What is a food system? What is the relationship between humans and food? These are some of the questions a group of Agriculture students embarked on getting answers to.
Every human being is part of a food system, directly involved as a consumer. The Faculty of AgricSciences at Stellenbosch University offers an MSc in Sustainable agriculture, and one of the modules focuses on systems thinking and analysis which forms the foundation for the MSc in Sustainable Agriculture. It provides the conceptual glue that integrates the different courses within the MSc curriculum.
The 2018 module was facilitated by Dr. Sandra Boatemaa and Dr. Rika Preiser at the Centre for Complex Systems in Transitions. Dr. Kristi Maciejewski, an expert in Network Analysis (NA), gave a lecture on how to use NA to visualise and represent complex phenomena. The students share their journey through visuals and narrative captured in this blog. The lectures cover the concepts, terminology and tools of systems analysis and thinking, such as systems and their boundaries, components and relational structure, stocks and flows, feedback, resilience and its limits, self-organisation, hierarchy and complex causality.