"Complex global problems, simple lifelong learning solutions." Discuss

Abstract

First paragraph: Complexity theory has emerged in the sciences as a way of explaining the patterning in nature, which cannot be readily explained through traditional notions of cause and effect. A similar theoretical innovation can be found in the social sciences in the line of writing variously identified as actor-network theory (ANT), a sociology of associations or material semiotics (Latour, 2005; Law, 2007). In the latter, society is not seen as a pre-existing object of enquiry, but emerges through enactments of various forms of association, including those associated by research. Here the social is viewed as assembled in analogous ways to the manner in which in complexity theory the natural emerges. There is thus a relatedness in these perspectives, although one focuses on the natural and the other on the social.