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.