Sylvie Genest, Bob White et Maude Arsenault vous invitent à participer à un numéro spécial sur la pensée systémique en anthropologie pour comprendre la diversité culturelle à l’ère de la super-diversité!
Informations sur la soumission des manuscrits
Date limite de soumission des manuscrits : 31 juillet 2023
Les manuscrits doivent être soumis en ligne en s’inscrivant et se connectant à l’adresse suivante. Les manuscrits peuvent être soumis jusqu’à la date limite. Toutes les soumissions qui passent le contrôle préalable sont examinées par des pairs. Les articles acceptés seront publiés en continu dans le journal (dès leur acceptation) et seront répertoriés ensemble sur le site web du numéro spécial. Les articles de recherche, les articles de synthèse ainsi que les communications courtes sont invités. Pour les articles prévus, un titre et un court résumé (environ 100 mots) peuvent être envoyés au bureau de la rédaction pour être annoncés sur le site.
Le numéro spécial sera en anglais. Pour plus d’informations, visitez le site web de la revue.
Mots-clés: pensée systémique, complexité culturelle, super-diversité, contexte interculturel
Special Issue Information
The objective of this Special Issue is to highlight the efforts made by anthropologists and other social scientists to integrate the theoretical framework and methods of systems thinking into their research. Systems thinking is considered here as a modeling methodology that facilitates the understanding of complex cultural phenomena, such as the dynamics of social relations in a cross-cultural context. Among the various lines of research in this area, this Special Issue focuses more specifically on the various phenomena that are encapsulated by the concept of super-diversity, introduced initially by Vertovec in the context of his work on the evolution of migration patterns.
By highlighting how “social, cultural, religious, and linguistic phenomena […] combine with others like gender, age and legal status” to bring about a “diversification of diversity” in societies, Vertovec (2022) is able to refocus the scientific project of anthropology in the sphere of a central problematic well known to the followers of systems thinking, that of “change of change”, which was explored by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson in the context of a general theory of communication, aimed at explaining the movements of adaptation or mutation of the “mind” of human societies (1972).
From this perspective, a system is conceived as a theoretical object designed to support and guide the modeling of “wicked problems”, such as the increasing complexity of intercultural relations in contemporary urban settings. A “cultural system”, such as the one Bateson might have called the “mind” of a city, is, in this sense, an artificial model endowed with fundamental generic properties that are assigned to it by a hypothesis to qualify its structure, functioning and processes (White and Genest 2020). To maintain this tripartite division systemic modeling, we will give priority to those proposals that put forward the study of such a “cultural system” by examining the interconnections necessary for the maintenance of its organization (structure); the operative modalities of its internal intelligence (functioning); or its dispositions to change, both static and schismatic (process).
For this Special Issue, we are particularly interested in texts that make it possible to see how systemic approaches facilitate the understanding of social dynamics in increasingly diverse urban environments. We are also interested in texts that make use of concepts that are specific to systems thinking or which will have recourse to the anthropological theories of learning, double-bind, information, or communication rooted in the work of Bateson.