Assemblages and complex adaptive systems: A conceptual crossroads for integrative research?

Abstract

In human geography and beyond, assemblage thinking has increasingly gained attention as a perspective from which to investigate the emergence and dynamics of more-thanhuman entanglements. Similarly, in the interdisciplinary field of social-ecological systems analysis, theories of complex adaptive systems have been employed to investigate how social and ecological dynamics and actors interact with each other on different scales. Nonetheless, despite the success of these conceptual perspectives in their respective research fields, there have been few attempts so far to bring these theoretical strands together to explore their common ground and investigate how they could cross-fertilize each other. This contribution seeks to address this gap, by investigating the ontological compatibility of these two approaches and exploring the potential for meaningful syntheses that could be utilized for integrative research-combining perspectives, approaches, and methods taken from social and environmental sciences for the analysis of human-environmental relations. Based on a comparative discussion of four selected "guiding principles" found in assemblage thinking and complex adaptive systems, namely, socio-nature, emergence/historicity, relationality, and selforganization, we find not only significant common ground between the two perspectives but also discrepancies that may be utilized for cross-fertilization. In particular, we argue complex adaptive systems would benefit from a deeper

Relate North: Distances

“…As our preludes demonstrate, relationality is central in scope and in design, and key to a rigorous and resilient architecture emphasizing process and practice, along with assemblage production. Such distinguishing qualities align with shifts in a number of fields, including geography (Spies & Alff, 2020), occupational sciences (Barlott & Turpin, 2021), and theatre (Gallagher et al, 2020), which advocate for more integrative research approaches. Artography has been at the forefront of such creative scholarship for nearly two decades, and now alongside neophenomenology, we advocate for a synthesis of ideas and renderings that attend to relationality as a condition of doing research, bringing to art education another configuration of inquiry that recognises curating distance is part of our co-creating and co-presence in the moment.…”

Conceptualising the panic buying phenomenon during COVID-19 as an affective assemblage

“…In summary, nested sets of actors in assemblages need to be viewed as components that more commonly become embedded (or accommodated) into already constituted wholes and, therefore, constrained and enabled by historically sedimented patterns within and emergent capacities of the whole (Spies and Alff, 2020). Once in place, panic buyers’ assemblages demonstrated a tendency towards homogenisation and a resulting decrease in individual differences, as is evident from tweets.…”

“…Thus, these reterritorialisation/deterritorialisation moments must not be reduced to being the result of human agency, but the outcome of the interactions between all the material, discursive, social, semiotic and economic forces. In summary, nested sets of actors in assemblages need to be viewed as components that more commonly become embedded (or accommodated) into already constituted wholes and, therefore, constrained and enabled by historically sedimented patterns within and emergent capacities of the whole (Spies and Alff, 2020). Once in place, panic buyers' assemblages demonstrated a tendency towards homogenisation and a resulting decrease in individual differences, as is evident from tweets.…”

Modelling and Simulation of Human-Environment Interactions

“…Assemblage thinking has recently been applied, for example, to the analysis of policies related to promoting sustainability in urban and rural areas [79][80][81] and to the study of aquaculture and agriculture sustainability [82][83][84]. Some scholars have even applied the concept of assemblage to the process of sustainability policy formulation and implementation, using phrases such as "response assemblages" [76,85] or "adaptation assemblages" [86,87] to refer to the way in which humans attempt to engage and alter the socio-ecological systems in which they live.…”