Bibliography: #R2R4SHER

key	R2R4SHER
title	Oneness of Humanity : The Implementation of the Baha'i Faith's Paradigm of Social Transformation in the United States Analyzed as a Complex Adaptive System
author	Baichoo, Elijah
item type	Thesis
publication year	2025
date	2025-01-08
abstract note	The purpose of this research is to analyze the implementation of the Bahá'í Faith's paradigm of social transformation, which is founded on the principle of oneness of humanity. The oneness of humanity is understood by the Bahá'í Faith as the ultimate evolutionary stage of the human species when all the peoples and nations of the world will be unified as “a single social organism.” The Bahá'í Faith asserts that a world that functions as a single social organism is an exigency for the collective search of solutions to local and global problems such as climate change, natural resource depletions, inequalities, prejudices of all kinds, the deprivation of human rights, economic disparities,ideological polarizations, rampant nationalism and wars. It views the succeeding identity,social, political and environmental crises in the world as a transitional phase engendered by the multitudinous diversity of human components struggling unwittingly to reach collective maturity and achieve unity, the inevitable evolutionary process towards a global peaceful civilization. Its approach to social concord and human evolution is presented as a framework for practical solutions to the underlying ideological, structural and sociopolitical fragmentation and polarization that paralyze most countries, and particularly the United States. The dissertation argues the Bahá'í community model is a complex adaptive system. It is designed to be agent-based, decentralized, interconnected through multilevel networks, self-organized and without hierarchy or leaders, so as to favor agency and autonomy, nonlinear interactions, multilevel flow of information and feedback loops, characteristics that when properly guided may exhibit collective emergent properties like social cognition. The observation and analysis of the implementation of the framework for action was carried out during a four-month field research in 12 cities throughout seven states across the United States in 2022 and 2024. The findings, based on some 50 activities and 70 interviews in neighborhoods with a high density of immigrant populations, show that the program of community building at the grassroots seeks to bring people from various political, social, cultural or religious backgrounds together to address issues like racism and ideologies of “us and them” through instruments and processes of collective learning, capacity building and coordinated actions of civic engagement. The research shows that the endeavors of community building exhibit a rather firm foundation for empowering the agency of individuals and creating a sense of collective vision, purpose and action for social change, especially among the youth involved in the program. The community's modes of self-organization, although already functioning with some degree of complexity, are still at an embryonic stage, and thus the number of protagonists involved has yet to reach a critical mass to engender significant exogenous transformation and influence its wider social environment.The main contribution of this dissertation is the study of the distinct social structure of a little known religious community and its endeavors to bring about social change. It provides fresh insights into the role of individual agency in upward causation that shapes community life and structures institutions, and into a new democratic mode of decision- making and social engagement based on cooperation and collective will.
publisher	Sorbonne Université
place	Réunion
language	English
type	Doctorate
manual tags	UNITY; UNITED STATES; SYSTEMS; SOCIAL CHANGE; TRANSFORMATION; MODEL

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