Holotopia

Holotopia

Imagine...

You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice the flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed where the headlights of the bus are expected to be. Candles? As headlights?

Of course, the idea of candles as headlights is absurd. So why propose it?

Because on a much larger scale this absurdity has become reality.

The Modernity ideogram renders the essence of our contemporary situation by depicting our society as an accelerating bus without a steering wheel, and the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it as guided by a pair of candle headlights.

Modernity ideogram

Our proposal

In a nutshell

The core of our knowledge federation proposal is to change the relationship we have with information.

What is our relationship with information presently like?

Here is how Neil Postman described it:

"The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."

The objective of our proposal is to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge.

Neil Postman

In detail

What would it take to reconnect information with action?

What would information and our handling of information be like, if we treated information as we treat other human-made things—if we adapted it to the purposes that need to be served?

What would our world be like, if academic researchers retracted the premise that when an idea is published in a book or an article it is already "known"; if they attended to the other half of this picture, the use and usefulness of information, with thoroughness and rigor that distinguish academic technical work?

What would the academic field that develops this approach to information be like? How would information be different? How would it be used? By what methods, what social processes, and by whom would it be created? What new information formats would emerge, and supplement or replace the traditional books and articles? How would information technology be adapted and applied? What would public informing be like? And academic communication, and education?

The substance of our proposal is a complete prototype of knowledge federation, by which those and other related questions are answered.

Knowledge federation is a paradigm. Not in a specific field of science, where new paradigms are relatively common, but in "creation, integration and application of knowledge" at large.

Our call to action is to institutionalize and develop knowledge federation as an academic field, and as real-life praxis.

An application

The situation we are in

The Club of Rome's assessment of the situation we are in, provided us with a benchmark challenge for putting the proposed ideas to a test. Four decades ago—based on a decade of this global think tank's research into the future prospects of mankind, in a book titled "One Hundred Pages for the Future"—Aurelio Peccei issued the following call to action:

"It is absolutely essential to find a way to change course."

Peccei also specified what needed to be done to "change course":

"The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future."

Aurelio Peccei

This conclusion, that we are in a state of crisis that has cultural roots and must be handled accordingly, Peccei shared with a number of twentieth century's thinkers. Arne Næss, Norway's esteemed philosopher, reached it on different grounds, and called it "deep ecology".

In "Human Quality", Peccei explained his call to action:

"Let me recapitulate what seems to me the crucial question at this point of the human venture. Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it. However, the business of human life has become so complicated that he is culturally unprepared even to understand his new position clearly. As a consequence, his current predicament is not only worsening but, with the accelerated tempo of events, may become decidedly catastrophic in a not too distant future. The downward trend of human fortunes can be countered and reversed only by the advent of a new humanism essentially based on and aiming at man’s cultural development, that is, a substantial improvement in human quality throughout the world."

The Club of Rome insisted that lasting solutions would not be found by focusing on specific problems, but by transforming the condition from which they all stem, which they called "problematique".

Can the proposed 'headlights' help us "find a way to change course"?

Why did Peccei's call to action remain unanswered? Why wasn't The Club of Rome's purpose—to illuminate the course our civilization has taken—served by our society's regular institutions, as part of their function? Isn't this already showing that we are 'driving with candle headlights'?

If we used knowledge federation to 'illuminate the way'—what difference would that make?

The Holotopia project is conceived as a knowledge federation-based response to Aurelio Peccei's call to action.

We coined the keyword holotopia to point to the cultural and social order of things that will result.

To begin the Holotopia project, we are developing an initial prototype. It includes a vision, and a collection of strategic and tactical assets—that will make the vision clear, and our pursuit of it actionable.

A vision

The holotopia is not a utopia

Since Thomas More coined this term and described the first utopia, a number of visions of an ideal but non-existing social and cultural order of things have been proposed. But in view of adverse and contrasting realities, the word "utopia" acquired the negative meaning of an unrealizable fancy.

As the optimism regarding our future faded, apocalyptic or "dystopian" visions became common. The "protopias" emerged as a compromise, where the focus is on smaller but practically realizable improvements.

The holotopia is different in spirit from them all. It is a more attractive vision of the future than what the common utopias offered—whose authors either lacked the information to see what was possible, or lived in the times when the resources we have did not yet exist. And yet the holotopia is readily realizable—because we already have the information and other resources that are needed for its fulfillment.

The holotopia vision is made concrete in terms of five insights, as explained below.

