Introduction
Paul Glazier shared a vision for a unifying theory of sport performance in his paper published online by Human Movement Science (2015).
I enjoyed the detailed argument he presented.
Paul’s use of Karl Newell’s concept ‘confluence’ in the paper resonated with some other reading I have been doing. The link for me is this sentence:
There is a need for sports biomechanists and sports performance analysts to move beyond reductionist paradigms, such as analysing relationships between discrete performance parameters and/or performance indicators and performance outcomes, and focus more on the analysis of continuous movement-related variables to establish firmer links between sports behaviours and performance outcomes …
The other paper I have been reading is Simon Foulds and Mark Macklin’s hydrogeomorphic assessment of twenty-first century floods in the United Kingdom (2016).
What is to count?
Simon and Mark discuss how present approaches to flood mitigation practices can be transformed by considering data other than the 40 years of river gauge measurements. They propose that “geomorphologically informed risk assessments become an important part of flood protection policy’. Such data, they argue, would enhance the work of agencies and enable them “to go beyond the ‘comfort zone’ of short instrumental records”.
They conclude:
Geomorphologically inferred flood records can be used to contextualize recent hydrometeorological ‘extremes’, which are often erroneously reported as ‘unprecedented’.
They add:
Although flood risk practitioners may feel more secure by following conventional flood risk assessment protocols, using instrumental or extrapolation of instrumental data, multi-centennial length geomorphic-based flood records presented in this paper demonstrate that reliance solely on the mid-late twentieth century flood series is underestimating current flood risk in the UK uplands.
Confluences and epistemic generosity
Paul, Simon and Mark have given me the opportunity to reflect on the openness of epistemic cultures to change. They offer an holistic approach to observation and analysis that is inviting.
I have seen and do see our understanding of performance as profoundly interdisciplinary. This is a point well made by Paul. My application for BASES accreditation as an interdisciplinary sport scientist in the 1990s called for an open discussion about whether all BASES sport scientists should be accredited as interdisciplinarians.
I find Simon and Mark’s arguments compelling and see the parallels between reductionism in performance analysis and the paradigmatic certainty of existing flood policies.
I do think Karl’s ‘confluence’ sits well in the discussion of flood mitigation too.
I see both papers as opportunities to reflect on epistemic cultures.
Karin Cestina says of an epistemic culture:
Everyone knows what science is about: it is about knowledge, the ‘objective’ and perhaps ‘true’ representation of the world as it really is. The problem is that no one is quite sure how scientists and other experts arrive at this knowledge. The notion of epistemic culture is designed to capture these interiorised processes of knowledge creation. It refers to those sets of practices, arrangements and mechanisms bound together by necessity, affinity and historical coincidence which, in a given area of professional expertise, make up how we know what we know. Epistemic cultures are cultures of creating and warranting knowledge.
She adds that “the focus in an epistemic culture approach is on the construction of the machineries of knowledge construction” (my emphasis).
I think Paul, Simon and Mark help us explore these machineries and invite us to consider our own understanding of context. We just need to be open to the possibilities of differentness.
References
Simon Foulds & Mark Macklin (2016). A hydrogeomorphic assessment of twenty-first century floods in the UK. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 41, 256-270. DOI: 10.1002/esp.3853
Paul Glazier (2015). Towards a Grand Unified Theory of sports performance. Human Movement Science. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.humov.2015.08.001
Photo Credit
Somerset Needs Longer Flood Gauges (Mark Robinson, CC BY-NC 2.0)