Provocation Panel

Day 1: Thursday, 12 September

We (Wendy Olsen and David Byrne) will argue that the dominant current approaches in social research are fundamentally incapable of contributing to approaches to policy and practices which can address the issues facing all of us in the contemporary polycrisis. By polycrisis we mean the interwoven crises in the socio-ecological global system at all levels consequent particularly on the impact of global wamring in the era of the capitalocene, but also involving crises across all the subsystems of contemporary life. The issue is not with the nature of methods as techniques but with the ontological understanding which underpins the logics of their deployment. The socio-ecological system and all its subsystems are complex far from equilibric systems in which causation is multiple, complex and in many context equifinal (multiple routes to any given outcome). We need to reject the continued survival of positivism in both crude and sophisticated versions whilst at the same time endorsing a realist framework which allows us to construct accounts of causation which address both the way in which science is constructed and the voice of reality itself in that construction, Of crucial importance is the role of human agency in determining our future which means that all useful research must be action research. We have slightly different takes on how to proceed but insist that research and action must be intimately inter-linked particularly but not exclusively in planning for sustainable urban futures in a now predominantly urban world.