Making things whole

What do we need to do to change course toward the holotopia?

From a collection of insights from which the holotopia emerges as a future worth aiming for, we have distilled a simple principle or rule of thumb—making things whole.

This principle is suggested by the holotopia's very name. And also by the Modernity ideogram. Instead of reifying our institutions and professions, and merely acting in them competitively to improve "our own" situation or condition, we consider ourselves and what we do as functional elements in a larger system of systems; and we self-organize, and act, as it may best suit the wholeness of it all.

Imagine if academic and other knowledge-workers collaborated to serve and develop planetary wholeness – what magnitude of benefits would result!

A method

We see things whole

"The arguments posed in the preceding pages", Peccei summarized in One Hundred Pages for the Future, "point out several things, of which one of the most important is that our generations seem to have lost the sense of the whole."

To make things whole—we must be able to see them whole!

To highlight that the knowledge federation methodology described in the mentioned prototype affords that very capability, to see things whole, in the context of the holotopia we refer to it by the pseudonym holoscope.

The characteristics of the holoscope—the design choices or design patterns, how they follow from published insights and why they are necessary for 'illuminating the way'—will become obvious in the course of this presentation. One characteristic, however, must be made clear from the start.

We look at all sides

Holoscope ideogram

If our goal would be to put a new "piece of information" into an existing "reality picture", then whatever challenges that reality picture would be considered "controversial". But when our goal is to see whether something is whole or 'cracked', then our attitude must be different.

To see things whole, we must look at all sides.

The views we are about to share may make you leap from your chair. You will, however, be able to relax and enjoy this presentation, if you consider that the communication we invite you to engage in with us is academically rigorous—but with a different idea of rigor. In the holoscope we take no recourse to "reality". Coexistence of multiple ways of looking at any theme or issues (which in the holoscope are called scopes) is axiomatic. And so is the assumption that we must overcome our habits and resistances and look in new ways, if we should see things whole and finding a new course.

We invite you to be with us in the manner of the dialog—to genuinely share, listen and co-create.

We modified science

To liberate our thinking from the inherited concepts and methods, and allow for deliberate choice of scopes, we used the scientific method as venture point—and modified it by taking recourse to insights reached in 20th century science and philosophy.

Science gave us new ways to look at the world: The telescope and the microscope enabled us to see the things that are too distant or too small to be seen by the naked eye, and our vision expanded beyond bounds. But science had the tendency to keep us focused on things that were either too distant or too small to be relevant—compared to all those large things or issues nearby, which now demand our attention. The holoscope is conceived as a way to look at the world that helps us see any chosen thing or theme as a whole—from all sides; and in proportion.

Five insights

Five Insights ideogram

Before we begin

What theme, what evidence, what "new discovery" might have the force commensurate with the momentum with which our civilization is rushing onward—and have a realistic chance to make it "change course"?

We offer these five insights as a prototype answer.

They result when we apply the holoscope to illuminate five pivotal themes:

• Innovation (how we use our ability to create, and induce change)
• Communication (how information technology is being used)
• Epistemology (fundamental premises on which our handling of information is based)
• Method (how truth and meaning are created)
• Values (how we "pursue happiness")

For each of these five themes, we show that our conventional way of looking made us ignore a principle or a rule of thumb, which readily emerges when we 'connect the dots'—when we combine published insights. We see that by ignoring those principles, we have created deep structural problems ('crack in the cup')—which are causing problems, and "global issues" in particular.

A 'scientific' approach to problems is this way made possible, where instead of focusing on symptoms, we understand and treat their deeper, structural causes—which can be remedied.

In the spirit of the holoscope, we only summarize each of the five insights—and provide evidence and details separately.

Power structure

Scope

"Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it", observed Peccei. We look at the way in which man uses his power to innovate (create, and induce change).

We look at the way our civilization follows in its evolution; or metaphorically, at 'the itinerary' of our 'bus'.

We readily observe that we use competition or "survival of the fittest" to orient innovation, not information and "making things whole". The popular belief that "the free competition" or "the free market" will serve us better, also makes our "democracies" elect the "leaders" who represent that view. But is that view warranted?

Genuine revolutions include new ways to see freedom and power; holotopia is no exception.

We offer this keyword, power structure, as a means to that end. Think of the power structure as a new way to conceive of the intuitive notion "power holder", who might take away our freedom, or be our "enemy".

