Transforming human activity systems: towards an agriculture for improving human-biosphere relations

Moderator: Marcos Lana, Associate Professor at SLU, and Professor Sandro Schlindwein at Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil.

Abstract: Research is a practice that can be systematic, systemic or both. Systematic practice is essentially linear and associated with simple cause and effect.  In contrast systemic practice is relational and encompasses feedback dynamics; it is thus circular, recursive and adapted to context. These two concepts (systemic/systematic) can be understood as a self-negating, either/or, pair (a dualism) or as modes of praxis that can form a unity, a whole, by epistemologically responsible practitioners (i.e., a duality). Claims for research practice are that it can provide new understandings and (situated?) improvements, though all too often this is expressed as the production of ‘new knowledge’ in a simplistic manifestation of the linear model of knowledge production, rather than embodied enactment of knowing.  Drawing on his own agricultural education, his research and ‘teaching’ practice and his turn to Systems scholarship: social learning; systemic co-inquiry; systemic governance and the design of learning systems, Ray will explore the constraints to effective situational improvement that have come through the institutionalisation of the linear model of knowledge production, scholarship which began with the publication of:

Russell, D.B., Ison, R.L., Gamble, D.R. & Williams, R.K. (1989) A Critical Review of Rural Extension Theory and Practice. Australian Wool Corporation/ University of Western Sydney (Hawkesbury).  67pp.

i) French Edition: (1991).  Analyse Critique de la Theorie et de la Pratique de Vulgarisation Rurale en Australie.  INRA, France.  79pp.

ii) Persian Edition: (1995). The translation into Persian by Ahmad Khatoonabadi.

He will finish with some personal reflections on a 55 year ‘career’ within (or near) the domain of agriculture (understood as one of the main domains in which human-biosphere relations are manifest through the enactment of ‘human activity systems’ that can be the product of systemic (co)design).

Biography: Ray Ison was appointed Professor of Systems at the Open University (OU) in 1994 retiring at the end of 2023 as Professor Emeritus. He is an Agricultural Science Graduate of the University of Sydney (1971-4) and received his PhD in tropical plant ecophysiology at the University of Queensland (1978-81). His first academic post was at the then Hawkesbury Agricultural College known internationally for its radical education model based on ‘systems agriculture’ (1982-6). His shift from framing grasslands as ‘biological/ecological systems’ to socially constructed human activity systems continued at the University of Sydney (1987-93) as conveyed in the book ‘Agronomy of Grassland Systems’ (Pearson & Ison 1987/1997). 

Prof. Ison is the current President (since 2018) of the IFSR (International Federation for Systems Research); he has also served as President of ISSS (International Society for the Systems Sciences) and as a Trustee of the American Society of Cybernetics. In 2022 he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Systems Society of India ‘for contributions to the transformation of society with a systems approach’. In October 2026 he will take up a Senior Fellowship within the University of Vienna Centre for Advanced Studies.

 This webinar is part of the ELLS subject area “Systems Analysis and Design of Agri-food Systems in a Changing Climate”.