What Are Complex Systems? Ontology, Epistemology and the Social Turn at IXXI’s 20th Anniversary Conference

4–6 November 2026 | Lyon, France

I am pleased to be participating in Thinking Complexity: Twenty Years at IXXI, an international conference celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Institut Rhône-Alpin des Systèmes Complexes (IXXI).

 

The conference brings together researchers from across the complexity sciences to reflect on the field’s development, its current challenges and its future directions.

 

Many thanks to PatriceAbry and the organising committee for the invitation and the opportunity to contribute to these discussions.

CLICK HERE for an overview of the programme:

⁠IXXI20th Anniversary Conference Programme

CLICK HERE for a PDF of my presentation

 

MY PRESENTATION: What Are Complex Systems? Ontology, Epistemology and the Social Turn

 

My presentation builds on the work Lasse Gerrits and I developed in TheAtlas of Social Complexity (2024), along with our more recent collaborative work on advancing a social turn in the complexity and systems sciences.

I begin with two related questions:

 

What would the complexity sciences look like if we fully engaged with the longstanding contributions of the social sciences, humanities, philosophy and arts, alongside those of the natural, mathematical and computational sciences?

 

And could such an engagement help us develop a genuine arts and sciences of complexity?

 

These questions are about more than making complexity research interdisciplinary. They concern whether taking different ontological, epistemological, theoretical and methodological traditions seriously might fundamentally change how we understand, study and explain complex systems.

 

The questions matter because, despite their significant contributions, parts of the complexity sciences continue to struggle with fundamental aspects of social reality. These include the role of institutions, power, inequality, discrimination, human agency, psychology, meaning and lived experience. There are also longstanding concerns about transferring concepts and mechanisms from physical and biological systems to social systems without sufficient theoretical or empirical justification.

 

These limitations have consequences beyond academic debates. They can shape how we understand social problems, construct models and develop interventions, particularly when complexity research informs public policy and practice.

 

 

Advancing the social turn

Drawing on the Atlas, I explore several directions for advancing a social turn in the complexity sciences:

 

·       Overcoming disciplinary boundaries. Recognising the longstanding contributions of the social sciences, humanities, philosophy and arts to understanding complexity, rather than treating these disciplines primarily as areas where complexity science can be applied.

·       Taking ontology and epistemology seriously. Examining what we assume complex systems are, what we can know about them, and how these assumptions shape our theories, methods and explanations. I draw on complex realism, morphogenesis, assemblage theory and other non-reductionist approaches to argue that social complexity is an emergent level of ontological reality.

·       Rethinking foundational concepts.

Asking whether concepts such as emergence and self-organisation operate in the same ways across physical, biological, psychological, ecological and social systems. For example, emergence in human organisations is not simply bottom-up. It is also shaped by institutions, hierarchies, power and deliberate steering. And also by such mechanisms as entanglement. See my Proceedings Paper on Entanglment as Mechanism for Complexity.

·       Developing a critical complexity. Treating power, inequality, domination, oppression, discrimination and politics as constitutive features of complex social systems, rather than peripheral variables.

·       Embracing methodological pluralism. Bringing computational, quantitative, qualitative, historical, configurational and case-based methods together, organised around the problems we are studying rather than disciplinary loyalties.

·       Becoming genuinely transdisciplinary. Grounding complexity research in lived experience, everyday life and meaningful engagement with stakeholders, including those involved in policy and practice.

·       Embracing a social complexity imagination. Drawing on C. Wright Mills, developing ways of thinking that move beyond reductionism, disciplinary boundaries and methodological rigidity, while accepting uncertainty, incompleteness and the limits of our knowledge.

 

 

The role of art and unfinished spaces

Throughout the presentation, I also draw on my artistic practice (CLICK HERE to see my art website) and the work of other artists to explore how visual complexity can contribute to how we think about complex systems.

 

This includes exploring entanglement as a material mechanism through which interactions, interconnections and constraints shape the emergence and transformation of complex systems.

 

I conclude by returning to an idea from the final chapter of the Atlas: the importance of creating unfinished spaces.

 

Rather than seeking a single theory, method or disciplinary approach that explains complexity, we need intellectual spaces that remain open to different perspectives, new concepts, critical disagreement and experimentation.

 

Ultimately, the aim is not to replace the complexity sciences, but to contribute to their continued development through a more meaningful engagement across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, philosophy and arts. This means creating the intellectual space to rethink foundational concepts, develop new approaches and move towards a more inclusive and genuinely transdisciplinary arts and sciences of complexity.

 

As the Atlas makes clear, there is still much work to do.

