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June 2013 Special Issue June 2013 Special Issue Volume 9, No 2 International Symposium: Research Across Boundaries, Part 1 ISSN 1553-3069 Table of Contents Research Across Boundaries: Introduction to the First Part of the Special Issue .................................... 1 Markus Molz & Mark G. Edwards Impressions from the Luxemburg Symposium Research Across Boundaries ............................................................................................. 12 Jonathan Reams & K. Helmut Reich Surprises Ahead: What Will Be Special about the 21st Century? Why Do We Now Need Boundary-Crossing Research? ....................... 18 Ruben Nelson Varieties of Boundary Crossings ........................................................... 27 V. V. Raman Networks of Agape and Creativity: Learning Across Boundaries and the Calling of Planetary Realizations .............................................. 38 Ananta Kumar Giri Toward a Genealogy and Topology of Western Integrative Thinking .. 46 Gary P. Hampson cont'd next page ISSN 1553-3069 From Knowledge to Wisdom: Assessment and Prospects after Three Decades .................................... 76 Nicholas Maxwell Towards a New Art of Integration ....................................................... 113 Ananta Kumar Giri Against Consilience: Outsider Scholarship and the Isthmus Theory of Knowledge Domains ............................................. 123 Mike King Global Knowledge Futures: Articulating the Emergence of a New Meta-level Field ...................... 145 Jennifer M. Gidley Towards an Integral Meta-Studies: Describing and Transcending Boundaries in the Development of Big Picture Science ...................... 173 Mark G. Edwards The Transdisciplinary Moment(um) .................................................... 189 Julie Thompson Klein cont'd next page ISSN 1553-3069 Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of our Human History? ....................................... 200 Irena Ateljevic Cybersemiotics: A New Foundation for Transdisciplinary Theory of Information, Cognition, Meaningful Communication and the Interaction Between Nature and Culture.............................................. 220 Soren Brier Listening into the Dark: An Essay Testing the Validity and Efficacy of Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry for Describing and Encouraging Transformations of Self, Society, and Scientific Inquiry .................... 264 William R. Torbert The Arc from the Body to Culture: How Affect, Proprioception, Kinesthesia, and Perceptual Imagery Shape Cultural Knowledge (and vice versa) .................................................................................... 300 Michael Kimmel Integrating Conceptions of Human Progress ....................................... 349 Rick Szostak cont'd next page ISSN 1553-3069 New Departures in Tackling Urban Climate Change: Transdisciplinarity for Social Transformation (a critical appraisal of the WBGU 2011 Report) ................................. 384 Christoph Woiwode Transdisciplinary Consumption ........................................................... 413 Sue L.T. McGregor ISSN 1553-3069 Research Across Boundaries: Introduction to the First Part of the Special Issue Markus Molz1 & Mark G. Edwards2 In the coming century, there will be an urgent need for scholars who go beyond the isolated facts; who make connections across the disciplines; and who begin to discover a more coherent view of knowledge and a more integrated, more authentic view of life. (Boyer, 1994, p. 118) Background and Foreground In the context of an unprecedented proliferation of research specializations and the pressing problem-solving needs in society, Ernest Boyer and other scholars, have emphasized the special role for research that connects knowledge and that spans boundaries. This scholarship of integration complements traditional modes of specialization of knowledge. Major advances in boundary spanning research across the seams of separate paradigms, disciplines, cultures and contexts have been made in many places in recent years. Multi-paradigm and multi-method research, translation research movements, trans- and meta-disciplinary approaches, as well as cross-cultural or cross-sector participatory projects are emerging in and across many fields of research. It is no accident that these developments are surfacing at this juncture in planetary evolution. Down through the ages, each generation of humanity has faced its own challenges, its own demons, and its own possibilities for expanding the possibilities. Sometimes the challenges are accepted, the will, the heart and the hands are tested, and life deepens and expands. Sometimes the challenges are rejected and avoided, our demons get the better of us, we turn in on ourselves 1 Markus Molz is currently Visiting professor at the School for Transformative Leadership, Palacky University Olomouc, Manager of the University for the Future Initiative, founding Board Member of the Institute for Integral Studies, and Associate Editor of Integral Review. He has a broad background in transdisciplinary social sciences, integral studies, meta-studies, international project development and consulting of NGOs. His interests revolve around integral pluralism, quality of life in the Great Transition, as well as social and educational innovation. His current focus is on concrete pathways for institutionalizing integrative and transformative higher education and research. [email protected] 2 Mark Edwards is Assistant professor at the Business School, University of Western Australia where he teaches in the areas of business ethics and organisational transformation. Mark’s PhD thesis (awarded with distinction) was published in a series on business ethics by Routledge/Taylor-Francis in August 2010 and was awarded book of the year 2011 by Integral Leadership. The book focuses on the integration of knowledge as applied to the fields of organisational transformation and sustainability. Mark’s research has been published in several leading academic journals and covers a diverse range of topics including business ethics, management studies, systems research, futures studies, psychotherapy and spirituality, sustainability and organisational transformation. [email protected] INTEGRAL REVIEW June 2013 Vol. 9, No. 2 Edwards and Molz: Editorial 2 and the possibilities afforded by human birth close down. Whatever our choices have been in the past, humanity has moved on. But something new presents itself in these current days. We are living in an unprecedented historical epoch, the Anthropocene (Steffen et al, 2011). The human has irrevocably changed the planet. The impact of our actions are coming back to haunt us and our children. The challenges are now global, local and everything in between, they are with us now and they stretch out into the distant intergenerational future, they include the whole Earth system and every living thing that travels with her, they involve every aspect of the countless bio-social systems that network across her surface and which course through the inter- subjective experience of every plant and animal. The possibilities for responding to the planetary challenges, and the implication of those responses, are extreme and they stretch out between a vision for and acceptance of a profound deepening of planetary potentials and a life-destroying, fear-laden rejection of the realities that demand our attention. Science, the humanities, religion, art, the storehouses of cultural and indigenous knowledge, the world of lived practice and life experience will all generate their own contributions to meeting or avoiding the local, regional and global challenges that beset us. Many possibilities exist in considering these options but, whatever path we choose as individuals or as a single global family, never before have the global stakes been so high, never before has the need for planet- wide decision-making, for big-picture explanations and solutions been so pressing. Never before has human society, as a single entity, been required to develop a coherent global approach to dealing with the challenges that now confront it. And it is no coincidence that the unfolding planetary challenge should also be accompanied by the emergence of global forms of knowing and of accessing knowledge. In no previous times has so much knowledge been intentionally produced, stored and disseminated, has there been such an extensive body of expertise in so many distinct research specializations. It is only now, in these last few years, that the products of so many knowledge traditions, institutions of learning, independent scholars, research collectives and commercial research sources from so many regions, cultures and historical periods have become accessible to so many people across the globe. The web and depth of knowledge is vast and it is available. But what sense can and will we make of it all? Down which pathways will all this knowledge lead us? It is no coincidence that in these critical times of a global anthropogenic cocktail of crises, we are also immersed in an ocean of experience, of data, information and knowledge. Do we have the wisdom to not only develop shared knowledge from this ocean of information but also to make shared sense of it? And are we able to make use of the bigger pictures we gain from boundary-crossing experience and reflection to engage in large-scale and long-term coordinated action? This is needed to enable a dignified life for the many throughout the Great Transition (Raskin et al, 2002; Spratt
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