While the nature of power structures will become clear as we go along, imagine them, to begin with, as institutions; or more accurately, as the systems in which we live and work (we'll here call them simply systems).

Notice that systems have an immense power—over us, because we have to adapt to them to be able to live and work; and over our environment, because by organizing us and using us in a specific ways, they determine what the effects of our work will be.

The power structures determine whether the effects of our efforts will be problems, or solutions.

Diagnosis

How suitable are the systems in which we live and work for their all-important role?

Evidence, circumstantial and theoretical, shows that they waste a lion's share of our resources. And that they cause problems, or make us incapable of solving them.

The reason is the intrinsic nature of evolution, as Richard Dawkins explained it in "The Selfish Gene".

"Survival of the fittest" favors the systems that are by nature predatory, not the ones that are useful.

This excerpt from Joel Bakan's documentary "The Corporation" (which Bakan as law professor created to federate an insight he considered essential) explains how the corporation, the most powerful institution on the planet, evolved to be a perfect "externalizing machine" ("Externalizing" means maximizing profits by letting someone else bear the costs, such as the people and the environment), just as the shark evolved to be a perfect "killing machine". This scene from Sidney Pollack's 1969 film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" will illustrate how our systems affect our own condition.

Why do we put up with such systems? Why don't we treat them as we treat other human-made things—by adapting them to the purposes that need to be served?

The reasons are interesting, and in holotopia they'll be a recurring theme.

One of them we have already seen: We do not see things whole. When we look in conventional ways, the systems remain invisible for similar reasons as a mountain on which we might be walking.

A reason why we ignore the possibility of adapting the systems in which we live and work to the functions they have in our society, is that they perform for us a different function—of providing structure to power battles and turf strifes. Within a system, they provide us "objective" and "fair" criteria to compete; and in the world outside, they give us as system system "competitive edge".

Why don't media corporations combine their resources to give us the awareness we need? Because they must compete with one another for our attention—and use only "cost-effective" means.

The most interesting reason, however, is that the power structures have the power to socialize us in ways that suit their interests. Through socialization, they can adapt to their interests both our culture and our "human quality".

A result is that bad intentions are no longer needed for cruelty and evil to result. The power structures can co-opt our sense of duty and commitment, and even our heroism and honor.

Zygmunt Bauman's key insight, that the concentration camp was only a special case, however extreme, of (what we are calling) the power structure, needs to be carefully digested and internalized: While our ethical sensibilities are focused on the power structures of yesterday, we are committing the greatest massive crime in human history (in all innocence, by only "doing our job" within the systems we belong to).

Our civilization is not "on the collision course with nature" because someone violated the rules—but because we follow them.

Remedy

The fact that we will not "solve our problems" unless we learned to collaborate and adapt our systems to their contemporary roles and our contemporary challenges has not remained unnoticed. Alredy in 1948, in his seminal Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener explained why competition cannot replace 'headlights and steering'. Cybernetics was envisioned as a transdisciplinary academic effort to help us understand systems, so that we may adapt their structure to the functions they need to perform.

The very first step the founders of The Club of Rome did after its inception in 1968 was to convene a team of experts, in Bellagio, Italy, to develop a suitable methodology. They gave "making things whole" on the scale of socio-technical systems the name "systemic innovation"—and we adopted that as one of our keywords.

Collective mind

Scope

If our next evolutionary task is to make institutions or systems whole—where should we begin?

Handling of information, or metaphorically our society's 'headlights', suggests itself as the answer for several reasons. One of them is that if we'll use information as guiding light and not competition, our information will need to be different.

Norbert Wiener contributed another reason: In social systems, communication is what turns individuals into a system. The nature of communication determines what a system will be like. The basic insight of cybernetics is that to to be able to correct its course (or to maintain "homeostasis", Wiener would have preferred to say, which we may interpret as "sustainability"), the system's "control" must be based on suitable communication or "feedback".

Diagnosis

The tie between information and action has been severed, Wiener too observed; it must be restored, for sustainability to be possible.

To make that point, Wiener cited an earlier work, Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think", where Bush urged the scientists to make the task of revising their own system their next highest priority—the World War Two having just been won.

Why hasn't this been done?

"As long as a paradox is treated as a problem, it can never be dissolved," observed David Bohm.

Wiener too entrusted his results to the communication whose tie with action had been severed!

We assembled a considerable collection of academic results that shared a similar fate, as evidence of an underlying anomaly we are calling the Wiener's paradox.