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry on Adult Social Care: Residents, Families, Staff and the Costs of Not Listening

In The Guardian today was an article by Jessica Murray, “UK government failures led to Covid spreading ‘like wildfire’ in care homes, inquiry finds.” It is based on a report  ‘Module 6: Care Sector,’ just released by the Rt Hon the Baroness Hallett DBE, as part of the UK COVID-19 Inquiry.

For those of us who work in and around healthcare workforce resilience, the report on adult social care is very much welcomed. It provides an important and careful account of what happened to people receiving care, their families and staff. Those who conducted the Inquiry and contributed evidence, particularly those revisiting painful experiences, deserve real thanks. 

Its findings matter. The Inquiry concludes that care homes were too often treated as an afterthought, that the drive to protect hospital capacity came at considerable cost to social care, and that failures around testing, PPE, hospital discharge and infection control contributed to devastating consequences for residents and their families. “More than 43,000 people died from Covid-19 in UK care homes between March 2020 and July 2022” (⁠The Guardian).

It is also important that the report recognises what happened to staff. Care workers were trying to hold an already fragile system together amid staff shortages, inadequate PPE, rapidly changing guidance and extraordinary personal risk. The Inquiry evidence describes a workforce that was already understaffed, underpaid and undervalued before the pandemic. (⁠The Guardian)

But there is a difficult question that needs to sit alongside the findings. Who working anywhere near social care at the time did not know that something was going badly wrong?

That is not the same as saying that everyone knew precisely what should have been done, or that the evidence available then was as clear as it is now. It wasn’t. But many of the central problems were being raised, repeatedly, by people working in the sector, families, professional organisations and others trying to get decision makers to listen. The fragility of social care was hardly a secret. Indeed, my reading of the evidence submitted to the UK COVID-19 Inquiry is that it was already well known to those working in and caring for people in the sector.

For many people, then, the report will not simply reveal what went wrong. It will formally recognise things many were desperately trying to say while they were happening.

And that matters because inquiries cannot only be about identifying failures retrospectively.

The harder question is what we change so that the next time people working inside a system are saying, 'Something is seriously wrong here!', it does not require years and a public inquiry before those concerns acquire authority.

What mechanisms will ensure that frontline staff are heard? How will social care have a meaningful voice alongside the NHS in an emergency? How will concerns move quickly enough from workers, residents and families to those making national decisions? And how will we know that anyone is actually listening?

Those seem to me to be among the most important lessons still to learn.

What can a South African orange teach us about the entanglement of just transitions?

I recently returned home to the UK from two weeks in South Africa. When I got back, I posted a bunch of photographs to a group chat back in the States.

The photographs were a mixture of everything we had been doing – from enjoying local wineries and going on a game drive to visiting museums and hiking along the Western Cape.

The focus of the visit, however, was work: I had been working with colleagues at Nelson Mandela University and the University of Cape Town on a variety of topics, from AI and complexity to environmental health, urban sustainability, and just transitions. Some of that work took us into parts of Gqeberha and Cape Town where poverty and inequality are very real. But we also saw people and organisations doing remarkable things in response. At Masifunde Learner Development in Walmer Township, for example, we visited their Montessori pre-school, Changemaker Academy and kasiConomy hub, an incubator supporting young entrepreneurs. 

So my group chat started asking questions and we got talking about South Africa.

At some point, one of the group, who lives in Ohio (USA), looked at the orange he was eating and realised it had come from South Africa.

That was a bit of a lightbulb moment.

Here we were talking about South Africa, looking at photographs and discussing what I had been doing, and suddenly the country wasn't quite so far away. There was a South African orange sitting in his hand.

I thought that was a win.

So I added that the blueberries I was eating back in the UK were also from South Africa.

An orange in Ohio. Blueberries in Britain. Both from South Africa.

Another in the group chat – who lives along the northwest coast of the States – was immediately critical: ‘That orange has a serious carbon footprint!’

My family member eating the orange pushed back: ‘Relative to what? Oranges from other places in the States or from the world, all being hawked at various times during the annual commercial distribution period in Ohio.’

I liked the word 'hawked.'

There is something important buried in that little group chat exchange. But my concern went beyond simple carbon accounting.

We had just spent all this time talking about South Africa. About universities and townships. Poverty and inequality. Businesses and employment. Education and community organisations. Vineyards and restaurants. Cities and coastlines. And, most importantly, about people.

One person in the group chat had suddenly looked at an orange and seen his connection to all of that.

Then, almost immediately, the other person reduced the orange to its carbon footprint.

The carbon matters. Of course it does.

But where had South Africa gone?

Rethinking Just Transitions

 

I think this little exchange captures something I have been struggling with in my work on just transitions.

We tend to see just transitions through the particular part of the world we know and the particular problems we have learned to see. Sometimes we become so confident that we are making the environmentally ethical choice that we don't notice how narrow our view of the system has become.

South Africa -> long distance -> carbon emissions -> environmental harm

That is real.

