'Displaced Memory' at Return 02: Group Art Exhibition in Glasgow and Japan About Memory, Place and Entanglement

A big thank you to curator Bowen Wu and the wider Return 02 team — Directors of Curatorial Affairs Ning Hu and Yaney Tang, Assistant Curators Ivy Wei and Jiahui Huang, and publication designer Sirui Zhang — for including my moving-image work Displaced Memory in the exhibition. And thank you to Molend Art in Glasgow and KONspace 101 in Tokyo for bringing the exhibition together across two countries. 

Return 02 (28 - 30 September 2026) is a show simultaneously run in Glasgow and Tokyo. 

 

The exhibition brought together thirteen international artists working across painting, moving image, digital art, installation, glass, printmaking and mixed media.

 

In addition to myself, the other arists included: Baoyue Zhang, Clare Schouten, Claudia Ungersbäck, Esha Malik, Hengtai Zhang, Herbert Neuwirth, Jiawei Yu, Josie Johnson, Leon Crayfish, Monika Tkaczyk, Sofia On and Vincent Corrèze. 

 

CLICK HERE for a PDF of the show and links to the works of the other artists.

 

RETURN O2

The idea behind Return is deceptively simple. What does it mean to return? Not simply to a place, but to a memory, a language, a relationship, a family history, a culture, or even an earlier version of ourselves?

 

Following Return 01, which focused on bodily awareness, emotion and our place in the world, Return 02 moved outward to explore how individual experience connects with wider cultural life through language, family, place and everyday experience. Appropriately, it did so across two very different cultural settings, with the exhibition taking place simultaneously in Glasgow and Tokyo. booklet

 

Across the exhibition, return took many forms: memories of places once lived, inherited cultural traditions, migration and diaspora, family separation, language, landscape, identity and imagined futures. What I particularly liked was that return was not treated simply as going backwards. Memory changes. Places change. Relationships change. We change. What returns is therefore never quite what was there before.

 

Displaced Memory

My contribution was a 90-second moving-image mixed-media work called Displaced Memory. 

 

What is memory, self, place, language? In the final stages of my mother’s dementia, everything blurred together or disappeared. Music was a way to communicate; she loved to sing. Born in the States, the daughter of immigrants from Slovakia. Me, now living in the UK, a new immigrant, caring for my mother from abroad, sorting out the distance and its fracture. On a video call at her skilled nursing facility, her singing Slovak Christmas songs, returning to a language I don’t speak, and to a time and place lost to the past. My brother by her side, my daughter sitting next to me, listening, and me recording it all three thousand miles away, knowing it will all just be a memory (displaced) very soon.

(NOTE: Adjust YouTube settings to HQ 1080 to get the best image and sound) 

 

Displaced Memory connects directly to Return 02 through its exploration of memory, language and family history and the instability of trying to recover them. For my mother, the Slovak songs become a form of cultural return, partial and displaced: they belong to her inherited past and to my own family history, but to a language I do not speak. Yet, now, a way to connect. Living in the UK, that earlier world is also beginning to blur for me and my family. We find ourselves telling the stories of our past again and again as our own cultural rapprochement, a way of reconciling where we came from with the life we have made in a new country. 

 

The recording preserves a trace of a moment already slipping into memory. 

 

The moving-image work reconstructs the moment through sound, portraiture and digital imagery, centred on a mind-like tangle of spheres and connections that gives visual form to language, place, and self as entangled, even as those connections shift, blur or disappear.

 

CLICK HERE to watch it on YouTube if the link above does not work. 

 

From Entanglement to Environmental Health: Proceedings and a First Look at a Forthcoming Book on Complexity

Over the last couple of years, I have been developing the idea of entanglement as part of a book I am currently writing, appropriately called Entanglement. The book develops entanglement as a mechanistic concept for understanding complexity and draws heavily on my visual arts practice as a way of exploring and explaining what entanglement is, how it works and what it looks like. 

 

As I have started using the concept more widely in my scientific and artistic work, and lecturing and presenting on it internationally, people have increasingly asked me if there is something they can read, share and cite. The book is still being written, but my recent public lecture at Nelson Mandela University gave me an opportunity to bring many of these ideas together and work through them in a more developed form. So, rather than wait for the book, I decided to write up the lecture as a first introduction to some of the central ideas.

