Learning to Unravel Complexity

The Australian National University runs a series of "Vice-Chancellor's Courses", to encourage students to look beyond their own discipline. Courses now open are:

Unravelling Complexity

Convener: Dr Shayne Flint

This course takes up this challenge by offering latter year students from any part of the ANU the opportunity to explore a series of complex issues. The connections between economic, historical, social, legal, scientific, engineering, environmental and moral dimensions of complex problems will be explored.

The course will examine the linked themes of ‘collapse’ and ‘resilience’. Case studies will include global financial crises, the collapse of empires, contemporary ‘failing’ states, pandemics, engineering and network failures and the moral and legal dimensions of these issues.

Creating Knowledge

Convener: Mary Kilcline Cody

We will explore:

• how researchers in various fields including the arts, social sciences, law, science, business, engineering and Asia and the Pacific think about what they are doing, including the relationship between academic ideals and everyday research practice;
• whether and how academic inquiry differs from knowledge creation in other contexts (traditional ways of knowing, non-Western intellectual traditions, religious thought, policy making, investigations by police or journalists, corporate knowledge production, creative art and design); and
• the changing social context of academic research, including the idea of the knowledge economy.

In February 2013:

• Leadership & Influence