Context Changes Everything - A Conversation with Dr. Alicia Juarrero

Future Learning Design Podcast

Alicia Juarrero, is Co-Founder and President of VectorAnalytica and Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Prince George’s Community College (MD).

She is the author of Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence, published last year: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5600/Context-Changes-EverythingHow-Constraints-Create⁠

Her other books are Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (MIT 1999) and co-editor of Reframing Complexity: Perspectives from North and South (ISCE Publishing, 2007), and Emergence, Self-Organization and Complexity: Precursors and Prototypes (ISCE Publishing, 2008).

Alicia was named the 2002 U.S. Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; in 2003 she received the Edward T. Foote Alumnus of Distinction Award of the University of Miami; in 1995 the Distinguished Humanities Educator Award of the Community College Humanities Association. In 1992 Alicia was appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to the Advisory Board of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) where, from 1992-2000 she served as NEH’s Chair of Council Committee on State Programs. In that capacity she was responsible for the oversight of approximately $32 million in NEH funds distributed annually to the States Humanities Councils.

Born in Cuba, Alicia has played a leading role in introducing complexity concepts and theory to that island nation and currently serves as Secretary-Treasurer of Friends of Havana’s January Complexity Seminars, a 501(c)3 not for profit organization which supports the work of complexity scholars in Cuba.