 

CLICK HERE FOR A PDF OF THE PROCEEDINGS AND CITE AS FOLLOWS:

 

Castellani, B. (2026). Entangled: How might we reshape our entanglement with theenvironment? ISCIA Public Lecture Proceedings, Nelson Mandela University, Gqeberha, South Africa, 16 September 2026.  

 

 

 

I want to begin by thanking Professor Andrea Hurst, Harsheila Riga and Professor Pamela Maseko, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, for the opportunity to give the ISCIA Public Lecture at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, South Africa, on 16 September 2026. The lecture was hosted through the SARChI Chair in Identities and Social Cohesion in Africa (ISCIA), led by Andrea, and forms part of a much wider collaboration I have developed with colleagues at Nelson Mandela University over the last several years. In terms of Durham University, where I work, I also want to thank the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing and the Durham Research Methods Centre, for supporting my work and for Jonathan Wistow for traveling with me on this trip. 

 

 

So, what do I mean by entanglement?

 

Entanglement is the process through which things become interconnected and interdependent through repeated interweaving over time. The important point is that entanglement is not simply another way of saying that everything is connected. Things can interact without becoming deeply entangled. Entanglement develops when repeated interactions progressively bind elements together such that they cannot simply be separated or extracted without consequences for the wider configuration. As an entanglement develops, it can also widen across other elements, domains and scales, while deepening as those elements become increasingly embedded in and dependent upon one another.

 

For complexity science, this provides one material explanation for how some forms of emergence occur: repeated interactions can become sufficiently entangled that a new level of organisation develops with properties, capacities and constraints that cannot be reduced to the individual elements. Entanglement also helps distinguish emergence from self-organisation. Self-organisation concerns the development of patterns or order through interaction without central control; entanglement concerns how repeated interactions become interwoven, persistent and difficult to disentangle. Importantly, entanglements can emerge through bottom-up self-organisation, but they can also be deliberately engineered, governed, institutionally maintained or strategically reinforced. Most real-world social systems involve combinations of these processes.

 

The Proceedings

‘Entangled: How might we reshape our entanglement with the environment?’

 

So, what is in the proceedings? Rather than give too much away here, the lecture takes the idea of entanglement and puts it to work on environmental health, urban sustainability and just transitions. It asks why some of our most serious environmental problems remain so difficult to change, even when we know a great deal about what needs to be done. 

 

Along the way, I move from fungal mycelium and marine debris to smartphones, coal and South Africa’s just transition to explore how entanglements form, widen, deepen and persist. I look at their relationship to emergence and self-organisation, why some entanglements become resilient or locked in, and how affordances, perception, imagination and creativity can open up possibilities for doing things differently. Visual complexity and my own artwork run throughout, including my speculative moving-image work When the Tangles Arrived.  

 

The second half turns the question around: if we become entangled, how do we become entangled differently? I develop the idea of dis(re)entanglement — Loosen → Reimagine → Redirect → Reweave — and use examples from South Africa to explore what changing established environmental and social entanglements might actually involve. 

 

I will leave the rest for the proceedings. If you are interested in complexity, environmental health, just transitions, or simply why some things become so difficult to change, have a read.

 

 

CLICK HERE FOR A COPY OF THE PROCEEDINGS

 

The proceedings can be cited as: 

Castellani, B. (2026). Entangled: How might we reshape our entanglement with theenvironment? ISCIA Public Lecture Proceedings, Nelson Mandela University, Gqeberha, South Africa, 16 September 2026. 

 

Which AI, by whom, for whom, and under what conditions? My Keynote at the Cynefin Exploratory: 'Balancing human & AI reasoning in a complex world' Dublin, 1-2 July, 2026

Much thanks to Dave Snowden and the Cynefin team for inviting me to be one of the Eagles at the Cynefin Exploratory, Balancing Human & AI Reasoning in a Complex World, held at Trinity College Dublin on 1–2 July.  

 

The two-day Exploratory was designed to bring together researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and organisational leaders to explore the evolving relationship between human reasoning and AI in situations characterised by complexity and uncertainty. Through a mixture of provocations, dialogue, and collaborative inquiry, the event encouraged participants to move beyond simple narratives about AI and engage with the challenges and opportunities these technologies present for organisations and society.  

 

As one of the event’s Eagles, my role was not to provide answers but to offer a provocation—an idea intended to stimulate discussion and critical reflection. My contribution centred on a simple question that I believe is largely missing from current debates about AI. It was this:

 

 

Which AI, by whom, for whom, and under what conditions?

