What is the Panarchæa Project?
Panarchæa is a project hosted by The Upper New, a nonprofit organization based in the mountains of North Carolina, in the Upper New River basin, the headwaters of the New River.
Panarchæa is a transdisciplinary conference, biennial, with the first conference occurring in the fall of 2025. This conference is intended to align with the mission and vision of The Upper New, increasing ecological literacy through systems wisdom, which includes an ongoing effort to “defy the disciplines” and look for relevant patterns to connect to a sense of place and meaning for humans in the biosphere.
Why Panarchæa?
We’ve chosen the name Panarchæa for this project because the word is a manifestation of panarchy, a state of flux.
The Resilience Alliance provides one excellent definition of panarchy:
“Panarchy is a framework of nature’s rules, hinted at by the name of the Greek god of nature- Pan – whose persona also evokes an image of unpredictable change. Since the essential focus of Panarchy is to rationalize the interplay between change and persistence, between the predictable and unpredictable, Holling et al. (2002) draw on the notion of hierarchies of influences between embedded scales, that is pan-archies, to represent structures that sustain experiments, test its results and allow adaptive evolution.
The panarchy framework connects adaptive cycles in a nested hierarchy. There are potentially multiple connections between phases of the adaptive cycle at one level and phases at another level. Two significant connections are labeled ‘revolt’ and ‘remember’. The smaller, faster, nested levels invent, experiment and test, while the larger, slower levels stabilize and conserve accumulated memory of system dynamics. In this way, the slower and larger levels set the conditions within which faster and smaller ones function.”
Resilience Alliance – Panarchy – In this passage, they cite Holling et al (2002) – “Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems, Edited by Lance H. Gunderson and C.S. Holling 2002. Island Press”
Practically speaking, Rocha and colleagues note that:
“Panarchy offers a rich conceptual framework for interpreting environmental problems. Although inspired by several mathematical constructs (e.g., cycles, traps, scaling laws), it is general enough to invite scholars from multiple disciplinary backgrounds, ontologies, and epistemologies to collaborate around research questions and applied problems. As such, it is useful as a boundary object and can be used empirically or metaphorically.”
Rocha, et al. Panarchy: ripples of a boundary concept. Ecology and Society, 2022
As such, we are launching Panarchæa to host thinkers and doers from all backgrounds to revolt and remember through an ecologically literate lens as we build a lifelong learning community of ecological stewardship practice for mitigation-driven critical climate solutions founded upon collective human behavior change.
Panarchæa Website
The Upper New is building a separate Panarchæa website (panarchaea.org), which will serve as the digital hub for the Panarchæa Project, including introductory information for the biennial conference, a series of workshops and online courses, and an online repository for open educational resources (OER) associated with topics addressed in each conference.
Using WordPress, Kadence, and LearnDash, we are building a Panarchæa project website to serve as the digital home and media archive. We will also be launching a podcast series to include auditory learning experiences and interviews of conference presenters throughout the months following the close of the conference.
Using BuddyBoss in conjunction with LearnDash, we can build a native mobile app (Android and iOS) to provide additional modalities for Panarchæa project participants (workshop attendees, learners accessing OER materials, students taking online courses).
The website will also be the access point for entering the (biennial) Panarchæa conference, which will be hosted using Oxford Abstracts.
Depending on the progression of the Panarchæa project over time, we are considering the possibility of setting up a membership/sponsorship structure to continue operational support.
Panarchæa Conference
Our intention is for Panarchæa to be a biennial conference, commencing in the fall of 2025. This will be an entirely virtual conference, to increase global exposure and participation, drastically reducing emissions and financial burdens for those presenting and attending.
Initial targeted disciplines for the Panarchæa conference will be astronomy, cosmology, physics, and climate sciences such as atmospheric science, hydrology, environmental microbiology, cloud physics, meteorology, and Earth system modeling. However, in a true transdisciplinary mindset, all research and evidence-driven disciplines of study across the sciences and social sciences will be invited to submit works and attend the conference.
A primary focus of the Panarchæa conference is to bring together these disciplines (and others) in defiance of the disciplines, as a demonstration of systems wisdom in service of ecological literacy and boundary breaching biospherical communities of practice, leading to the potential for permanent paradigm shifts. Each biennial conference theme (to be determined) will be chosen to reflect such trajectories.
Each biennial conference will publish traditional proceedings, in order to add value to those in more formal academic posts in need of such credentials to document publication work.
The virtual Panarchæa conference event will be “live” for as long as possible, hopefully one month. This will give ample time for asynchronous discussions and iteration of works presented at conferences in a variety of ways. Following this live virtual event, the conference portal will remain accessible to all presenters and paid attendees for the duration of one year, allowing for continued perusal and asynchronous conversation.
