Katharine Mcgowan
Biographic Data
| ID | 4004947 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Katharine Mcgowan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Katharine |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcgowan |
| SIGNATURE | MCGOWAN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Mount Royal University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8355-9672 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Parallel systems in healthcare
The Canadian public healthcare system faces significant challenges in performance. While the formal healthcare system addresses funding, access and policy, there is a critical need to prioritise the informal system of community-oriented networks. This integration aligns with the World Health Organization's primary health care approach, emphasising a whole-of-society strategy for health equity. Canada's healthcare, harmonised through the Canada He…
Just transitions
Transitions and transformations literature signals the need for radical and large-scale changes for more sustainable futures. In addition to more plural and nuanced understandings of these concepts of change, we need to engage with how we do this type of research, and with whom. We ask: How might research based on responsibility, relationality, and reciprocity change the range of possible outcomes of transitions and transformations, towards more …
Systems Thinking in Practice in a Circular Economy
The Circular Economy (CE) is frequently touted as important for building sustainability. Despite growing interest in CE, few theories have provided effective on the-ground tools for building circularity. This case study of an agricultural organization in Western Canada illustrates how the logic of complexity helps frame and sustain a CE. Interviewees embraced complexity to manage the messy, unpredictable work of CE. Although preliminary, this sug…
Recognizing the dark side of sustainability transitions
A complex-systems perspective on the role of universities in social innovation
Indigenous strengths-based approaches to healthcare and health professions education – Recognising the value of Elders’ teachings
Background: A strengths-based lens is essential for the pursuit of health equity among Indigenous populations. However, health professionals are often taught and supported in practice via deficit-based approaches that perpetuate inequity for Indigenous peoples. Deficit narratives in healthcare and health education are reproduced through practices and policies that ignore Indigenous strengths, disregard human rights, and reproduce structural inequ…
Indigenous Elders’ wisdom and dominionization in higher education
Decolonisation in higher education requires congruent social processes that support human rights and inclusive knowledge generation. While often discussed, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s. Calls to Action, and similar reports published over several decades, have yet to disrupt existing power structures and shift government or popular relations with Indigenous peoples. To explore why reconciliation seems to be idling, we sought…
An Innovative Opportunity? Social Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and the Pedagogical Possibilities for Indigenous Learners
The need to indigenize curriculum in Canada is pressing. Education, however, is fraught and complex. Questions have been asked about the accessibility and applicability of traditional class-based educational paradigms and subject matter. Based on the limited courses currently on offer in Canada, the emergent social-innovation pedagogy seems to bear several points of sympathy or commonality with Indigenous pedagogies, including emphasis on experie…
Panarchy, ontological and epistemological phenomena, and the Plague
Building resilience to major economic, social, and ecological crises such as armed conflict and natural disasters is seen as critical to maintaining system integrity. Although studies of system survival can be used to gauge whether or not social systems are resilient, this can only be conducted in retrospect. Contemporary measures of resilience rely on proxy measures that one can argue build capacity for resilience, but are not direct proxies for…
Moral entrepreneurship
How game changers catalyzed, disrupted, and incentivized social innovation
Westley, F. R., K. A. McGowan, N. Antadze, J. Blacklock, and O. Tjornbo. 2016. How game changers catalyzed, disrupted, and incentivized social innovation: three historical cases of nature conservation, assimilation, and women’s rights. Ecology and Society 21(4):13.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08811-210413
At the Root of Change
At the Root of Change
This chapter explores the roots and developments of social innovation through comparative historical case studies. Specifically, this chapter introduces a theoretical and methodological framework for this historical discussion. It then goes on to discuss trends observed from a preliminary analysis of several historical cases of social innovation and offers a more detailed discussion of one specific case — the emergence of the intelligence test. T…
The research journey
McGowan, K. A., F. Westley, E. D. G. Fraser, P. A. Loring, K. C. Weathers, F. Avelino, J. Sendzimir, R. Roy Chowdhury, and M.-L. Moore. 2014. The research journey: travels across the idiomatic and axiomatic toward a better understanding of complexity. Ecology and Society 19(3): 37. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-06518-190337
A Finger in the Fire
(2009). 'A Finger in the Fire': Canadian Volunteer Soldiers and their Perceptions of Canada's Collective Identity through their Experience of the Boer War. War & Society: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 61-87
Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory
Moral entrepreneurship
Recognizing the dark side of sustainability transitions
Indigenous Elders’ wisdom and dominionization in higher education
Decolonisation in higher education requires congruent social processes that support human rights and inclusive knowledge generation. While often discussed, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s. Calls to Action, and similar reports published over several decades, have yet to disrupt existing power structures and shift government or popular relations with Indigenous peoples. To explore why reconciliation seems to be idling, we sought…
How game changers catalyzed, disrupted, and incentivized social innovation
Westley, F. R., K. A. McGowan, N. Antadze, J. Blacklock, and O. Tjornbo. 2016. How game changers catalyzed, disrupted, and incentivized social innovation: three historical cases of nature conservation, assimilation, and women’s rights. Ecology and Society 21(4):13.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08811-210413
