You can see the list of abstracts here

Welcome to the web pages of the Aalborg University conference on ”Complexity”

  COMPLEXITY

  An interdisciplinary seminar on the moment of complexity in
 textual and cultural studies and studies of education and learning

Aalborg University, 22nd - 24th January 2004

“Complexity” – opening remarks

January 22, 2004; Bent Sørensen  

Ladies and gentlemen; participants, invited guests and audience – it gives me great pleasure to welcome you to Aalborg University and to open the conference on “Complexity” (An interdisciplinary seminar on the moment of complexity in textual and cultural studies and studies of education and learning), and particularly to welcome you to Kroghstræde 3’s major lecture hall where today’s portion of the conference will take place. Today we have devoted to the aspects of complexity in connection with learning and education studies, and in a few minutes I will hand over the floor to Professor Taylor, our first keynote speaker. 

Thanks are due… 

First, though, I wish to say a word of thanks to all who have been involved in putting this event together. Today’s talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Education and Learning and the Dept. of Languages and Intercultural Studies – and for that we thank them, esp. the two Heads of Dept., Palle Rasmussen and Torben Vestergaard, respectively. The conference as a whole has been organized by my colleagues Associate Prof. of English, Jens Kirk; Tore Rye Andersen, who is a PhD candidate in American Literature; myself; and our very able conference secretary Bente Vestergaard, whom many of you have already met at registration. 

Thanks are also due to a number of other people, both present and absent. I would like here to single out Roy Sellars of the U. of Southern Denmark (SDU), who generously offered to co-host the conference at an early stage of the planning and difficult fund raising process, but who unfortunately could not be here today. We should also thank the Danish Research Council for the Humanities, who spared us a few of their precious pennies and dimes to help cover the costs of the conference. Also generous was The Obel Foundation, which has helped out with travel expenses, for which we thank them warmly. Not least, I have to express a deep gratitude to some of our closest collaborators and colleagues, who have agreed to chair and moderate sessions here at the conference – a function which is crucial in order to make our chosen conference format work: So, thank you to Torben Ditlevsen, Søren Balle, Kirsten Jæger, and last, but not least, Camelia Elias, who has been instrumental in establishing the contacts to both of our keynote speakers, and without whom there would not have been a “Complexity”-conference today. To Mark C. Taylor, and Charles Lock, of course also a heartfelt thank you for accepting our invitation, although it should be said that Prof. Taylor originally remarked: “I can't believe I'm entertaining the prospect of coming to Denmark in JAN!” (I can’t imagine what he meant by that…) 

The genesis of the conference 

Briefly, I want to remark on the history and theme of this conference. When the idea was originally conceived by Camelia and me, the intention was to bring Prof. Taylor to Aalborg University, virtually at any cost or any excuse. I trust that you will all shortly understand why, when you hear him speak. But, when Camelia was given the chance to read Prof. Taylor’s book The Moment of Complexity while it was still in manuscript, we decided that the notion of complexity would be the perfect interdisciplinary nodule around which to arrange a whole conference, bringing together scholars and graduate students from a wide variety of disciplines.  

It seemed obvious that we all in our daily research routines had to come to terms with complexities inherent in our subject matter, whether they be overtly textual, or more related to organizations and individual human problems. What we then decided to do was formulate a broad call for paper to appeal to people in literary, cultural and social studies, as well as philosophically inclined scholars. I think the resulting panels in our three workshops eminently reflect the broad scope of fields where complexity concepts can be brought to bear, and I now hope that the conversations between the various papers can create a fruitful, but still critical dialogue between the fields and scholars in question.

Now, what we often tend to do in academe is perform analytical work that reduces complexity, orders chaos temporarily, and often does so at the cost of simplifying or even oversimplifying our points about texts and or realities. I cannot in all conscience say that that is not what we are going to be doing here at the conference as well – after all we often do this for very good reasons related to didactical concerns vis-à-vis our students, peers and publishers. What I can say, though, is that we aim to produce a meta-discourse about complexity in order to make it a visible (since it tends to sometimes function as our invisible enemy), and to some extent a familiar if not downright lovable companion in our academic and didactic work.

When Jens and I were interviewed in advance of the conference for a magazine published here at the university (Videnskabet), intended to keep lay people in the area informed about what the hell we academics do all day at the taxpayers expense, we spoke eloquently about these matters for about an hour. The young editor conducting the interview did warn us that the ensuing piece would be rather short. Indeed when he showed it to us, I felt we had been reduced to saying rather less complex things than I remembered. Jens’ sound bite was that “Complexity is what lies between that which is in a state of order and that which happens by accident”, mine was rather less pertinent and shall remain unquoted here. About Jens’ sound bite the thing that struck me the most was that he had rather succinctly characterised the difference between his approach and mine to all things academic, so in a sense between Jens’ desire for a state of order and my penchant for the accidental and downright chaotic, lies the common ground of complexity that enabled us to co-organize this conference in the first place.  

Aalborg University and interdisciplinarity in learning 

Originally, as I mentioned, we wished to have the conference co-organized by SDU, but for various reasons related to lack of funding, we had to scrap that interuniversity collaboration. It is however, also appropriate that it be AAU which eventually hosts this event. We have a long tradition of interdisciplinarity at this university, and a long tradition for bringing together in dialogue interests from across a wide divide of ideologies. In fact one could argue that the tradition of project work and cross-disciplinary scientific work here at AAU goes back to a somewhat unholy marriage between business interests desiring efficiency in education and learning, and a left-wing, if not downright Marxist tradition of critical intellectual activity.  

