Open University 2028 Spring

Ecology and economy share the same Greek root, oikos, meaning household or dwelling, yet modern thought has tended to separate them: economy is commonly associated with production, exchange and growth, while ecology is understood as the study of the natural environments within which economic activity takes place. This semester takes inspiration from Bruno Latour’s ecological thought and Donella Meadows’s systems thinking to explore how these seemingly separate domains are interconnected, and how we might learn to understand and engage with complex systems without reducing them to problems of prediction, control or optimization. In her influential essay “Dancing with Systems”, Meadows challenges the assumption that understanding a system means being able to control it. Instead, she advocates attentiveness to feedback, respect for complexity, intellectual humility, responsiveness to change and an expanded sense of responsibility. These ideas offer a valuable framework for reconsidering the relationship between human societies and their environments, and for exploring alternative understandings of economic activity, sustainability and the common good. Latour’s work similarly invites us to move beyond the opposition between nature and society, asking how heterogeneous human and non-human actors, forms of knowledge, institutions and material practices participate in composing a shared world. The series brings together perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, environmental studies and systems thinking to examine such questions as ecological responsibility, sustainable economies, multispecies relations, environmental justice, local knowledge and the cultural assumptions underlying economic growth. Particular attention will be paid to the role of the humanities in making complex interdependencies intelligible, bringing different forms of knowledge into dialogue, and enabling communities to imagine and negotiate alternative futures. Rather than approaching ecology as a technical problem requiring expert solutions, the series explores how learning to live within complex systems calls for interpretive, ethical, cultural and imaginative capacities.