Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies
Science in Culture: Narrating Complexity
The AHRC large grants call for the "Science in Culture" theme gave the NarCS group the opportunity to develop a large-scale project mapping out the interrelated domains of the Narrative and Complex Systems research theme.
The resulting diagram (click on the image for a larger version) is a conceptual map of four research areas organized along two axes: a vertical axis plotting "analytical depth" which ranges from the abstract and theoretical to empirical social and cultural case studies; and a horizantal axis plotting the interdisciplinary relation between narrative studies and complex systems analysis, and ranging from issues oriented towards complexity science to those oriented towards narratology. Within each quadrant, the reciprocity between narratological perspectives and complexity science perspectives is repeated, as is the reciprocity between theory and case study.
This framework provided the conceptual structure for the Narrating Complexity project, which is built upon four research questions correlating to the areas denoted by the quadrants of the diagram: communication, culture, conceptualization and cognition.
The text of the proposal is available here:
Science in Culture narrating complexity (PDF 
, 78kb)