Abstract This special issue was based on a flagship panel of the 2022 International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) annual conference held at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague on realist complexity. The aim of this special issue is to capture and specify what Critical Realism (CR) can contribute to the literature on complexity. Against the background of previous attempts that have subsequently coalesced the two under the rubric of ‘Complex Realism’, the primary objective here takes stock of the various analytical shortcomings of ‘Complex Realism’ and aims instead to understand how CR scholars analytically treat complexity. Put differently, the contributors of this special issue problematize the amalgam between CR and complexity evident in ‘Complex Realism’ and ask instead how CR deals with complexity (Realist Complexity). In so doing, they present a variety of arguments and approaches which will be dealt with below. The next section will provide a short background on the origins of complexity sciences before it highlights both the tents and shortcoming of Complex Realism. The final section will provide a summary of all key contributors of this special issue.

This paper attempts to retrace the steps used to conceive of category theory in Complex Realism. It starts evaluating Three Turns and Five Directives that have emerged from a transdisciplinary approach to metametaphysics, as well as the Speculative Realists’ contributions to this state of affairs. It then presents a more detailed account on how to build a Category Theory for this Complex Realism that grew out of Speculative Realism, Whitehead’s Process Philosophy, and Nicolai Hartmann’s Critical Realism, among other important influences. The purpose of this paper, then, is propaedeutic in showing directions to be taken and errors to be avoided in the construction of a new categoreal matrix for Complex Realism.

Parents' psychological stress during the perinatal and neonatal periods continues to increase in an environment of declining birthrates, aging populations, and shrinking family sizes. The increase in child abuse and neglect cases, most likely by inexperienced and insufficiently knowledgeable parents, necessitates education on childcare and intervention techniques in nursing and midwifery training. In particular, attachment formation early in life between mother and infant is crucial. To accurately teach sensitive and comprehensive information on intervention techniques for mother-child attachment formation, realistic videos, and educational materials are necessary. Although pseudoeducational materials are available, they might be limited in explaining complex realism, particularly to support breastfeeding that involves both parents and child and that encourages interaction between the two. In a previous study in a common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) model, we experimentally controlled infant feeding and nurturing through 24 h of constant sensing and collected 1 month of quantitative data on psychological indices that possibly translated to psychological development. Age-dependent dynamic visualization of these data by multivariate analyses inferred causal relationships between early parental feeding and psychobiological rhythm formation. In the same primate model, we identified a spontaneous case of breastfeeding failure in which the father inhibited his neonatal infant's feeding and the mother appeared to abandon nurturing, leading to clinically significant weight loss in the infant. Thus, we explored intervention techniques to promote mother-infant interaction. The mother was trained to allow the infant to spontaneously explore her breast. Initially, the mother refused to display the feeding pose potentially due to pain associated with breast engorgement. Massage was used to soften the breast and feeding was reintroduced. We hypothesize that activation of instinctive attachment formation mechanisms by encouraging spontaneity in each parent and child is the key to successful feeding intervention.

The study of the social world involves multiple, multidimensional, and endlessly dynamic competing systems evolving over time. This inherent complexity, however, does not mean that the social world is chaotic, random, or unstructured. Rather, structural forms do emerge and co-exist in social settings. It is the emergence, maintenance, and decay of these structures that allows researchers to detect temporary stability and provides them with the means to make predictions about continuity and change in social dynamics. Arguably then, the main challenge in the study of the social world consist of developing robust and consistent strategies or tools capable of tracing, mapping, or retrieving these structural forms in order to ultimately model this social complexity. Accordingly, the overarching purpose of this study consists of addressing this analytic and methodological challenge by proposing a groundbreaking analytic framework, and its corresponding software application, designed to extract temporal and dynamic structures in the social world relying on complex realism, complex systems, dynamic temporal network analyses, and data science and visualization techniques. Together, these frameworks constitute the foundations of Mapping, Organizing, and Visualizing Interdependent Events (MOVIE), an analytic framework [and software application] designed to ease the understanding of, individually-produced or interactively-generated, events and knowledge evolution, by tracing and recreating the processes that may have affected participants’ experiences, outcomes, and standpoints. To demonstrate MOVIE’s performance and rigor in capturing and recreating the dynamic complexity of micro-level interactions, the analyses relied on publicly available data sources on foreign policy and conflict resolution. All data elements and tools are provided with this study to make these analyses fully transparent and reproducible. MOVIE can trace/recreate the temporal elements embedded in existing qualitative databases (e.g. those generated with NVivo/MAXQDA/Atlas.ti), even if they were created without considering their dynamic time-evolving features, whose meaning-building relevance may help inform policy planning and action.

