It’s always inter­est­ing to watch the social appro­pri­a­tion of tech­ni­cal tools and idioms. Com­plex sys­tems research (which never suc­ceeded in defin­ing itself cogently) seems to be dif­fus­ing into all sorts of dis­ci­plines. At Professional-​​Lurker, a CFP for the con­fer­ence “Com­plex­ity The­ory and Cul­tural Arti­facts”:

Papers are sought which apply schol­ar­ship from the grow­ing field of Com­plex­ity Stud­ies (deal­ing with emer­gence, cul­tural com­plex­ity, pro­to­col, con­trol, infor­ma­tion, tech­nol­ogy, net­work the­ory) in their analy­sis of medi­ated texts. Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est are papers which address the role of com­plex­ity and cul­tural arti­facts in rela­tion to mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, nation­al­ism, transna­tion­al­ism, post­colo­nial­ism, or iden­tity pol­i­tics, as man­i­fest within (or in rela­tion to) the pub­lic sphere.

Inter­est­ingly, I already don’t know what most of that last bit means. Prob­a­bly because I’m no longer a com­plex­ity researcher.