Abstract: There is now considerable work on applying complexity to social systems. At the same time, the social sciences have a long history of methodological work that advocates for mixed methods designs or combining methods to better understand the complex social world. Yet, time remains relatively undertheorized in both areas. This talk proposes a simple yet powerful approach to mixed-methods research, grounded in the idea that all methods, just as all complex systems, have tempos inscribed within them: paces, rhythms, durations, sequences, and events that shape them as well as what can be known about them. Temporal threading - that is, the mapping of the different kinds of temporalities that are empirically available to us - allows us to build in temporal sensitivity into research design. In this brief talk, I will share a few examples of how using mixed methods to study complex systems can support real-world systems change and open new frontiers for interdisciplinary complexity research.

Abstract: Understanding the entangled dynamics of social-ecological systems (SES) requires methodological innovation that reflects the complexity, relationality, and multi-scalar nature of human-nature interactions. In this talk, I introduce the Routledge Handbook of Research Methods for Social-Ecological Systems (2021), a comprehensive resource that curates over 30 qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches specifically adapted to study SES interdependencies.

Drawing on the Handbook’s structure and intent, I highlight how diverse epistemological traditions — from participatory scenario building and systems mapping to ethnographic fieldwork and historical analysis — can be meaningfully combined to reveal feedbacks, thresholds, and emergent patterns in social-ecological contexts. I also reflect on key methodological challenges: navigating data pluralism, integrating knowledge across disciplines and worldviews, and grounding research in contextual, place-based realities.

This presentation aims to stimulate discussion on how methodological pluralism can support rigorous, creative, and actionable research in complex systems science and what it takes to foster transdisciplinary integrity in practice.

Abstract. TBA

Abstract: As complex modelling becomes more widely used, we need to engage with the ethical and democratic implications of model-informed policy decisions (Thompson, 2022). Disciplinary norms can lead to 'blindspots' (Marchionni, 2022), exclude particular social groups or entrench certain worldviews (Kolkman, 2020). Policy Modelling for Health (HealthMod) is a multi-institution research consortium, based in the UK, working to understand and influence the effectiveness of economic policies, such as changes to taxation and welfare, to address health inequalities. One of the goals of HealthMod is developing innovative methods to democratise policy modelling.  This 15-minute presentation will reflect on learning from a collaboration between the modelling and ‘community insights’ teams at HealthMod. This has required us to find creative ways to traverse between concrete evidence generation (experiential understanding) to the model abstraction (explanatory understanding) (Black and Greer, 2024).  Working alongside three community groups affected by economic policy, the project team have been exploring participatory ways to incorporate missing dimensions of lived experience in ‘Simpaths’. Simpaths is a microsimulation model which draws on national survey data (UKHLS) to project individual and household life course events. A particularly innovative aspect of this work is the potential use of ‘PhotoVoice’, a wellestablished participatory method which supports participants to capture their experiences and perspectives through photographs. We reflect on the potential and challenges of our efforts to work across the abstraction gap between experiential and explanatory framings through integrating participatory visual methods with quantified policy modelling.  

Abstract:In recent times, social researchers are finally coming to terms with the need to use mixed research methods in order to effectively combine both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Considering that years of hegemony of the so-called “hard sciences” have left no doubt as to the definition of quantitative factors, the question that must first be posed is the following: in social research, what exactly are the qualitative dimensions? The answer is quite simple: the qualitative dimensions – keeping in mind that all (living) social systems are by their very nature complex adaptive systems -- are precisely those that the hard sciences have defined as “emergent properties”, that is, those capable of spontaneous, non-linear, and unpredictable self-organization. When researching social systems, therefore, the “contamination” of qualitative factors with the quantitative data is not an option, but an obligatory pathway. The research itself can never be undertaken by an external observer, as we are all observer/participants in the system, hence every “observation” will change both the system and the “observer”. This in itself calls for an epistemological and methodological approach that is truly inter, multi, and trans-disciplinary: a mostly illusory practice, unfortunately, among today’s universities, whose application of transdisciplinary studies consists mainly of empty slogans echoing through the halls of robustly separated fields of study. 

