Complex Processes Research Group
The Complex Processes Research Group strives to advance cross-disciplinary research into complex processes.
Advances in mathematics, the natural sciences and cultural and social theory together with problems and opportunities generated by globalization, including the global ecological crisis, have demonstrated the inadequacy of traditional reductionist ways of understanding the world.
Each in its own way has revealed the world to consist of dynamic, complex processes; in each case the central problem is how to study and comprehend such processes. The group undertakes research on process philosophy and its developments and applications, on the wide range of ideas which are now converging in the general theory of complexity and complex systems, and on cultural, social and economic theories concordant with these ideas.
In this way the group attempts to link research on process philosophy and complexity theory with theoretical physics, chemistry and biology, neurophysiology, psychology, human ecology and global political economy, and research on cultures, institutions and organizations and their transformations and pathologies, particularly those engendered by the impact of globalization.
In the light of such research the group also reviews and attempts to reformulates the basic concepts defining social and political ideals and goals of the global community and the standards of economic performance and human welfare.
To provide the means to formulate policy within this global system, the group promotes research into new approaches to policy formation such as "retrospective path analysis" and, in accordance with this, strives to create new visions of the future.
The group draws together people from a broad range of disciplines both within the Swinburne University along with academics and postgraduate students from other universities. During semester, the group holds fortnightly research seminars.
In previous years it has examined topics such as the emergence of consciousness, the mathematics of complexity, ecology and human ecology, the nature of emergence, the dynamics of culture and globalization and complexity in international politics.
In 2000 members of the group also produced a special edition of the journal Democracy and Nature devoted to complexity and systems theory.
Members of the group participated in the organization of the Third Australasian Conference on Process Thought. The papers for this have been published in the 2002 edition of on-line journal Concrescence, a journal in which members of the group regularly publish their research.
Members of the group have also set up a new on-line journal: Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy which we expect to be launched this year.
Enquiries
Associate Professor Arran Gare
Philosophy and Cultural Inquiry
Faculty of Life and Social Sciences
Swinburne University of Technology
PO Box 218
Hawthorn Victoria 3122
Telephone : +61 3 9214 8862
Facsimile : +61 3 9819 0856
email : agare@swin.edu.au