Panarchy, Transformation, and Place: Exploring Social Change and Resiliency Through an Ecological Lens

We are new parents. We sleep in sporadic chunks. We eat, write, clean, and do laundry with one hand. This paper is my first foray into writing since the birth of my son and the content is also partially about him. It was written while taking turns comforting, feeding, and changing diapers. For this paper, I will call my son, Sam. Despite the indulgence and gushing of new parents, the change that he brought to my wife’s and my life was substantive. In this paper, I describe one small change that occurred because of Sam’s entry into our world in order to introduce concepts of complexity theory and transformation. I outline my wife’s and my choice in naming Sam and the changes and resistances we witnessed within my family (resulting from our name choice) as a basis for an introduction to complexity theory language. Expanding on the concepts of transformation and change, this paper then explores some data from my PhD dissertation, in which I looked at complexity theory as a tool to describe human connection to place and learning. I use examples taken from my interviews to examine the ways in which returning to childhood and adolescent (trans)formative places demonstrates the elements of panarchy theory as a tool to describe change within social systems. First, however let’s start with th