Furthermore, in an era when thinking is being increasingly delegated to machines, it would be wise to remember that thought(human thought) is an emergent property; indeed, the “mind” we are unable to “locate” within our brain, which gives rise to these thoughts, is itself an emergent property. Collective emergent properties in social systems include power, which exists only by way of the relationships that acknowledge and sustain it. Indeed, stepping outside of purely social research, we can find many physicists, such as Carlo Rovelli, whose relational quantum mechanics tells us that the primary elements of the universe are relationships. The implications of this postulate in social systems demonstrate the necessity of working from below as a primary methodological approach: of recognizing that social research must first and foremost deal with the smallest, most modest, grassroots elements, whose constant interdependent and interconnected interactions, in social systems as in all complex systems, trigger change(s) in the entire system, rather than focusing on top-down approaches and impositions, despite the capacity for huge-scale pattern recognition available since the advent of artificial intelligence.

The truly transdisciplinary, systemic, relational epistemology andmethodology this author/this paper? proposes has yet to be implemented in social research, particularly when the greatest risk, as seen above with transdisciplinary studies, is that of simulation -- with which our social systems and research methods are fraught -- simulation of participation, simulation of inclusion, simulation of thought itself, keeping in mind that it is the qualitative dimension that can heal the widening fracture between the human and the technological.

Abstract:

Research Question. Eskom, is the dominant fossil-fuelled electricity utility supplying about 90% of South Africa’s electricity energy requirements. In this paper, a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) Theoretical Framework, is operationalised into a qualitative research methodology for exploring the electricity incumbent’s  trajectory. System dynamics, such as cross-scale feedback loops and unresolved tension points, are visualised with timelines and tipping points in this historical assessment. The challenges of practitioner confirmation bias, researcher reflexivity and a directed search for system-level properties data in this retrospective socio-technical case study are explored.  

 Theoretical Foundation There are foundational four pillars informing this complexity – informed research design. The pillars provide guardrails for operationalising the ontological framework into an epistemological and methodological framework.  The first pillar recognises that a CAS lens is an integrative ontological framework enabling a way to address meso and empirical level aspects of reality  (Swilling, 2020) and the second pillar recognises that the six organising principles of a CAS enables the identification of appropriate methods to focus on systemic properties, relations, open systems and the capturing and assessing complexity (Preiser, et al., 2018). The third pillar recognises that the role of the researcher in a CAS study needs to be examined reflexively to ensure that there is critical awareness of the limitations of the researcher’s meta-viewpoint and the limits to their knowledge claims, given that they are part of the system they are analysing (Morin,2008).  The fourth and last pillar relates to understanding the context or contingent conditions under which the CAS is operating and how these shapes understanding system dynamics and behaviour (Cilliers, 2016).”   Research Method 

 Underpinning this retrospective CAS study is the assumption that appropriate data to illustrate systemlevel properties can be extracted from archives and that plausible explanations of the observed dynamics can be provided. The selected research methods include constructing a system timeline juxtaposing key events in the social system with the breaching of technical system thresholds. The analysis includes identifying the governance decisions that led to system tipping points and state changes. The capacity to retrospectively identify important systemic variables and extract relevant data and thereafter draw contextually plausible narratives in this analysis relies on the researcher’s previous participant/observer experience of the CAS and their practitioner’s knowledge of how the CAS operated. The challenges around  confirmation bias and limitations to knowledge claims are addressed by triangulating between the practitioners’ first-hand CAS knowledge and how it had changed over time with evidence from peer-reviewed journals describing system dynamics and grey literature such as audited financial statements, legal records and parliamentary records describing specific events over time.  Findings and Discussion 

A CAS lens to illustrate change dynamics over a 40yr period was useful to highlight the complex causality driving the decline of the South African electricity sector regime incumbent, Eskom. The breaching of system thresholds leading to tipping points occurred at different temporal and spatial scales in the system. With the relational and integrative focus afforded by a CAS lens, key events at firm, industry or national policy level could be contextually connected to illustrate the multiple interconnected factors driving system behaviour over time.  The system data and key events used to visualize a system timeline and demonstrate where tipping points occurred was made possible by drawing on the researchers’ participant/observer status in the socio-technical system and their institutional knowledge and corporate memory.  This analysis revealed the breadth of systemic coupling and feedback between Eskom and its environment and spotlighted discrepancies between the firm and sectoral governance frameworks and actual dynamics that must be managed for effective performance. 

