Imagining a Social Turn in Systems and Complexity Sciences

Social science researchers and policy practitioners are increasingly engaging with systems and complexity concepts and methods. In their Atlas of Social Complexity , Castellani and Gerrits (2024) argue that there are 13 challenges that must be overcome so that such concepts and methods can be used effectively to address social issues. We outline their argument and present four practice examples that demonstrate the value of applying a social complexity imagination to engage with the challenges. These examples illustrate how complexity can reshape research to remain theoretically coherent, contextually sensitive and practically useful. What is needed is directed effort to create a social turn in the study of complexity, productively combining the problems and perspectives of social science and the humanities with the methods, concepts and perspectives of complexity science so as to develop a more social complexity science.