Is it possible to naturalize semantics? Starting from Libet’s 1983 studies, current research developments in neuronal bases of behavior reduce the mind to the brain, with significant implications in reference to issues of free will, imputability and individual behavioral responsibility. However, many criticisms can be made at this approach. This paper shows the limits of Cognitive Neuro-reductionism, especially in the light of Varela’s Systemic Cognitive Neuroscience or Neurophenomenology and the current theoretical revision process of social systems as complex—dynamical, emergent and unpredictable—social systems, or Complex Realism Sociology. Here, there is an agreement point. The conception of living systems as complex system as well as that of social system as complex systems acknowledge the autonomy of human reflexivity capability and free will be able to initiate the chain of events that triggers the process of adaptation to environment and change and social emergence ones, and, in so doing, problematize a neuro-reductionist determinism of cognitive life and behavioral processes, with its dilemmatic consequences on individual social responsibility and, ultimately, on social order possibilities. This being stated, this paper reflects on dialogue possibilities between Varela’s neuroscientific revolution and Complex Realism Sociology. Going beyond the Parsonsian functionalism’s social homeostasis and maintaining the point firm of social emergence and relationship between reflexivity and social morphogenesis, Complex Realism Sociology can dialogue well with Varela’s Neurophenomenology. Lieb’s disciplined analysis shows to be a fruitful ground for interlocution about the understanding of that Organism which cannot be liquidated but must be reinterpreted in its function, about the understanding of neuronal circuits that mediate free will and intersubjectivity, conscious deliberative intentionality and awareness of oneself and others, self-control, perception of time and risk, in other terms, about the understanding our ability to give meaning to the world, to adapt or change it, to know, remember, desire, empathize, socialize and interact. In Varela’s revision, stripped of problematic reductionist claims, Neuroscience can provide to Sociology a wealth of observations that contribute to the understanding of the bodily basis of social interactions and social order. This paper is within Piaceri’s research.

Born in Dahomey and trained in France, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra made his career in postcolonial Senegal. A director, producer, and film critic, his early films mark simultaneously the origins of the West African cinema and of West African documentary. When situated in its regional and transnational contexts, Vieyra's work demonstrates that early West African documentary was varied, innovative, and always political. In Afrique sur Seine / Africa on the Seine (1955), Une Nation est née / A Nation Is Born (1961), Lamb / Wrestling (1963), and Môl (1966), Vieyra experimented with both documentary content and style, exploring the boundaries between nonfictional and fictional narrative strategies and expanding documentary's formal and geographical boundaries. These films constitute an important contribution to global documentary, a revolution within a tradition that had been tightly bound to the French colonial project as well as a new tradition and model for contemporary African documentarists.

Cli-fi, Petroculture, and the Environmental Humanities: An Interview with Stephanie LeMenager River Ramuglia (bio) Stephanie LeMenager is the Barbara and Carlisle Moore Dis tinguished Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century, co-founder and advisory board member of the journal Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, and a passionate advocate for cross-disciplinary engagement with environmental culture. In addition to her academic work, which includes numerous publications in the fields of American Studies and environmental criticism, LeMenager has been profiled in the New York Times, Time Magazine, and ClimateWire, and has also appeared as a guest on National Public Radio’s Science Friday. The following interview was conducted via email in May 2017. In response to questions by River Ramuglia, LeMenager shares her perspective on the genesis and current popularity of the cli-fi genre, discusses the relevance of her work in the current political climate (even recommending a novel to Rex Tillerson), and contemplates the future of the environmental humanities in an era of rapid technological, political, and environmental change. Q. In your essay “The Humanities after the Anthropocene,” you attribute the rise of cli-fi as a popular genre to the sociological phenomenon of “genre trouble,” whereby a genre emerges because “the affective expectations we hold for how things unfold, in art and life, do not make sense anymore” (476). It seems that, in your view, cli-fi is a useful way of getting environmental topics into the news, but might also risk simplification or evasion of the climate crisis. How are writers navigating—or perhaps breaking out of—the boundaries of this genre? [End Page 154] A. Cli-fi is more interesting to me than simply as a way of getting climate change into the news—and under the “safe house” of fiction, although it does that, and I see that as a social good. Primarily I find cli-fi fascinating as a sociological phenomenon because the excitement about it, the fact that it has spawned such a fervent fan community and media interest, suggests to me that, on some level, the mainstream media and perhaps a broader public than the arts faculty believe that fiction is a survival strategy. As in: cli-fi might pattern for us a new way of being human and living in a world without the benefits of Holocene climate. As a person who has taught literature for over twenty years, I was shocked to see the press pick up cli-fi to the extent that the New York Times would appear in my class at the University of Oregon on the pretext (more or less) that a new kind of novel might save the world. In part, cli-fi draws upon the charismatic subcultural lifestyles spawned by science fiction, one of its parent genres. If we consider that science fiction acts more as a way of life than as a genre per se, that sci-fi communities have grown up around book clubs, workshops, fan fiction, festivals, multiplayer games, and environmental causes like Peak Oil—as my colleague Matthew Schneider Mayerson has written about—then the relationship of cli-fi to social action is easier to see. However, not all cli-fi novels are clearly related to science fiction, not all are futuristic, not all are dystopian or utopian. Novels like Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital series, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Saci Lloyd’s YA Carbon Diaries series, or even Jennifer Haigh’s Heat and Light—which is about fracking—give us complex realism for the Anthropocene, making clear that critics have exaggerated how problems of scale make it impossible to write a realist novel about either climate change or petroculture. Moreover, realist cli-fi with dystopian or futurist elements—such as Octavia Butler’s Parable series, Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle, George Turner’s The Sea and Summer, and Karl Taro Greenfeld’s satiric novel The Subprimes—makes crucial contributions to our understanding of the interrelationships of colonialism, racism, neoliberalism, and climate...

