Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change

About the Journal

Awareness-based systems change is a consciousness-based, action research approach to social transformation. It is an emergent cross-sectoral, inter- and transdisciplinary field that brings a first- and second-person lens to the field of systems thinking and systems change.

The Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change  is a place for creative scholarship that is breaking new ground in research and further evolving this emergent field. The journal aims to reveal and support rigour in these new forms of research. It is also a place for highlighting current interesting examples of promising transformative practices and to co-inquire into these. Instead of providing definite answers, the journal seeks to ask new questions. We believe new understanding will surface through emerging patterns across the range of place-based and viable solutions/approaches provided. This mirrors an important spirit of our time and moment around the collective exploration of transformation from an awareness-based perspective.

The Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change sees itself as one element of a larger intention which is to co-create a global platform which aligns and brings together a community of researchers and practitioners who, over the next decade, will advance and amplify the field of awareness-based systems change by co-developing the concepts, methods, tools and frames needed to illuminate and catalyze the evolution of social fields.

Social Field

The social field can be defined as the source conditions that give rise to patterns of thinking, conversing, and organizing in systems, which in turn produce practical results. In this way, the social field is the social system seen not only from the outside (the third-person view) but also from within (the first- and second- person views). A social field perspective addresses the less visible levels of individual, social and relational reality creation: the dynamics, processes and particularly the levels of awareness that underlie and shape the behavior we see more readily. It is a theoretical and practical innovation with significant implications for changing practice and taking a fresh look at what is needed to shift social systems.

Awareness-based systems change, therefore, is a process of co-inquiry into the deeper structures of the social systems—the source conditions—in order to see, sense and shift them.