Understanding Of Social Complexity Research Articles

“Us versus Them;” Local Social Fragmentation and Its Potential Effects on Building Pathways to Adapting to Wildfire

As the need for wildfire adaptation for human populations in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) intensifies in the face of changes that have increased the number of wildfires that exceed 100 thousand acres, it is becoming more important to come to a better understanding of social complexity on the WUI landscape. It is just as important to further our understanding of the social characteristics of the individual human settlements that inhabit that landscape and attempt to craft strategies to improve wildfire adaptation that are commensurate with local values, management preferences, and local capabilities. The case study research presented in this article evaluates social characteristics present in a WUI community that faces extreme wildfire risk to both people and property. It explores social processes that impede the ability of community members to work together collectively to solve problems (e.g., wildfire risk) and offers an alternative perspective about the nature of residency status (i.e., full-time and non-full-time) and its role in influencing wildfire mitigation efforts. This article closes with recommendations intended to facilitate collective action and foster community development.

Serpents Glen (Karnatukul): New Histories for Deep time Attachment to Country in Australia’s Western Desert

Recent work at Serpents Glen (Karnatukul) in the Carnarvon Ranges (Katjarra) of the Western Desert has changed our archaeological understanding of both deep time occupation and more recent arid-zone social geography. Mobilising rock art evidence into earlier models for how arid zone peoples have entered, settled and known Country has allowed us to project people into cycles of human mobility. Our understanding of the deep time and more recent engagements with Country (ngurra) has changed significantly since Richard Gould wrote Yiwara and Living Archaeology in the late 1960s. Early ethno-archaeological studies portrayed the desert as harsh and precarious, and the lifeways of arid zone peoples as marginal and conservative. Fifty years of archaeological endeavour working with traditional custodians in the Western Desert, has changed this view of the ‘dangerous desert’. ‘Risk-minimisation’ and the ‘dietary stress hypothesis’ have been replaced with models that consider human mobility, social geography and information exchange theory as ways of understanding how arid-zone peoples have been successfully on country since the earliest human occupation of this continent. Karnatukul’s record rewrites the deep history of the arid zone, as well as refining our understanding of social complexity by combining late Holocene arid zone art and occupation evidence.

Intercultural mediation through picturebooks

Picturebooks are good resources for intercultural mediation with children given their multimodality and topic range related to contemporary living. When carefully selected, picturebooks may help children reflect on the multicultural world they live in and learn about meaningful intercultural action. Some examples of picturebooks are used from the Identity and Diversity in Picture Book Collections project (IDPBC) in order to explore topics related to the superdiversity of contemporary societies, such as, living in communities, multiple linguistic identities, approaches to mass migration and (voluntary and enforced) mobility. Fictional resources such as these are capable of generating empathy in readers and thus can be used to help children understand the growing cultural diversity around them, as well as the social phenomena of migration, refugees. These fictional resources may also contribute to children’s understanding of social complexity at the global scale, at the human rights level, and within rules of democratic action as global citizens. Some inclusive didactic approaches are further suggested for using the selected picturebooks with five to 12-year old children in contexts of intercultural mediation.

Posthumanism Thinks the Political: A Genealogy for Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics

ABSTRACT This article rethinks the concept of the political from a posthumanist rather than a humanist vantage point. More specifically, it engages in an extended discussion of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos and its claims regarding the relationship between neoliberalism and the economic and political spheres, as exemplified in Michel Foucault’s lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics. While sympathetic with Brown’s views on the deleterious effects of neoliberalism, it takes issue with her critique of Foucault’s “notorious late-1970s antagonism to Marxism” and its effects on his understanding of the relationship between the political and the economic, as reflected in the phenomenon of neoliberalism. This article argues instead that Foucault’s work in The Birth of Biopolitics does indeed have an important genealogical relationship to Marxism, but it is not the humanist Marxism that frames Brown’s analysis. What motivates Foucault’s interest in neoliberalism is not his insufficiently Marxist understanding of the relationship between the economic and the political, but rather his larger project of exploring a theory of social complexity in which the economic does not and cannot unilaterally steer the other social systems, including the political. This understanding is utterly consonant with Foucault’s larger discussion of the qualitative shift from disciplinarity to governmentality, and evinces a genealogical through-line from Althusser’s analysis of structural causality to Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics, to Luhmann’s social systems theory—one that fundamentally changes how we must think the concept of the political within a new understanding of social complexity.

Personality and Social Networks: A Generative Model Approach.

Social network analysis has produced important insights regarding the causes and consequences of animal social structure. Social structure has been shown to impact longevity, reproductive success, transmission of pathogens and information, and also play important role in the evolution of cooperation. Studies of the determinants of social structure have identified environmental, genetic, and structural factors in a variety of species. At the same time, most studies in the field have been descriptive in approach, statistically identifying patterns in social networks constructed from observed interactions. We argue that there is a need for predictive theory to complement descriptive studies, moving the field from pattern to process. As an example, we provide a simple model of the effect of personality on social network structure and social role differentiation. Our model suggests that variation in behavioral types can result in variation in individual social network traits, and that some patterns found in animal networks in the wild, such as assortativity with respect to personality, may be outcomes of social inheritance and individual variation in it. Our approach and results exemplify the potential of generative models to connect individual-level processes to emergent patterns and advance our understanding of social complexity in nature.

Transitive inference in free-living greylag geese, Anser anser

Living in large, stable groups is often considered to favour the evolution of cognitive abilities related to social living, such as the ability to track relationships among group members and to make transitive inferences about relationships based on indirect evidence. Greylag geese are relatively small brained, but live in complex societies with social support and clan structures. They form dominance hierarchies in which families dominate pairs and unpaired individuals. However, competition is costly and the ability to transitively infer relationships among flock members may be highly advantageous. We tested five free-living, juvenile greylag geese embedded in a flock of 150 birds for their ability to track multiple dyadic relationships and their transitive inference competence. Individuals were trained on discriminations between successive pairs of five implicitly ordered colours (A–E). All individuals learned to track four dyadic relationships simultaneously and showed transitive inference when presented with nonadjacent colours. Remarkably, the amount of training required was related to the individual’s early social environment. Our study is one of the first to show transitive inference in a precocial bird and suggests an influence of early social experience on sociocognitive abilities. Furthermore, it improves our understanding of social complexity as an important selection pressure for the evolution of cognition.