WIT Reading Circle - Spring 2026
The Centre for Water Informatics and Technology (WIT) is currently hosting a fishbowl-style Reading Circle as part of its Spring 2026 programming. This ongoing series brings participants together to engage in a critical exploration of global challenges through a justice-oriented systems lens, with a focus on planetary boundaries, power structures, and sustainability transitions.
Human and industrial activities, compounded by changing climatic conditions, are pushing global energy, water, agriculture, and health systems toward, and in some cases beyond, planetary limits. These pressures carry significant implications for system performance and long-term sustainability. While such challenges are often addressed through techno-economic models and resource optimization frameworks, their impacts and associated risks remain unevenly distributed across regions, populations, and generations, raising fundamental questions of justice, power, and responsibility.
Through this Reading Circle, participants are exploring the intersection of applied systems analysis and social justice. The discussions examine how concepts such as equity, vulnerability, and stewardship can be meaningfully integrated into the analysis and governance of complex socio-technical systems. Participants reflect on how system constraints, geopolitical dynamics, modeling assumptions, and ethical frameworks shape pathways for mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.
The Reading Circle consists of six 90-minute sessions, held bi-monthly. Each session centers on a shared reading and a facilitated discussion. Students, researchers, and practitioners from all disciplines are welcome to join the remaining sessions. Beyond the formal meetings, the initiative aims to foster an interdisciplinary community, encouraging continued dialogue, resource sharing, and sustained engagement with these critical themes.
Themes:
- Planetary Boundaries and System Limits
- Thresholds, risk, and the constraints shaping global systems.
- Thresholds, risk, and the constraints shaping global systems.
- Power, Geopolitics, and System Design
- How global power relations and historical development pathways shape system outcomes?
- How global power relations and historical development pathways shape system outcomes?
- Justice in Models and Metrics
- What quantitative frameworks include, exclude, or obscure?
- What quantitative frameworks include, exclude, or obscure?
- Allocation Under Constraint
- Water, energy, food, and health systems in a just transition.
- Water, energy, food, and health systems in a just transition.
- Adaptation, Resilience, and Responsibility
- Who adapts, who benefits, and who bears the cost?
- Who adapts, who benefits, and who bears the cost?
- Stewardship, Ethics, and Plural Futures
- Moral frameworks, faith perspectives, and rethinking sustainability pathways.
