Events

Complexity science and related methods draw from multiple theories and disciplines. As a result, the application of complexity science and methods can potentially help build bridges across disciplines. However, the use of different language and concepts across disciplines can also act as a barrier to achieving transdisciplinary collaborations to address complex challenges.

Managing air pollution, toxic substances, and climate change is a complex, linked sustainability challenge. To better inform efforts to address these issues, we need to understand how policies to address emissions translate into societal benefits. In this talk, Dr. Selin will present work from her research group, using a systems approach to better understand air pollutants such as particulate matter, ozone, and mercury.

WICI Speaker Series: Dr. Mary O'Connor "Our Changing Biosphere: Understanding our Future from First Principles"

Watch the video recording of this talk on Vimeo.com

WICI and the Waterloo Centre for Microbial Research (WCMR) Present: 

"Life, but not alive" with Kate Adamala

Watch the video recording of this talk on Vimeo.com

Join WICI and the Waterloo Centre for Microbial Research in welcoming Kate Admala on Thursday, February 6th in DC 1302.

Join us for a WICI Webinar on Wednesday, January 6th @ 2 p.m. via Webex.

WICI Director Dr. Sean Geobey brings community leaders Naudia Banton, Manager of Waterloo Region Small Business Centre, Trevor Charles, Executive Director of LiftOFF, Eric Avner, President and CEO of Waterloo Region Community Foundation, and Carla Leon, President and CEO of Just Like Family Home Care, together to share their perspectives on community wealth building.

WICI Director Dr. Sean Geobey and his research team share how their work with the Investment Readiness Program, in partnership with Canadian Community Economic Development Network (CCEDNet), connects with social finance and community-wealth building.

WICI Speaker Series with James Shelley on Monday March 17 from 3 - 4:30

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. 

Join us in welcoming Woi Oh to WICI.  He will present his talk,

"Understanding dynamics of forced migration and conflict through the lens of complex systems".

📅 November 3,2025

📍DC 1301 for refreshments; DC 1302 for the talk

🕑1:00-3:00PM