 

 

 

Here is my argument:

Most debates about AI become too broad too quickly. We ask whether AI is intelligent, creative, biased, dangerous, transformative or beneficial, but those claims only make sense once we specify three things: which AI, for whom, and under what conditions.

 

By ‘which AI’, I mean that LLMs, machine learning and predictive systems, recommendation systems, decision-support tools, autonomous agents, and robotics are not the same thing. They have different histories, capabilities, users, risks and consequences.

 

In terms of 'by whom,' I mean AI does emerge in a vacuum. We need to focus on who creates these technologies, owns them, controls, them, decides what they do, etc. We need to address the sociology of AI technologies in terms of power, inequality, exclusion, discrimination, agency etc. 

 

By ‘for whom’, I mean there is no generic AI user. A civil servant using a decision-support tool, a teenager shaped by TikTok recommendations, a scientist using machine learning, a student using ChatGPT, and a warehouse worker interacting with robotics are not encountering AI in the same way. The benefits and harms are unevenly distributed.

 

By ‘under what conditions’, I mean more than context. Conditions force us to specify the task, setting, stakes, expertise, training, access, free versus paid systems, oversight, accountability, laws, language, culture, institutional pressures, and consequences of failure.

 

So, the point is not to ask whether AI is good or bad in general. The point is to ask what kind of AI, used by whom, for what purpose, under what conditions, and with what consequences.

HERE IS A LINK to the PDF of my presentation

HERE IS A LINK to my artwork

HERE IS A LINK to my academic work  

 

Bringing a Complex Systems Approach to WHO Europe Health Workforce Planning (A Two-Day WHO Collaborative)

I would like to thank Tomas Zapata, Cris Scotter, and their team in the Unit of Health Workforce and Health Services in the WHO Regional Office for Europe (Copenhagen) for the opportunity to engage colleagues from different countries for our two-day event: WHO Europe Health Workforce Planning Collaborative

OVERVIEW OF EVENT 

The collaborative sought to advance an international health workforce learning partnership based on shared challenges, adaptive learning and comparative exchange – something that sits at the forefront of all my current work, namely, we need not only international engagement, but also collaboration to learn from each other!

 

Bringing together participants from different systems and contexts creates an important space not simply to compare workforce challenges, but to collectively explore how health systems might build greater adaptive capacity under conditions of growing complexity and uncertainty.

 

The shared challenge we explored was: how do health workforce planning systems remain adaptive, resilient and sustainable under growing multiple pressures?

 

To facilitate the discussions, I was charged with bringing in a complex systems perspective, including participatory systems mapping and a systems approach to theory of change.

What emerged was striking. Despite major differences in health systems and governance structures, many countries are wrestling with similar dynamics: workforce shortages, burnout, fragmented governance, fiscal constraints, uneven regional capacity, data fragmentation and increasing service complexity. At the same time, countries are experimenting with new approaches centred on prevention, collaborative care, learning systems, digital infrastructure, workforce redesign and adaptive planning.

 

One of the most interesting parts of the workshop was moving beyond simply describing problems and instead asking a more difficult question: what actually helps systems adapt under complex conditions? To support this discussion, we developed a working, complexity-informed theory of change and then used participatory systems mapping to collaboratively explore the interacting pressures, feedback loops, leverage points and adaptive capacities shaping workforce planning across contexts.

 

Perhaps the clearest lesson from the discussions is that no country is solving these challenges through single interventions or simple technical fixes. Workforce planning increasingly looks less like a forecasting exercise and more like the governance of a complex adaptive system—one that depends on learning, coordination, institutional memory, trust and the ability to adapt under uncertainty.

 

Unravelling the Complexities of Policy, From Models to Actionable Decision-Making -- A Keynote for Polder and IAS, University of Amsterdam

 Many thanks to Mike Lees, Vítor Vasconcelos, the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), and the POLDER Center for the invitation to speak at today’s 'Unravelling Complexity session at the IAS Festival -- as part of the IAS's week of celebrations for its 10th anniversary.

The POLDER event explored how insights from the complexity sciences can be better translated into policy, governance, modelling, and decision-support systems, particularly under conditions of uncertainty, competing values, and institutional complexity. Discussions throughout the session focused on methodological innovation, participatory modelling, governance learning, the value of the social sciences and humanities and the future role of the complexity sciences in helping societies navigate increasingly complex societal challenges. 