When AAU was founded in 1974 both left wing forces (the moderate social-democrats with a long tradition for being in government, as well as more radical Marxist intellectuals) found a common ground with business interests in promoting project based teaching and learning as a tool for modernizing university programs and giving university graduates more flexible skills. The left-wingers were keen to democratize education and demolish the existing hierarchies of professorial control over university programs. Marxists especially wanted new types of curricula with much more attention to ideology and critiques of power structures. On the other side of the spectrum business interests were beginning to realize that flexibility and the skills of being able to rapidly assimilate to new environments and fields were premium skills, and that they were ill served by graduates who had not learned to work well together with others and had not mastered the art of rapid, independent and critical evaluation of mounds of information. Project based learning seemed to offer the perfect solution for both sides of the spectrum: Interdisciplinarity and problem-focused learning appealed to left-wingers who saw the potential for social change coming from candidates thinking in complex and holistic terms; group-organized work and self-determined work areas (under strict supervision, of course) as customary in project groups appealed to businesses who saw that such learning would be more efficient and very similar to the work structures found in organizations and corporations.

The paradox now is that despite of the project ideology with its emphasis on co-presence and collaborative learning between supervisor and students, AAU has also placed itself in the forefront of distance learning programmes having long had a degree offer in German, based entirely on distance learning and teaching, and very recently having added a similar programme in English to the palette of e-learning offerings. This paradox we hope to explore more fully in today’s session on networking education.

 Future complexities  

In closing, I just want to briefly signal that the moment of complexity will not just come and go by rapidly after these three conference days. The Dept. of Languages and Intercultural Studies is initiating a project under the heading of Cultural Text Studies, which will start its activities with a monograph series under the same imprint. We plan to publish the proceedings of the conference as volume 2 of this series and invite all presenters to submit revised versions of their papers for this venture. We trust that our format of having circulated the papers in advance among the workshop members and of obliging the participants not to read their papers, but present them dynamically and supplement them, will ensure that all papers will get rich feedback from co-panellists and moderators, and that all will then revise them accordingly to reflect the debate taking place here at the conference. Part of the CTS imprint will also be a web forum where this discussion of the Complexity theme can continue far beyond the next three days, and where voices that are not present here today can join in the complex mix of analyses and syntheses we look forward to producing today, tomorrow and on Saturday.

So – without  further ado: welcome to Complexity!

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The conference venue is Kroghstræde 3, and we are eagerly awaiting our conference delegates and audience. Note especially that employees and students at Aalborg University will be allowed free entry to all plenaries and workshops  

Please feel free to browse our pages and download our programme.

  The organizing Committee:

  Jens Kirk
Bent Sørensen
Tore Rye Andersen
Bente Vestergaard (conference secretary)

Second call for papers

 COMPLEXITY

  An interdisciplinary seminar on the moment of complexity in
 textual and cultural studies and studies of education and learning

Aalborg University, 22nd - 24th January 2004

Deadline for abstracts: 31 August 2003 / for full papers: 28 November 2003

Mark C. Taylor writes in his recent book, The Moment of Complexity:

“We are living in a moment of unprecedented complexity where things are changing faster than our ability to comprehend them. […] As always when in the midst of changes that are so extensive and rapid, it is difficult to assume a critical perspective from which to assess the significance of what is occurring, Far from discouraging analysis, the recognition of emerging complexity invites a variety of interpretations and prognostications.”

The purpose of the seminar is to gather voices that have attempted to theorize and analyse moments of complexity, both within their separate fields and across disciplinary boundaries. These voices are invited to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue in a number of workshop sessions following keynote addresses from invited main speakers.

Plenary sessions/key note addresses proposed:

E-learning
 – Mark C. Taylor, Williams College

The moment of complexity and emergence
 – Mark C. Taylor, Williams College

Complexity in textual theory
 – Charles Lock, University of Copenhagen

Workshops will offer participating researchers a chance to present and discuss detailed approaches to the seminar’s main themes. Topics for workshop papers are invited within the following areas:   

• Dynamic concepts in literature and aesthetics: text and reader

• Cultural acceleration and emergence – reaction and responses

• Complexities of genre, gender and genealogy – postcolonial and post-modern modalities

• Globalisation and the growing cultural and linguistic complexity of the learning landscape

• Teachers and learners in global e-learning - roles and competence profiles

• Societal, institutional and organizational aspects of global e-learning

Sample paper topics might include:

• Attempts to historicize the use and ab-use of nonsense in literary texts and literary theory.

• Theory and application of complex dynamic concepts such as Bakhtin’s chronotope or Peter Brook’s plotting.

• Analyses of cultural moments of change, such as the creation and naming of generational, racial or ethnic/national identities in both fictional and non-fictional texts.

• Cultural and linguistic implications of global e-learning

• Cultural encounters in the virtual classroom

• Collaboration and e-learning exemples of good practice.

The seminar will be held over three days. A plenary session and discussion will take place Thursday afternoon. Friday and Saturday mornings are dedicated to plenary sessions followed by workshops. The seminar will conclude with a round-table discussion for all interested participants. The seminar is targeted towards researchers within the disciplines of textual and cultural studies & communication and media studies, and studies of education and learning.

Two volumes of proceedings dedicated to textual and cultural studies and studies of education and learning respectively will be published by the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies, Aalborg University.

Web editor . Last edited 24 November 2003