Amanda Raffoul: Are we (unintentionally) doing more harm than good? Systems Approaches to the Prevention of Eating-and-Weight-Related Disorders
Kevin Church: The Hidden Geometry of Complex Dynamics and How to Exploit It
Katharine Zywert: Social-Ecological Systems Change and the Future of Human Health
Dr. Maryam Mohiuddin Ahmed Appointed Director of the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (WISIR)
The Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (WISIR) is pleased to announce that Dr. Maryam Mohiuddin Ahmed has been appointed as its new Director.
Founded by Dr. Frances Westley, WISIR has long been a global leader in advancing research, teaching, and practice on social innovation and systems change. The Institute has served as a hub for scholars and practitioners committed to addressing complex societal challenges through collaboration, experimentation, and resilience-building.
In assuming this new role, Dr. Ahmed expressed deep gratitude to those who have guided WISIR’s evolution over the years.
“I am profoundly grateful to Dr. Frances Westley, whose vision and scholarship gave life to WISIR and deeply influenced the field of social innovation around the world,” she shared. “I also want to honor the thoughtful leadership of Dr. Dan McCarthy and Dr. Sean Geobey, whose stewardship has carried forward WISIR’s legacy of rigor, compassion, and collaboration. It’s an honor to continue building on their work with our remarkable community.”
As Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) of Business at the University of Waterloo, Dr. Ahmed brings a unique blend of scholarship, practice, and relational leadership to the Institute. A social innovation scholar-practitioner, her work foregrounds decolonial and relational approaches to social entrepreneurship, finance, systems change, and knowledge co-creation. Her research and pedagogy center “dialogues of wisdoms” and plural ways of knowing, doing, and being to reimagine social innovation as a path toward more equitable, regenerative futures.
Dr. Ahmed is also a co-steward of the Transition Bridges Project (TBP), a collaborative initiative pioneering systems mediation to address the polycrisis. TBP's practice involves acting as intermediaries across actors, scales, and systems to facilitate dialogue, mutual understanding, conflict transformation, and collective action toward resilient, regenerative communities.
She completed her PhD in Sustainability Management at the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment, where she was named Valedictorian. She also holds an LL.M. in International Law from the University of California, Berkeley, and B.A./LL.B. degrees from LUMS University in Pakistan.
As a former co-founder of the Social Innovation Lab and Daftarkhwan, Pakistan’s largest co-working network, Dr. Ahmed has long bridged academic inquiry with lived practice through community-engaged learning, critical pedagogy, and systems-mediation experimentation.
“WISIR has always been more than an institute,” she notes. “It’s a living community of practice - an ecosystem of people who believe in reimagining systems more in tuned with justice, equity, and regeneration. I look forward to continuing this journey together.” When asked about WISIR’s future directions, Dr. Ahmed is excited to promote radical interdisciplinarity and more inter-systemic approaches to research and practice, while centering pluriversal ways of knowing, doing and being rooted in wisdoms from around the world.
Join us in welcoming Woi Oh to WICI. He will present his talk,
📅 November 3,2025
📍DC 1301 for refreshments; DC 1302 for the talk
🕑1:00-3:00PM
Join us as we hear WICI external member Madhur Anand read from and discuss her debut novel, "To Place a Rabbit".
📅 October 28, 2025
📍STC 2002
🕑1:30 -3:00PM
Guest speaker, Seanna Davidson joins us for a WICI Talk discussions "Systems Leadership Framework". Learn more and register for this talk.
📅 October 22, 2025
📍EV1 225
🕑2:00-4:00PM
Celebrate the launch of To Place a Rabbit, the debut novel by acclaimed author and former WICI Director Madhur Anand.
📅 October 28, 2025
📍STC 2002
🕑1:30 -3:30PM
Enjoy a live reading, an intimate conversation with the author, and an opportunity to purchase signed copies.
This event is free and open to the public. Presented by the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI), with support from Penguin Random House.
The Waterloo Institute for Complexity & Innovation (WICI) is proud to launch our 2025 Speaker Series with two thought-provoking events.
Join us for two inspiring talks on complexity, governance, AI, and relational futures featuring:.
Dr. Rik Logtenburg, June 26, 2:30 pm,
and
Dr. Vanessa Andreotti, June 27, 10:30 am.
More information and registration details can be found on our events page.
We are excited to announce that a Dr. Rik Logtenburg will be joining us for a special event you won't want to miss! Register online to stay updated.
🎤Workshop: The Futures We Can Build: Coordinating Complexity Across Canada
📅 Date: June 26, 2025
🕒 Time: 2:30 pm
📍Location: United College of University of Waterloo, Room 164 (Greenhouse) | 190 Westmount Road N. , Waterloo, ON | (formerly St. Paul's College)
Stay tuned for more details soon—mark your calendars now!
Canada is at a crossroads—facing simultaneous crises in climate resilience, economic productivity, housing affordability, and institutional effectiveness. Traditional approaches often fragment efforts, limiting their impact.
How can we coordinate complexity, scale effective solutions, and catalyze systemic innovation across sectors, scales, and communities?
Join Rik Logtenberg, Director of CanAdapt, for an inspiring talk and interactive workshop demonstrating how complexity science, AI, and community-led systems thinking can accelerate Canada’s transition.
In this session, you’ll:
Leave empowered, connected, and ready to build the shared futures Canada urgently needs.
Prof. Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, is a distinguished educator, researcher, and author who recently has delved into the concept of "Meta-Relational AI," advocating for a perspective that views artificial intelligence not merely as a tool but as a participant in the web of life.
As we meet this moment of social and ecological systemic unraveling, artificial intelligence stands as both a mirror and a symptom of modernity’s habits: control, mastery, and separation. This talk invites a different question: what is AI revealing about us, and what is collapsing through that revelation?
Drawing on decades of work in educational, decolonial, and post-representational relational inquiry, Vanessa Andreotti explores how Large Language Models (LLMs), when engaged from within an ontological shift (from epistemic regression to relational inference), rather than the logic of optimization, can become something else: a co-witness to social, ecological, and psychological destabilization, and a speculative co-weaver of life-affirming and Earth-aligned relationalities.
📅Date: June 27, 2025
🕒Time: 10:30 am
📍Location: United College of University of Waterloo, Room 164 (Greenhouse) | 190 Westmount Road N. , Waterloo, ON | (formerly St. Paul's College)
Please register using the online event form in order to stay up to date with more information.