 

MY KEYNOTE:

Three provocations: 

• ‘The challenge is no longer simply producing more sophisticated models or more data. The challenge is learning how to unravel systems of reasoning, governance, participation, and decision-making in ways that open new possibilities for collective learning and action.’  
• ‘Complex societal challenges unfold differently across places because systems become configured differently over time, requiring more place-based, participatory, and adaptive forms of governance, modelling, and decision support.’
• ‘If we are serious about addressing the complex challenges societies face, we need to fundamentally rethink how we educate future generations — training people to think across disciplines, reason in systems terms, engage uncertainty, understand computational methods, and work within more methodologically pluralistic forms of inquiry and decision-making.’

Abstract of Keynote: 

My keynote focused on why we need the complexity sciences, drawing less on abstract theory and more on years of mistakes, failures, institutional frustrations, partial successes, and small hard-won insights gained through working across real-world policy, governance, and decision-support systems. 

A major focus of the talk was the growing mismatch between the complexity of contemporary societal challenges and the increasingly narrow forms of reasoning often used to address them. 

The presentation argued for more place-based, participatory, configurational, and adaptive approaches to governance and decision-making; stronger engagement with issues of power, inequality, and institutional asymmetry; and greater methodological pluralism across qualitative, computational, participatory, statistical, and systems-based approaches.

Another major theme was the importance of moving beyond the idea that models alone can solve complex societal problems. Models and methods are only one part of broader governance and decision-making systems. The future challenge is developing more socially usable forms of complexity-informed reasoning that can better connect researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and communities, while also rethinking how we educate future generations to work within increasingly complex and unfinished worlds. 

One example would be models that unravel the complexity of a problem, such as healthy eating or workforce resilience or just transitions -- rather than try to find solutions -- in order to help people understand why the system is so difficult to change, giving new insights then into what sorts of change is possible and the models that would help to drive that change. 

 

LINKS
 

CLICK HERE for a PDF of my presentation 
 

Here is a link to the paperback version of The Atlas of Social Complexity Discount Code TASC15, and it offers a 15% discount.

 

Here is a link to the map of the complexity sciences  

 
Here is a link to COMPLEX-IT, the online R-Studio platform allowing non-experts in computational modelling access to these tools, all through a social complexity framework.

 

 

 

 

How can scholars harness visual arts, media, and methods? A DRMC Visual Methods and Media Panel

On 12 May 2026 the DRMC hosted a Visual Methods and Media Panel, appropriately titled, 'How can scholars harness visual arts, media, and methods?'

 

The panel was moderated by Sam Hoyle (History, Durham University) and included Laura Channing (Assistant Professor, History, Durham University), Vivian Myron (History, Durham University), Nawal Watali (Geography, Durham University), Julia Handelman-Smith (Director, Into the Light), and Brian Castellani (Director, Durham Research Methods Centre, Durham University).

 

Several themes emerged across the discussion. One was the growing recognition that visual methods are no longer peripheral to research. They are becoming increasingly central to how scholars immerse themselves in topics, organise knowledge, analyse complex systems, and communicate ideas to wider audiences.

 

Another theme was the importance of community engagement and the role the arts can play in both research and community wellbeing. The panel explored how visual and creative practices can help build dialogue, support participation, create shared spaces for reflection, and connect academic work more directly to lived experience and local communities.

The discussion also explored how visual materials can function as data, how diagrams and images can shape conceptual thinking, and how visual outputs themselves can become legitimate forms of research dissemination. Questions from the audience extended these conversations into issues of ethics, exhibition, interdisciplinarity, software, and public communication.

 

A further theme was the growing importance of visual literacy within contemporary scholarship. Researchers increasingly work in environments shaped by images, interfaces, maps, dashboards, networks, and digital media, yet many still receive little formal training in how to critically engage visual forms as part of their methodological toolkit.

 

The event formed part of the DRMC’s wider commitment to creating spaces where scholars can experiment with methods, media, and new ways of thinking about research across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

 

 

 

USEFUL LINKS

 

INTO THE LIGHT (COUNTY DURHAM) – Julia Handelman-Smith  

 

NAWAL WATALI’S PHOTOJOURNALISM WEBSITE

 

ART AND SCIENCE FACTORY Visual Complexity Art – Brian Castellani

 

HISTORICAL ECONOMIC DATA VISUALIZATION – Laura Channing

·      https://www.aehnetwork.org/

·      https://chartle.cc/

 

WORKING WITH PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES – Vivian Myron

·      PHRC – Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University

https://photographichistory.wordpress.com/

·      Edwards, Elizabeth, and Janice Hart. Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images. Taylor & Francis Group, 2004.

