Upcoming activities
No reading group meet-ups have been scheduled for Michaelmas Term 2025. If you would like to suggest a reading, reach out and we can help organise a meet-up.
Our reading archive
Systems dynamics focus:
-
This ‘Systems Research and Behavioral Science’ paper explores how conceptualisations of justice can be brought into system dynamics models, which helps us see more how models are used in practice and how they interface with deeper social science concepts.
Modelling the drivers of a widespread shift to sustainable diets (Eker et al. 2019).
This ‘Nature Sustainability’ paper describes a full quantitative system dynamics model. We can discuss the model details and/or think about how the approach is framed to reach a broad audience.
Systems thinking and relationality:
‘Ecosystems and People’ on a relational turn for sustainability science:
This exchange in ‘Ecosystems and People’ explores the need and practicalities of recognising relationality in systems thinking on sustainability. It provides insight into the challenges of reconciling different traditions of systems thinking. We suggest reading the first paper and perhaps also having a look at the responses (which are quite short).
Introductory readings:
- The Four Waves of Systems Thinking. (Cabrera et al. 2023; Journal of Systems Thinking).
- Introduction to Systems Thinking (Daniel Kim 1999; The Systems Thinker blog)
- Part one of the ‘Thinking in Systems: A Primer’ book by Donella Meadows
- There is online access through the uni library
- Or there is a free PDF via Florida Tech Uni