Launch of Professor Paul Downes' New Book

Professor Paul Downes' new book, Towards a Concentric Spatial Psychology for Social and Emotional Education: Beyond the Interlocking Spatial Pillars of Modernism (2024) was launched at the University of Malta on October 18th, 2024. Paul Downes is Professor of Psychology of Education, School of Human Development,and Director, Educational Disadvantage Centre, DCU Institute of Education. His open access book was launched by Professor Paul A. Bartolo, Professor of Psychology, University of Malta 

Building on the initial spatial turn recognised across the social sciences and education, Professor Downes' new book proposes a further layer of a concentric spatial turn to challenge Western ethnocentric versions of space as being either empty or ones of diametric spatial opposition. Developing this cross-cultural, concentric spatial turn for psychology and applied to social and emotional education, it highlights the need for an interdisciplinary and spatial reinterpretation of seminal concepts in cultural studies and sociology, such as De Beauvoir's othering, Du Bois' 'double consciousness' and Weber's 'iron cage', while also amplifying anthropological challenges to diametric oppositions between nature and culture. This spatial reconstruction additionally seeks to reconceptualise Western understandings of human freedom in Kant and fear of freedom in Fromm to identify innovative concentric spatial conceptions of freedom in embedded systems of society, education and human experience in order to challenge both modernist and postmodernist understandings.

The launch was opened by Professor Carmel Cefai, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Centre for Resilience and Socio-Emotional Health, University of Malta, with the University of Malta's Pro-Rector for Strategic Planning and Sustainability, Professor Valerie Sollars, Dean of the Faculty of Education, Professor Colin Calleja, and Dean of the Faculty for Social Wellbeing, Professor Sandra Scicluna, among those in attendance.