Abstract:

Background

 The way people-nature relationships can improve, is if their patterns and relationships are conceptualized as systems. That is as interactions, communication, context, and feedback. Participatory processes are way to enable these contextual interactions through qualitative methods that ignite human relational processes that might otherwise be unnoticed. Objective: This paper informs on the use of qualitative and mixed methods in foresight processes to study people’s interactions with the natural environment in urban-related contexts.  

Method

  First, a Futures Wheel workshop was conducted during an international futures workshop process to compile mental images of the future that served as a feedback mechanism to stimulate new thinking. Implementing the tool began with an inquiry, a core theme or issue that was positioned at the center of a web-like structure. From there, a first, secondary, tertiary and potentially further levels of impact or consequences were drawn and systematically organized.  Second, a questionnaire method as a tool in workshop discussions to help gain understanding about the context that was attached to the images of the city that residents were holding, essentially allowing for a more explicit interpretation and understanding the architecture behind the multiplicty of images. Third, a dialog approach to communication as a method used in a group activity to stimulate listening and communication of citizens concern for the value and the future of natural forest resources in Finland.  

Results

Qualitative methods generated different and substantial data that revealed the multiple dimensions of nature-related connections values and images in the participants who took part in the workshops.  Results showed that using a diversity of methods can enabled participatory processes as feedback mechanisms. Furthermore, all results contributed assert current knowledge and understanding of nature as a provider of wide range of benefits to people in different urban-related contexts. 

Abstract:

In 2003, Helga Nowotny offered an agenda for a shift from institutionally-robust science towards “socially robust knowledge” (Nowotny, 2003). Instead of common approaches like opening up expert advisory committees to the public, or systematising experiential knowledge into another input into science, she argued for creating opportunities for publics to act as partners in research, testing results not in ‘the laboratory’ (or its computerised equivalents) but in the real world. In this keynote talk, I share some of my experiences running Community Panels to ‘scrutinise’ the work of the systems science SIPHER Consortium in the UK between 2020 and 2024. Sharing a series of vignettes from Panel workshops, I will reflect on some of the successes and failures of this model of engaged systems research. I will share headlines from a recent scoping review of involving publics in computational modelling research, and offer some provocations for priorities for methodological innovation in this space.

Abstract:

The Relatoscope* is a relational method, designed to promote the performance of a selected set of complex thinking movements to facilitate the emergence of  creative and abductive ideas which can open new possibilities for thinking and acting in relation to complex systems. It has been used as a tool to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues (Melo et al, 2023; Melo & Campos, 2022). The Relatoscope method will be used to facilitate the emergence of new ideas in the insights during the dialogues regarding new possibilities for researching social complex systems using qualitative methods and creative interactions and relations between qualitative and quantitative methods.There will be a short introduction to the method.

Focus questions for the dialogue:

• How to promote the use of qualitative and mixed-methods approaches to research and practice with complex systems?

• What and how could critical questions and needs in complex systems research  be addressed through qualitative and mixed-methods approaches?

• What key methodological challenges are brought forward by (what) pressing questions regarding the understanding of social and social-ecological complex systems?

• How can innovations regarding qualitative and mixed-methods approaches to research and practice with complex systems best be nurtured, supported and disseminated?

• At what level and under which conditions can the qualitative and quantitative methods be truly synergetic and lead to emergent novelty?

• What focuses, areas, themes could be particularly targeted with qualitative and mixed-methods approaches?

• How can innovations be stimulated, supported, evaluated and disseminated in the domain of qualitative and mixed-methods approaches to research and practice with complex systems best be nurtured, supported and disseminated?

• What are the main obstacles and how could they be overcome regarding qualitative and mixed-methods approaches to research and practice with complex systems?

• What difference can qualitative and  mixed-methods research do in “real-world” contexts, namely of interventions in complex systems?

• What is mainstream in the use of qualitative and mixed-methods approaches in the domain of complex systems and what are the spaces and opportunities for innovation?

*References: Melo  et al. (2023). A Complexity-Informed Methodology for Interdisciplinary Dialogues: Key Questions and Challenges for Theory, Research and Practice on Modes of Thinking (In) Complexity. Available at osf.io/preprints/osf/v6t2h_v1; Melo, A., & Campos, R. (2022). Facilitating scientific events guided by Complex Thinking: A case study of an online Inter/Transdisciplinary Advanced Training School. Informing Sci. Int. J. an Emerg. Transdiscipl., 25, 89–110. https://doi.org/10.28945/4934.  

 Images of analogue /Physical Relatoscopes can be seen here.