At this web site you’ll find information about my background, teaching, research, and writing. The site includes some of my writings as well as a Forum where we can discuss issues of common interest. If you’d like to receive my newsletter, just enter your email address in the box at the bottom of the page. Enjoy your visit.
Featured
Tar Sands Disaster
April 1, 2013, an op-ed in The New York Times. Many Canadians want the tar sands industry stopped, because it’s relentlessly twisting our society into something we don’t like. Canada is beginning to exhibit the economic and political characteristics of a petro-state. Go to “The Tar Sands Disaster.”
Listen to a recent related interview on CBC Radio’s As It Happens.
WHAT’S NEW
September 17th, 2012 –
Arctic Sea-Ice Loss and Extreme Weather: An op-ed in the Toronto Globe and Mail
Ice loss in the Arctic boosts the likelihood of extreme weather—heat waves, flooding, severe drought, and even prolonged snowfall and cold spells—across the Northern Hemisphere’s mid-latitudes. Go to “Ice, Please—Climate on the Rocks.“
May 31st, 2012 –
Complexity Theory and Social Sciences
On May 31, 2012, I gave a speech at Congress 2012, the premier Canadian conference of scholars from the humanities and social sciences, explaining how we can use complexity science to better understand the increasingly surprising behavior of our world. See the speech here.
RESEARCH TALK
Catastrophe Response Surface
Catastrophic Dehumanization: the Psychological Dynamics of Severe Conflict
A presentation at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, April 17, 2012.
Dehumanization is arguably a defining feature of the most brutal acts of human violence, such as saturation bombardment of civilian populations, terrorist attacks on urban centers, intense battlefield combat, and genocide. I propose a psychological explanation of this phenomenon that uses a catastrophe manifold to describe a set of psychological states in an individual’s mind and the possible pathways of movement between these states. The manifold exists in a three-dimensional phase space defined by the variables identity, justice, and structural constraint. It specifies five hypotheses about the causes and dynamics of dehumanization. Taken together, these hypotheses represent an overarching theory of the nonlinear collapse of identification at the level of the individual.