time – and possibly even his growing block theory – are sourced in Alexander.

Collective action is volatile: characterized by swift, unexpected changes in intensity, target, and forms. We conduct a detailed exploration of four reasons that these changes occur. First, action is about identities which are fluid, contested, and multifaceted. As the content of groups' identities change, so do the specific norms for the identities. Second, social movements adopt new tactics, or forms of collective action. Tactical changes may arise from changes in identity, but also changes in the target or opponent groups, and changes in the relationships with targets and with other actors. Factions or wings of a group in conflict may in turn form identities based on opposition or support for differing tactics. Third, social movements change because participant motivation ebbs, surges, and also changes in quality. Finally, political social change occurs within socio-political structures; these structures implicate higher-level norms, which both constrain and emerge from actions. Our analysis presents idealized and descriptive models of these relationships, and a new model to examine tactical changes empirically, the DIME model. This model highlights that collective actors canDisidentify after failure ; they canInnovate, or try something new; and they can commit harder, convinced that they are right, with increased moral urgency and redoubled efforts.