In recent years, both realism and complexity have begun to have methodological influence in social research. Yet for the most part, these have existed separately and have had limited impact on empirical research. In this article, we develop a theoretical argument for complex realism, grounded in an ontology of probability, that may be operationalised to demonstrate the reality of social change at a micro- and meso-level. We apply our conception of complex realism to an example using the method of longitudinal case–based cluster analysis to analyse the trajectories over time of male and female prisoners aged 18 and above who were at risk of self-harm.

Abstract This article adopts the theoretical framework of complex realism to trace the evolution of the Islamic Republic of Iran's foreign policy and developmental activities in Africa between the 1980s and the 2000s. Contrary to common assumptions, the deradicalization of the Islamic Republic's foreign policy in Africa began not under the moderates in the early 1990s, but under the conservatives in the mid-1980s. This period marked the first time that the Islamic Republic instrumentalized development to advance its strategic interests in Africa—a policy that has continued despite the factionalization of Iran's political elite. Based on one year of archival research and interviews in Iran, this article is the first to investigate the history and activities of the Islamic Republic's rural development organization, Construction Jihad, in Africa. It posits that development, instead of arms or ideology, has enabled Iran to make the farthest inroads into the continent due to Africa's sizeable agrarian economies, widespread rural poverty, and formidable developmental challenges.

And even the most adroit of languages may fail to "work" in an abnormal situation or to cope, or to cope reasonably simply, with novel discoveries. J. L. Austin, "Truth" How to tell that truth that is a strange experimental friction. Joan Retallack, "G'L'A'N'C'E'S" In "The Poethical Wager," Joan Retallack jokes that however far we move away from Aristotle's Poetics, its shadow continues to loom over our thinking: (laughter) Yes, Aristotle, who has cast the most enduring shadow over the course of academic poetics, quite artificially divided everything up into what he took to be thoroughly comprehensible disciplines—theory, practice, ethics, politics, poetry. Poethical poets, whether or not they have themselves used the "h," enact the complex dynamics that criss-cross through these boundaries. (295) And certainly this criss-crossing of boundaries has been a foundational idea of contemporary innovative writing—the rule of language in the poem as the rule of thought, rather than the rules of comprehensible disciplines, literary convention, or aesthetic form. Such a poetics aims to explore the material and signifying possibilities of language as language, contesting traditional conceptions of certain kinds of language uses or subject positions as essentially "poetic" in order to open the poem to a space of social and cultural [End Page 62] investigation. But as this poetics reimagines the poem as a space of thinking and feeling, as a mode of investigation rather than representation, how are we to understand the interconnections, and mutual relevance, of the kind of thinking that poetry can offer us and the kinds of thinking offered by the disciplined ways of knowing characteristic of other fields, such as analytic philosophy, speech-act theory, formal logic, or physics? Asked this way, these questions—which are the further and more challenging questions raised by the work of Joan Retallack—become at once questions of thought and questions of genre. What happens when a poem uses specific vocabularies or language practices or logics from quantum physics, chaos theory, or mathematics?1 What happens when the very life of a poem arises from a specific and technical philosophical text, as with Retallack's "The Woman in the Chinese Room," which draws from John Searle's infamous thought experiment?2 For Retallack, as a poet-theoretician trained in philosophy and attentive to the complex intersections of disciplinary forms, "[t]he model is no longer one of city or nation states of knowledge each with separate allegiances and consequences, testy about property rights and ownership, but instead the more global patterns of [End Page 63] ecology, environmentalism, bio-realism, the complex modelings of the non-linear sciences, chaos theory" (295). But of course Retallack is talking here of models; not all of these "nation states of knowledge" are so ready to give up their testiness over property rights and ownership, the particular modes of discourse which have historically made them separate and identifiable. At the heart of Retallack's How to Do Things with Words is how to bring this questioning of disciplinarity not only into the space of experimental poetry but into the spaces of philosophy and the sciences as well, and in so doing, to enact a pragmatic, philosophical, and ethical realism—what Retallack terms a "complex realism." Venturing just such a complex interplay between poetry and philosophy, the title poem of Retallack's How to Do Things with Words opens the vexed question of aesthetics and analysis, intervening in a history of thought that presupposes (and thus articulates) a fundamental distinction between poetry and philosophy in which philosophy is based on an appeal to validity and logic, and poetry on an appeal to experience, sensation, interest. Retallack elaborates the problem in her essay ":RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM: (three essays onto shaky grounds)," critiquing what she terms the "picture theory of meaning," which rests on "a fairly simple (this = that...