WICI Seminar: World and Other Systems: A Challenge to WICI - George Francis
For WICI to realize its considerable potential it should strive to draw upon a cadre of people who are each familiar with several quite different approaches to understanding complex systems as well as specialists who are highly accomplished in particular complex phenomena of special interest to them. Together, they can begin to relate the variety of approaches, especially across the great divides between the natural science/mathematics and the social science/history contexts of the different endeavours. This kind of combination will be required to achieve WICI’s aspirations for “the development of a common transdisciplinary language and a coherent and integrated theory for the study of complex adaptive systems” that can also be applied to practical problems in the world, manifested at all scales.
I will share my experience in striving over a number of years to understand diverse approaches that have been taken by academics and practitioners towards understanding different kinds of complex systems. This meant coming to the subject matter as an academic consumer (or perpetual student) rather than as a prize producer. I will briefly summarize perspectives that came out of this exploration, then (as requested) sketch a “consumers’ guide” to world-systems thinking, a well-developed body of scholarship that should be an important part of a WICI repertoire. A longer summary of this exercise is presented in the attached paper.
Speaker Profile
George Francis is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Environment and Resource Studies at UW where he was originally appointed as its first Chairperson in 1970. His long ago university degrees were in biology, zoology (ecology), political economy and resource management, one each from the Universities of Toronto, British Columbia, McGill, and Michigan. He has long been interested in issues associated with what has more recently been called governance for adaptive management in complex social-ecological systems. Over the years he has participated in a number of cross-disciplinary and inter-university collaborative studies related to this theme.