Academics (including undergraduate and graduate students) and professionals within relevant fields may propose any number of sessions for the conference. Conference session types will include:
- Roundtable discussions
- Transdisciplinary panels
- Poster presentations
- Paper presentations
- Themed symposia
- Practical workshops
We will also consider a “late breaking works in progress” submission near the beginning of the conference, where brief missives can demonstrate new findings or failures of relevance to the conference.
In all cases, through the Oxford Abstracts platform, we will manage submissions, reviews, and conference hosting. All accepted works will be uploaded for access by attendees, including pre-recorded narrations or videos to complement/explain and present the posters and papers.
Live videoconference events can be scheduled for various conference sessions, and each will be recorded and shared for later viewing to accommodate global time zone differentiation (and year-long access to the conference portal).
Awards may be given for best poster and best paper in the conference, in two categories: student, faculty, and professional (totaling six potential awards). We are considering two additional named awards for “most discipline defying” and “most ecoliterate”. Each award will include a $500 prize.
Conference attendance fees will be structured as follows, (with rates subject to change as necessary):
- Professional (corporate): $200
- Academic (university faculty): $100
- Public Educator: $20
- Student: $20
Presenters accepted for conference session(s) attend the conference for free. To achieve this, we can provide a private coupon code through Oxford Abstracts to negate the ticket cost.
All conference presenters will be invited to create permalinked public online profiles on the Panarchæa website, containing listings of all accepted works (linking back to relevant conference site archives) and links to any materials created since (e.g. the research narrative explanatory animations generated as a result of the post-conference workshops)
All presenters will be asked to write and/or record a summary reflection of their conference experience, to be submitted within a certain time frame following the conclusion of the conference. These summaries will be included in the presenter profiles.
Presenters will also be invited to conduct 1:1 interviews with Upper New staff to focus on Panarchæa topics and generate material for the Panarchæa podcast series, which should increase exposure and participation in future Panarchæa conferences.
We will offer tiered sponsorship opportunities for each Panarchæa conference. Likely we will create more theme relevant names for these tiers.
- Platinum
- Gold
- Silver
- Bronze
- Symposia sponsors (specific to individual symposiums)
All sponsors will also be given an exhibitor space with options for engaging with all conference attendees. Sponsorship revenues will help sustain future operations costs for the Panarchæa Project. We are still calculating appropriate pricing models.
For a small registration fee, various theme-relevant organizations and research labs will be offered opportunities to maintain an exhibitor space at the virtual conference. This space would allow these organizations to connect and engage with Panarchæa participants to expand relevant networks and foster cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Panarchæa Workshops
The initial purpose of the Panarchæa workshops is to give Panarchæa conference presenters guidance in how to transition their presented works into multimodal learning experiences and materials that will be engaging and accessible to a wide array of audiences. Multiple workshop sessions will be offered in order to provide accommodations for all participants, regardless of location and timezone. All workshop sessions will be virtual instructor-led.
End results of these workshops include polished research narratives and explanatory animations that broaden the accessibility and understanding of the relevance and practicalities of the Panarchæa presenters’ research findings, allowing all users of Panarchæa to have what we hope to be enlightening incidental learning experiences when engaging with these materials (upon publication in the Panarchæa OER Repository).
Additional public facing workshops will be developed in the future to expand the offering of structured transdisciplinary learning experiences in support of ecological literacy and systems wisdom within biospherical communities of practice.
As mentioned previously: using WordPress, Kadence, and LearnDash, we are building a Panarchæa project website to serve as the digital home and media archive. Using BuddyBoss in conjunction with LearnDash, workshop participants should be able to engage with Panarchæa by downloading a native mobile app (Android and iOS). The same modality options should be available for anyone wishing to peruse the artifacts published in the Panarchæa Repository.
Panarchæa Repository
The Panarchæa Repository will be full of artifacts released as OER, or open educational materials. For those not familiar with OER, we provide a brief description below.
According to the OER Commons: “OER are educational materials (everything from a single lesson plan to an entire textbook) that save students and teachers money because they are free to use, customize, and share. OER are openly licensed, which makes it easy to personalize materials and infuse them with fresh, relevant content.”
The Upper New intends to register the Panarchæa Repository as an OER Hub which, according to the OER Commons, is “a custom resource center on OER Commons where groups can create and share collections associated with a project or organization. Projects, institutions, states and initiatives make use of Hubs to bring groups of educators together to create, organize, and share collections that meet their common goals.”Additional information about OER can be found on the Wikipedia page.
Over time, contracted learning experience designers will work with The Upper New to generate additional curricula and experiences to expand the offerings of the Panarchæa Repository.The exact structure of the Panarchæa Repository is still in the planning stages, but most multimedia contents will be hosted on Vimeo or some form of streaming audio platform, or potentially using a more sophisticated digital asset management and programmable media system such as Cloudinary. We are exploring FlipHTML5 as an option for more advanced interactive media experiences to be delivered in the Panarchæa Repository.
