Mr Jude Rowley

Jude Rowley is an Associate Lecturer in Systems Thinking, working as an Academic Mentor on Exeter's Level 7 Systems Thinking Practitioner Degree Apprenticeship and MSc in Systems Thinking. With an academic background in History and International Relations, he is an interdisciplinary researcher with a particular interest in critical histories. As a historian of order, empire, and emergence, his work has historical dimensions, but is ultimately concerned with applying these with a contemporary relevance, seeking to construct histories of the present. His academic research focusses particularly on International Relations as a 'science of empire' and seeks to trace the historical emergence of the formalised academic discipline from a hidden past of colonial race science and eugenics whilst critically deconstructing the legitimising function that scientific discourses are co-opted to serve within the field in the present day.

Drawing on concepts of complexity, non-Newtonian approaches to time and order, and non-linear dynamics, his work seeks to stretch approaches to historical study beyond the orthodox, whilst seeking to broaden these further with radical and decolonial approaches to power and order. His work thus draws on a wide and diverse theoretical framework whilst building on critical approaches that can help shed light on the practice of history and its relation to power, especially the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and others. He is particularly interested in the role interactions between History and Complexity/Systems Thinking can play in supporting these critical approaches.