Panarchy, ontological and epistemological phenomena, and the Plague
Building resilience to major economic, social, and ecological crises such as armed conflict and natural disasters is seen as critical to maintaining system integrity. Although studies of system survival can be used to gauge whether or not social systems are resilient, this can only be conducted in retrospect. Contemporary measures of resilience rely on proxy measures that one can argue build capacity for resilience, but are not direct proxies for…
The research journey
McGowan, K. A., F. Westley, E. D. G. Fraser, P. A. Loring, K. C. Weathers, F. Avelino, J. Sendzimir, R. Roy Chowdhury, and M.-L. Moore. 2014. The research journey: travels across the idiomatic and axiomatic toward a better understanding of complexity. Ecology and Society 19(3): 37. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-06518-190337
Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory
A Finger in the Fire
(2009). 'A Finger in the Fire': Canadian Volunteer Soldiers and their Perceptions of Canada's Collective Identity through their Experience of the Boer War. War & Society: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 61-87
The research journey
McGowan, K. A., F. Westley, E. D. G. Fraser, P. A. Loring, K. C. Weathers, F. Avelino, J. Sendzimir, R. Roy Chowdhury, and M.-L. Moore. 2014. The research journey: travels across the idiomatic and axiomatic toward a better understanding of complexity. Ecology and Society 19(3): 37. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-06518-190337
At the Root of Change
At the Root of Change
This chapter explores the roots and developments of social innovation through comparative historical case studies. Specifically, this chapter introduces a theoretical and methodological framework for this historical discussion. It then goes on to discuss trends observed from a preliminary analysis of several historical cases of social innovation and offers a more detailed discussion of one specific case — the emergence of the intelligence test. T…
Moral entrepreneurship
How game changers catalyzed, disrupted, and incentivized social innovation
Westley, F. R., K. A. McGowan, N. Antadze, J. Blacklock, and O. Tjornbo. 2016. How game changers catalyzed, disrupted, and incentivized social innovation: three historical cases of nature conservation, assimilation, and women’s rights. Ecology and Society 21(4):13.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08811-210413
An Innovative Opportunity? Social Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and the Pedagogical Possibilities for Indigenous Learners
The need to indigenize curriculum in Canada is pressing. Education, however, is fraught and complex. Questions have been asked about the accessibility and applicability of traditional class-based educational paradigms and subject matter. Based on the limited courses currently on offer in Canada, the emergent social-innovation pedagogy seems to bear several points of sympathy or commonality with Indigenous pedagogies, including emphasis on experie…
Panarchy, ontological and epistemological phenomena, and the Plague
Building resilience to major economic, social, and ecological crises such as armed conflict and natural disasters is seen as critical to maintaining system integrity. Although studies of system survival can be used to gauge whether or not social systems are resilient, this can only be conducted in retrospect. Contemporary measures of resilience rely on proxy measures that one can argue build capacity for resilience, but are not direct proxies for…
Indigenous Elders’ wisdom and dominionization in higher education
Decolonisation in higher education requires congruent social processes that support human rights and inclusive knowledge generation. While often discussed, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s. Calls to Action, and similar reports published over several decades, have yet to disrupt existing power structures and shift government or popular relations with Indigenous peoples. To explore why reconciliation seems to be idling, we sought…
A complex-systems perspective on the role of universities in social innovation
Indigenous strengths-based approaches to healthcare and health professions education – Recognising the value of Elders’ teachings
Background: A strengths-based lens is essential for the pursuit of health equity among Indigenous populations. However, health professionals are often taught and supported in practice via deficit-based approaches that perpetuate inequity for Indigenous peoples. Deficit narratives in healthcare and health education are reproduced through practices and policies that ignore Indigenous strengths, disregard human rights, and reproduce structural inequ…
Recognizing the dark side of sustainability transitions
Just transitions
Transitions and transformations literature signals the need for radical and large-scale changes for more sustainable futures. In addition to more plural and nuanced understandings of these concepts of change, we need to engage with how we do this type of research, and with whom. We ask: How might research based on responsibility, relationality, and reciprocity change the range of possible outcomes of transitions and transformations, towards more …
Systems Thinking in Practice in a Circular Economy
The Circular Economy (CE) is frequently touted as important for building sustainability. Despite growing interest in CE, few theories have provided effective on the-ground tools for building circularity. This case study of an agricultural organization in Western Canada illustrates how the logic of complexity helps frame and sustain a CE. Interviewees embraced complexity to manage the messy, unpredictable work of CE. Although preliminary, this sug…
Parallel systems in healthcare
The Canadian public healthcare system faces significant challenges in performance. While the formal healthcare system addresses funding, access and policy, there is a critical need to prioritise the informal system of community-oriented networks. This integration aligns with the World Health Organization's primary health care approach, emphasising a whole-of-society strategy for health equity. Canada's healthcare, harmonised through the Canada He…
Political science (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Ecology (4 works) · Economics (4 works) · Indigenous (4 works) · Biology (3 works) · Complex Systems and Decision Making (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Epistemology (3 works)