•Food web
•Emergence
•Emergence 3 Minute Video
•The remarkable simplicity of complexity
•UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Once we develop our tactical advocacy skills through individual representation and traditional systems advocacy, we need to expand our vision and our skills to encompass a form of systems advocacy that supports the organizing of emergence as a way we implement our social justice agenda.
Emergence means (among other things) the creation of a network with a core of strong process links and a periphery of weak process links. This mutually reinforcing network of strong and weak ongoing process links is the way that emergence occurs. This network is the governing constraint that creates a possibility space in which emergence can grow.
Remember that strong linked processes drive the local system, and weak linked processes buffer the local system and prevent it from “burning out”.
World Building is another way to talk about such networks and organizing for emergence. World building can be a very human tool for building a change ecosystem. While the detail of building a change ecosystem is the subject of the next Part (7) of this work, I hope this slide will introduce you to the idea of world building, something which we all embrace as a standard part of our social and personal lives., mostly in media, the arts, and social culture. For example, many entertainment vehicles (like Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, the Matrix trilogy) have been extended as highly detailed, multi-media, social community driven worlds far beyond what we used to accept as the boundaries of entertainment and fan culture.
World building can create possibility spaces that allow the enabling and disruption of affordances. Such worlds can be used to engage in the task of creating a new future for PWD. Building a World for social justice is an expansion of the possibility space that PWD created when we embraced the civil rights advocacy paradigm. It represents the possibilities we have learned from the strengths and weaknesses of civil rights advocacy.
Today, we tend to use change narratives only linearly to illustrate a value or a policy failure of the system, not to formulate an entirely new way to go forward.
But, if we are to remake this world in a way that supports personal autonomy, social inclusion, and freedom of choice, we will have to simultaneously make our own lives much larger than they’ve been before.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
