This event is part of the Keough School’s Dignity and Development Forum. We invite the global community to join us virtually in March 2022. The Notre Dame campus community is invited to join us in person.
Development challenges are environments rather than isolated problems. Every action seems to dislodge stones in a precarious terrain–ecologically, politically, culturally, technologically–because we increasingly confront complex and dynamic problem environments. These environments are socio-technological in nature, and they move through multiple scales from the individual, to communities and organizations, to societies. They are often characterized as ‘wicked’ problems. Having agency in these environments calls for new tool sets, ones that scaffold insight and action across many entangled dimensions: many disciplines, many professions, many publics, and many lived experiences. It calls for a new practice that designs for emergence rather than fixed ends, and steers change in what Ann Pendleton-Jullian characterizes as a WhiteWater World.