Elvira Booth, PhD

My research focus was initially oriented towards the applications of complex adaptive systems and multi-agent systems to accelerate the penetration of dispersed renewable generation, by developing novel, robust and adaptive, bottom-up approaches to both energy markets and power systems. I received my PhD in 2009 from Swiss Federal School of Technology, Lausanne.

Over the years, my interest has gradually shifted from complex technological systems towards living human systems, which often evolve in unpredictable and emergent ways as we experience them in organisations and groups we belong to.

Through my own experience in management, I could appreciate the extent to which the (still persistent) linear thinking and the traditional mechanistic view of the organisation (and the human dynamics within it) constraint what is possible on individual and collective human levels.

Today, my research is focusing on the ongoing processes of participation and agency in human systems, and in how this participation continually reshapes meaning, affect, identity, relational autonomy and perceived possibilities for action. I explore this continuous mutual becoming, alongside ideas from complexity science, enactivism, ecological thinking and process ontology.

A particular focus of my research is how relational conditions and experienced constraints shape individual coherence landscapes: how certain patterns become stable attractors, how alternative trajectories become possible, and how participation may transform the landscape itself. My aim is to develop both a theoretical framework and empirical approaches for investigating these dynamics in real-world human systems.

Through this work, I hope to contribute to the development of Human Systems Dynamics as a field of inquiry into the complex, relational and continually evolving nature of human participation.