It may be disheartening, especially to an academic researcher, to see that so many best ideas of our best minds are unable to benefit our society. But this sentiment quickly changes to holotopian optimism, when we look at the vast creative frontier that is opening up—where we are called upon to reinvent the very system by which we do our work; as the founding fathers of science did centuries ago.

Optimism turns into enthusiasm, when we understand the role that the new information technology will have in that undertaking.

Core parts of contemporary information technology were created to enable fundamentally different systemic solutions in knowledge work, compared to the ones we have inherited from the past.

"Fundamentally different" here means that their very principle of operation will be different—in the manner and in the degree in which electrical light is different from the light that a burning candle would produce.

It is not completely true that Vannevar Bush's call to action was ignored. Douglas Engelbart heard it, and with his SRI team developed a solution that was well beyond what Bush envisioned. They showed this solution—really the technology we all now use to connect with each other and to communicate—in their famous 1968 demo.

But the vision that guided Engelbart, of a new paradigm in communication, has neither been understood in theory nor implemented in practice.

When we, humans, are connected to a personal digital device through an interactive interface, and when those devices are connected together into a network—then the overall result is that we are connected together in a similar way as the cells in a human organism are connected by the nervous system. While all earlier innovations in this area—from clay tablets to the printing press—required that a physical medium that bears a message be physically transported—this new technology allows us to "create, integrate and apply knowledge" concurrently, as cells in a human nervous system do.

We can now think and create—together!

This three minute video clip, which we called "Doug Engelbart's Last Wish", offers an opportunity for a pause. Imagine the effects of improving the system by which information is produced and put to use; even "the effects of getting 5% better", Engelbart commented with a smile. Then he put his fingers on his forehead: "I've always imagined that the potential was... large..." The improvement that is possible is not only large; it is staggering. The improvement that can and needs to be achieved is indeed qualitative— from a system that doesn't really work, to one that does.

By collaborating in new ways, as Engelbart envisioned, we would be able to comprehend our problems and respond to them incomparably more quickly than we do. Engelbart foresaw that the collective intelligence that would result would enable us to tackle the "complexity times urgency of our problems", which he saw as growing at an accelerated rate or "exponentially".

But to Engelbart's dismay, our new "collective nervous system" ended up being used to only implement the old processes and systems, which evolved through the centuries of use of the printing press, and make them more efficient; to only broadcast data.

The above observation by Anthony Giddens points to the impact this has had on us as culture; and on "human quality". Dazzled by an overload of data, in a reality whose complexity is well beyond our comprehension—we have no other recourse but "ontological security". We find meaning in learning a profession, and performing in it a competitively.

But this is, of course, what binds us to power structure.

Instead of liberating us—the new information technology bounded us to power structure even stronger.

Remedy

What we are calling knowledge federation is the functioning of our collective mind that suits the new technology—and our situation.

Our call to action—to develop knowledge federation as an academic field, and as real-life praxis—is proposed as a remedy to the collective mind issue.

Our prototype is offered as a proof of concept model of this solution.

Socialized reality

Scope

"Act like as if you loved your children above all else"

Greta Thunberg, representing her generation, told the political leaders at Davos. Securing our children a future, however, will require an unprecedented level of international collaboration, and restructuring of the global economy, the widely read Rolling Stone article reeports. The COVID-19 exacerbates those demands and makes them even more immediate. Considering the way in which things are related, restructuring of the world economy will not be possible without restructuring other systems as well.

So our next question is who, that is what institution will initiate the next urgent task on our evolutionary agenda—tell us how to update the systems in which we live and work; and empower us to do that?

Both Jantsch and Engelbart believed that "the university" would have to be the answer; and they made their appeals accordingly. But they were ignored. And so were Vannevar Bush and Norbert Wiener before them; and also Neil Postman and others that followed.

Why? Isn't restoring agency to information and power to knowledge a task worthy of academic attention?

It is tempting to conclude that the academia too followed the general evolutionary trend; that the academic discipline too evolved as power structure—to provide clear and fair rules for pursuing a career within a discipline; and divide the 'academic turf' between disciplines—while keeping the outliers outside.

But to see solutions, we will need to look at deeper causes.

As we pointed out in the opening paragraphs of this website, the academic tradition did not develop as a way to pursue practical knowledge, but (let's call it that) "right" knowledge. By bringing up the image of Galilei in house arrest, we highlighted that it was not the pursuit of practical knowledge that led our ancestors to a "great cultural revival", but of knowledge for its own sake. Censorship and prison were unable to contain the new way to look at the world, whose time had come—and it transpired from astrophysics, where it originated, and permeated the society.

