What inspired Project Fractal Resilience?
I am not the first person to draw inspiration from fractals in nature to understand the challenges of the world we live in. My most direct inspiration for Project Fractal Resilience comes from two sources.
First, is adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy. adrienne’s presence in this world defies easy categorization; I have known them as a writer, a thinker, and a generative force for a resilient, loving future. Her work has shaped the way I teach, research, and connect with others for the better part of a decade.
Second, is stem-cell biologist Neil Theise, whom I discovered listening to the Sounds of Sand, the podcast home for Science & Non-Duality. Neil is known in some circles as playing a role in the discovery of a new organ— the interstitium— but he is perhaps more widely known for his writing on complexity theory. His phenomenally insightful book—Notes on Complexity— describes in detail how complexity theory offers a frame for making sense of resilient systems as diverse as ant colonies, the human body, cities, and the subatomic particles that animate the universe. As I read his descriptions of different complex systems—their fractal characteristics, the lack of a central authority, the role of local connections, the significance of low-level randomness, something hit me:
Election administration in the United States functions almost exactly like the resilient, complex systems Neil describes. It has thousands of points acting independently from one another, yet they come together to produce self-similar processes in service of a singular goal. Most importantly, despite decades of challenges anticipated and unanticipated— an ever shifting legal landscape, perennially underfunded offices, a global pandemic, and targeted disinformation campaigns— U.S. election administration has become more, not less resilient over time. This is precisely what healthy complex systems in nature do.
Together, emergent strategies and complexity theory can help election officials, their staff, and the democracy stakeholders who run and support elections see the bigger picture of the often painstaking, hyper-scrutinized, and under appreciated localized work of administering elections. But I also believe there is a bigger lesson for anyone interested in preserving democracy for a future that more fully realizes the human right to agency and authenticity.
My name is Mara. In title, I’m a professor of American government specializing in elections. But from a very young age I have been fascinated by the concepts of authenticity and agency.
This fascination reflects the belief that two of the most essential ingredients for a fulfilled, meaningful life revolve around having agency in our lives, and being able to safely show up as our authentic selves. I suppose the writers of the Declaration of Independence might consider this akin to that self-evident truth: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, embodied by the consent of the governed.
In my younger years, this fascination manifested most specifically in my attention to elections as a middle schooler. There was something about getting to make a your own choice about governance that I thought was just, well, so cool. (Yes, I was an early adopter of the election nerd moniker, staying up well past my bedtime the night of the 2000 election only to be waiting on a knife’s edge for over a month and a half with the rest of the country).
These fascinations have been present in my interests ever since. In my work as a scholar, I have always tended towards research questions that examine the limits and possibilities of human agency and authenticity within systems of governance.
This tendency is most fully reflected in my research on election administration. Together with my colleague Thessalia Merivaki, for the last eight years I’ve sought to understand how the people who administer elections use their own voice to educate the public about the electoral process. This includes not only vital information about what one needs to vote, but also the work election offices do to ensure elections are free, fair, accessible, and secure.
Underneath the tangible questions that animate my academic research runs a singular, lifelong question that reflects the mission at the heart of Project Fractal Resilience: how can we build systems of governance that honor human agency and authenticity?
I hope Project Fractal Resilience can play some role in answering this question, and help us understand how the values-driven work of the officials and stakeholders who make elections happen offer us a roadmap for building a more resilient democratic future.
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