Welcome to the final installment of this blog series. Thanks for making it all the way to the end. To recap, on one side of the systems landscape (see Figure 1 below) we have information scientists who wish to disembody information while not upending the applecart of liberal humanism with its focus on such things […]

In this post I would like to move over to the right side of my map The Shifting Landscape of Systems Development. The right side of my map was constructed though my readings of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s 1969 book General System Theory: Foundations, Development and Applications, and Gerald Midgley’s 2000 book Systemic Intervention: Philosophy, Methodology, […]

In the last post, I ended by mentioning that the Enlightenment ushered in a new conceptualization of what it means to be human. According to Hayles’ research, liberal humanism conceptualized the human as being free, autonomous, self-regulated, and self-directed. In my mind, liberal humanism seems to be describing a person who is able to access […]

How is it that we find ourselves in the swimming pool of the cyborg—part human, part machine—inching our way toward the deep end? In her 1999 book entitled How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Katherine Hayles asks a similar question: “How is it possible in the late twentieth century to believe, […]

Back in 2006, I attended an attachment conference held annually in Salt Lake City. Very much like Dr. Pynoos’ talk on trauma narratives mentioned in Part 2, this attachment conference featured a speaker who captured my imagination. Dr. Abraham Sagi-Schwartz gave a presentation entitled Holocaust Child Survivors and their Offspring: Vulnerability and Resilience. Dr. Sagi-Schwartz […]