But distance is not the whole story.

An orange’s environmental impact is built across the whole supply chain. It depends on how much water and energy are used to grow it, what chemicals are applied, how it is packed, how long it is refrigerated or stored, and whether it travels by ship, truck or air. The environmental cost comes from all of those things together, not from transport alone. You cannot infer the environmental impact of an orange simply from how far it has travelled.

And then there are the people behind that orange. The same orange held in the hand by a person in Ohio is entangled within a global network of agriculture, workers, household incomes, communities, international trade, land, water, inequality, economic security, and Western consumption demands. In South Africa, citrus is not some marginal part of its economy. According to South Africa's Department of Agriculture, the country exported 2.9 million tons of citrus in 2025, overtaking Spain to become the world's largest citrus exporter by volume that year. (For more, CLICK HERE).

Those numbers represent real people and real economic wellbeing: people picking fruit, sorting and packing it, maintaining farms and equipment, and moving produce through ports. Those jobs mean wages flowing into households and communities. What happens to an export industry of this scale reaches far beyond the balance sheet of a citrus company.

But we shouldn't romanticise that either.

Jobs do not automatically equal justice. Like much large-scale commercial agriculture, the citrus industry depends heavily on seasonal labour and is shaped by mechanisation, insecure employment and unequal bargaining power. Creating jobs does not mean workers necessarily receive a fair share of the value they create.

So ‘Citrus creates jobs, therefore buy South African oranges’ is not a satisfactory answer. But neither is ‘That orange travelled a long way, therefore don't buy it.’

It is not an ‘either/or’ situation. It is ‘both/and’ – and this is my main point: the orange is simultaneously part of an environmental system, an employment system, a food system, a trade system and a development system. Pull on one part of that system and something else moves. If a consumer in a wealthy country decides not to buy the South African orange because of its carbon footprint, that decision does not end at the supermarket checkout. Multiply that decision thousands or millions of times and its effects travel backwards through the supply chain – through retailers, importers, shipping companies, ports, packhouses and farms – eventually reaching workers and communities whose livelihoods have become tied to that export economy.

So what is the answer, then?

This is where I find backcasting particularly useful.

 

Backcasting Just Transitions

 

Most of the time, the questions we ask around environmental impact are framed within the system we already have: should someone in the States buy the South African orange or not? That turns a complex transition into a binary consumer choice: buy the orange and accept its environmental impacts, or don't buy it and accept whatever social and economic consequences may follow.

Backcasting starts somewhere else. Instead of asking which choice to make within the present system, it asks us to imagine the future we actually want and then work backwards to ask what would have to change to get there.

In the case of the South African orange, for example, we might ask: how can we create a global supply chain for citrus that is environmentally sustainable, economically viable and more equitable?

That question gives us a picture of the future we want: one in which South African citrus continues to provide employment, export income and economic opportunities for the communities that depend upon it, while the environmental impacts of producing and moving that citrus around the world are substantially reduced.

Then we work backwards.

Working backwards from that future means asking what would have to change across the whole system to make it possible. How could irrigation in South Africa become less water-intensive, and who should pay for the infrastructure needed to make that happen? What investment would help growers reduce fertiliser and pesticide use or move packhouses towards cleaner energy?

But what would also need to change further along the chain? Could shipping, refrigeration and port logistics become less carbon intensive? Could supermarkets in the United States, Britain and Europe change how they source, price and promote imported fruit? Could trade and purchasing arrangements reward lower-impact production and better working conditions rather than simply cheaper fruit? And how might consumers, retailers and governments in importing countries share some of the costs of making that transition possible? These are the kinds of changes across production, trade, infrastructure, consumption and public policy that working backwards from the future brings into view.

Seen from this perspective, the environmental impact of that orange is not simply a South African problem. It is produced through a global system. Countries already struggling with poverty and inequality cannot be expected to bear the costs of transforming that system alone, nor should transition come at the expense of the people whose livelihoods currently depend upon it.

The challenge is to change the relationships themselves. Carbon, employment, water, land, chemicals, shipping, trade, consumption and inequality are all part of the same entanglement. The orange may be South African, but the system that produces, ships, sells and consumes it is global. The transition therefore has to be global too.

One person in my group chat looked at an orange and suddenly saw a global connection.

The other looked at the same orange and saw carbon.

Both saw something real.

But one strand of a tangle is not the entire entanglement.

The problem isn't the orange.

The problem is how all of these things have become entangled in ways that cannot be addressed through a simple choice to buy or not buy. They require us to rethink the entanglement itself.

The challenge of a just transition is to see our entanglements in more complex and sophisticated ways, so that as we seek to un(re)tangle them, we reduce environmental harm without reproducing social and economic injustice.

 

 

 

 

'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.