July, in my job, is a moment of weightlessness, a liminal space and time of anti-gravity, while the existing students have not yet entirely left us, some grades outstanding, and the new students are just statistics in a spreadsheet, waiting to be met as vibrant and anxious individuals. It is this time of year where colleagues are on leave, and threads of some work are left undone, and new threads of others sit waiting to be dealt with. In these moments, bursts of creativity have allowed two journal papers to be written for the special edition of a new journal called Novation, dedicated to the field of innovation, of which social innovation is a Venn diagram segment. Two years ago, at this time, I completed by PhD and passed my viva, last year I was awarded my PhD and this year I was made an Associate Professor. It is a time for reflection, and writing, of considering who I am and how I want to be. July is a special month.
Whilst I was browsing LinkedIn and noticed that the academic Systems Thinking Interest Group have influenced the UK civil service with a handbook on systems analysis, my thoughts turned to what tribe I belong to. I have been developing my skills in systems thinking since the early 2000s but am mostly associated with the emerging field of social innovation, within which I have been exploring the critical question of what the ‘social’ is in social innovation. I trained in the early 90s as a geographer at a time when social geography was also asking itself a similar question. Doing geographies of society means to investigate how humans, as individuals, live, work and have their being together, in lumps of humanity. The spaces and places in which social relations are expressed form the backdrop, as well as structure, perform and, in turn, is structured by their relations. Space is made into place by social relations. In writing my biography for the Associate Professor post, I had to cram 30 years of practice into three pages. This highlighted to me the multiple tribes of thought which I inhabit. My PhD is an investigation into social innovation in public safety, so there is a lot of sociology and criminology in it especially focused on how humans relate (often negatively) to the built and performed environments of neighbourhood. It draws on my experience and the literature on community development, as well as a therapeutic technique called Motivational Interviewing, two threads of work that are expressed in my religious community and pastoral volunteering as well as in my approach to teaching in higher education. I have been involved in environmental issues, most importantly interested in sustainable development, which is how societies and organisations of humans relate to their ecological environment. I also use Systems Thinking as a way of structuring my thinking about how humans gather together into communities and organisations, how they as thinking, feeling and emoting actors relate to, structures and are structured by inanimate objects, as the new materialists have it, as well as the transcendental aspects of their being, as expressed in critical realism. Social innovation is, it seems to me, to be an investigation into how social relations are formed, reformed, and structured by agents acting within other social relations and the objects that form a part of that environment. Social innovators reconfigure social relations through reconfiguring resources and meanings associated with those objects. Whether these reconfigurations are positive or negative, or to whom they are most positive is a separate question. Social innovation reconfigures socially structured agency. This thinking brings me back to thinking about my tribes. I am at the same time an expert in social innovation, using soft systems methodology, as well as involved in sustainable development, and community development. I am interested in the spaces and places in which those social relations are made and remade. Ultimately, am I a Professor of Social Geography?
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