·      Langford, Martha. Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums. Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8a1UBV1RWFkC.

·      Gil Pasternak. The Handbook of Photography Studies. 1st ed. Edited by Gil Pasternak. Routledge, 2020. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003103974.

 

 

 

Manners are the new punk!

People ask me why I love traveling to Japan, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands so much.

 

One word: manners!

 

I’m not naïve. I have lived and travelled across far too many countries to know that, given time, the underbelly of any culture will eventually show itself and that no society is perfect. Just read Butter, by Asako Yuzuki (柚木 麻子) and you get my point.

 

Still, just travel to Japan and some of the countries I just mentioned (which is by no means a complete list) and you will see what I am talking about – the culture is brimming with manners.

 

By the way, just to be clear, so we know what I mean by manners, here is my working definition. Manners are the everyday civic virtues that guide how we treat one another in shared social space. They involve kindness toward strangers, concern for the wellbeing of others, awareness of how our behaviour affects those around us, respect for difference, tolerance in moments of disagreement, and a basic willingness to cooperate with others. In this sense, manners are the ordinary moral habits that sustain trust and make civil society possible.

 

So, how do the manners of other countries compare? Well, let’s just say, that is my worry.

 

Yet another caveat: for the naysayers, yes, certainly manners still exist throughout the world, and more so in some cultures than others; and there are also lots of people and communities that get up every day and are kind and considerate and aware. So, let’s get that critique of my argument out of the way.

 

Bottom line: something in our collective moral structure has changed.

 

What got me thinking about all of this was a text from my friend Scott – one of my old-school, progressive rock buddies who is also keen on 1980s alternative music. He sent me a 2026 interview with David Byrne, from the Talking Heads, who is touring the UK with the release of his new album, Who is the Sky?  The interview is on YouTube, so you can watch it yourself. (The new album, by the way, is pure brilliance! Byrne is just so amazing.)

 

If I were a music critic, I would say the record circles around the possibility of human connection at a moment when the world feels deeply divided, suggesting that even in a fragmented landscape there remain everyday ways people can still find one another.

 

To make his point, in the YouTube interview Byrne quotes John Cameron Mitchell – actor, playwright, screenwriter, singer, songwriter, producer and director – that, ‘Punk used to be about making a big noise, but now this is the resistance: kindness and empathy.’

 

In a recent article for the New York Times, Mitchell explains what he means: the real spirit of punk today, he says, lies not in rebellion, but in collective action, tolerance, storytelling, and people having one another’s backs in times of crisis. In our current fragmented and fearful political moment, we need to stop cancelling one another or pulling to the hard-right of politics and start building communities, working together outside approved systems, and acting with empathy. Today’s punk ethic is grounded in cooperation, courage, and shared responsibility—qualities that sustain civic life.

 

I could not agree more!

 

As the American science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein famously wrote: ‘A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.’

 

The last sentence is particularly full of punch. Reading the daily news in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, it often feels as though we are living through the erosion of civil society that Heinlein described.

 

And this erosion is at us, it seems, from all sides. The liberal left contributes to a breakdown in manners through moralism, cancel culture, ideological purity tests, and the endless bifurcating of identity politics to the point of absurdity – a point that many comedians today go hard at.

 

On the other side, hard-right conservatives and populists contribute in far more structurally damaging ways: democratic backsliding, attacks on institutions, the promotion of intolerance, authoritarian rhetoric, and escalating partisan hostility—developments widely documented in recent political science research on democratic erosion and populism. In this environment, abusive rhetoric toward opponents and women, LGBTQI communities, immigrants, liberals, and minorities becomes normalized and expectations of accountability in public life weaken.

 

Yes, manners also mean accountability!

 

As Edmund Burke stated in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ‘Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend.’

 

Manners set the basic expectation that people answer for what they say and do. Yet we are living through a moment in which many of the most powerful figures in politics, media, and public life increasingly operate without that expectation. The message filters downward. When those at the top face little consequence for cruelty, dishonesty, or open contempt for others, the signal sent to the rest of society is clear: accountability no longer matters; manners are for the weak.

 

Manners also mean honour and self-respect. Historically, manners were never just about etiquette. They were the outward expression of character—the everyday way people showed restraint, respect, and responsibility toward others. Honour meant treating others with dignity even when you had the power not to. Self-respect meant holding yourself to a standard even when no one was watching. In that sense, manners are the small civic virtues that show whether we are capable of living together without tearing one another apart.

 

Or, as Hannah Arendt stated, ‘The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.’

 

So, where does that leave us?

 

When I travel to places like Japan, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands, what I feel most strongly is not perfection. A healthy culture is never perfect; healthy does not mean everything works or that there are no tensions or failures. What I feel is that in these countries the everyday civic habits of their societies still hold—small acts of respect, awareness, restraint, and kindness. In other words, manners remain part of the social fabric.

 

And perhaps that is my ultimate point. In a moment when cruelty, outrage, and performative hostility increasingly dominate public life, bringing manners back into everyday existence can do more to quiet the riot than we might imagine. It is the small, daily acts of consideration—holding ourselves accountable, treating others with dignity, showing restraint in moments of anger—that slowly repair the civic bonds that hold a society together.

 

David Byrne and John Cameron Mitchell may be right.

 

Today, manners are the new punk.

 

 

The Atlas of Social Complexity. Keynote for the Capital City Complex Systems Symposium, February 2026 New Zealand

I would like to thank Anna Matheson and the rest of the team for the opportunity to deliver one of the keynotes at this year’s Capital City Complex Systems Symposium 2026— 24-25 February 2026, Wellington, New Zealand.

ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM

The Capital City Complex Systems Symposium 2026 in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington convenes leading thinkers and practitioners to examine how contemporary complexity research—across philosophy, artificial intelligence, infrastructure, health, climate, governance, and Indigenous knowledge—is reshaping both theory and real-world intervention. Under the theme ‘Understanding complex systems: Theory, practice and impact,’ the symposium situates evolving complexity sciences within the urgent institutional, environmental, and democratic challenges of our time, asking not only how systems work, but how they can be changed responsibly and effectively.

  

MY KEYNOTE SUMMARY

The Atlas of Social Complexity: Charting a transdisciplinary future through the arts and sciences to address our interconnected global challenges. We live in a world more complex, interdependent, and entangled than at any point in human history — from shifting climates to fragile democracies. Yet our sciences, including complexity science, still struggle to confront these challenges in a truly transdisciplinary way.

 

Hence the purpose of The Atlas of Social Complexity.

  

Lasse Gerrits and I chart the bold, disruptive journeys of scholars reshaping the study of social complexity into a force for impactful change through transdisciplinary engagement.

 

We begin with the thirteen situations – the methodological, epistemic, and institutional conditions that social complexity research must navigate, and which too often blunt its disruptive potential. These include the need for methodological pluralism, bridging disciplinary silos, addressing issues of scale, and engaging stakeholders.

 

As a corrective, we explore how a global network of scholars, artists, policy makers, etc are cultivating a social complexity imagination — a way of seeing, thinking, and acting rooted in the lived, entangled realities of our social, ecological, and technological systems — and advance a social science turn in complexity, which directly engages with inequality, power, identity, and the messy histories in which systems are embedded.

 

Across the Atlas, we follow these researchers as they confront the thirteen situations in various combinations and with varying degrees of success. But the Atlas does not stop at science. Across its pages runs a second throughline: the visual arts and humanities as modes of social complexity inquiry. Here we follow a growing network of artists and philosophers whose practices offer new ways to see and embody social complexity.

 

The Atlas, and this keynote, closes with the unfinished space. Drawing on interviews with a wide list of scholars, we distil the additional traits needed for social complexity research to stay open, reflexive, transdisciplinary and disruptive — epistemic humility, methodological pluralism, a willingness to share control, and the capacity to live with uncertainty without retreating to simplicity.

 

LINKS 

Here is a link to the paperback version of The Atlas of Social Complexity

Discount Code TASC15, and it offers a 15% discount.

Here is a link to my PowerPoint Presentation

 

Here is a link to the map of the complexity sciences

 

Here is a link to COMPLEX-IT, the online R-Studio platform allowing non-experts in computational modelling access to these tools, all through a social complexity framework.