So the core role of the university is to inform us about the meaning and purpose of knowledge, so that we may successfully pursue knowledge in any context. The traditional academic keyword is "epistemology", which is usually interpreted as the exploration of the limits of knowledge, understood as "how and to what degree can we really know reality?". Here we'll use this keyword a bit differently, and let epistemology mean both the "knowledge of knowledge", and the "foundation for creating truth and meaning" that follows from it.

We concluded the opening paragraph of our website by asking, rhetorically, "Could a similar advent be in store for us today?" In this way we suggested that our situation today might be similar as the situation back then, in Galilei's time. That now again there is a new way to look at the world waiting to be given 'citizenship rights'—ready to transform our world.

This leads us to the key question, which we shall here begin to explore.

Who, or what, might be 'Galilei in house arrest' today?

What transformative ideas are ready to emerge? What new way of looking at the world is ready to transform it?

And who, or what, is keeping Galilei 'in house arrest'?

Diagnosis

So what is "right" knowledge? What is the right foundation for creating truth and meaning? Nobody knows!

Of course, innumerable views of this core philosophical issue have been contributed since as far back as our collective memory can reach. But no "official narrative" or consensus has as yet emerged.

So all we can do here to begin this exploration is share what we've been told, while we were growing up. We'll simplify and caricature—to point to an issue that calls for attention.

As members of the homo sapiens species, we were informed, we have the evolutionary prerogative to understand the world, and to make choices rationally. Give the homo sapiens a correct understanding of the natural world, he'll know exactly how to go about satisfying "his needs", which he no doubt knows because he can experience directly. But the traditions got it all wrong! Being unable to understand how the nature works, our ancestors invented a "ghost in the machine"—and prayed to him to give them what they wanted. Science corrected this error. It removed the "ghost"—and told us how the nature, or 'the machine', really works. We can now combine scientific understanding of causes with technology, and get out the nature exactly what we want and need.

And yes, one more thing: Our wants and needs can of course contradict one another. Here "the free market" and "the free elections" will serve as perfect scales, to assure that the majority prevails.

According to this view, all we need from information is to give us "an objective reality picture", so that we may use our rational faculties and handle our affairs correctly.

Popular myths of this kind, which began to take hold of our culture around the middle of the 19th century, when Adam and Moses as cultural heroes were replaced by Darwin and Newton, were proven wrong in 20th century science and philosophy.

It turned out that we got it wrong.

It is impossible, scientists found out, to assert that our ideas and models correspond to reality. There is simply no way to open the supposed "mechanism of nature", and verify that our models correspond to it.

"Reality", sociologists found out, should rather be considered as a contrivance of the traditional culture (or of what we called the power structure), invented to socialize us in a certain way. In "Social Construction of Reality", Berger and Luckmann pointed out that throughout history, the explanations how "the reality really works", which they called "universal theories", have been used to legitimize the given social order.

Results in cognitive science, and in political science and sociology, showed that we are not the "rational decision makers", as the 19th century made us believe.

They explained the mechanism of socialization—the way in which our seemingly rational choices are manipulated through the use of "symbolic power", without anyone noticing.

This, however, has been noticed. The business people were quick to learn that our choices can be manipulated; they now use scientific advisers to do that (the epic story of Edward Bernays, Freud's American nephew, illustrates how this began). The politicians followed.

As it turned out, the Enlightenment did not really liberate us, as we tend to believe. Our socialization only changed hands—from one power structure (the kings and the clergy) to the next (the corporations and the media).

They are now creating our culture.

Remedy

"Reality" as foundation for creating truth and meaning, and hence of culture, is bankrupt. It has no basis in reality.

We use the mirror as metaphorical image, in a similar way as we use the bus with candle headlights, to point to the academic and cultural situation that resulted. The spontaneous pursuit of knowledge, and the knowledge of knowledge that resulted, brought us to the mirror. The mirror symbolizes coming back to the original academic values, and ethos: self-reflection; and the Socratic dialog, about the meaning and purpose of what we do. But now in the light of contemporary knowledge of knowledge. It symbolizes also a new self-awareness and self-image that will result: We are not above the world, observing it "objectively"; we are in the world—and have a role in it.

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The mirror points out that the effect that the epistemological state is to replace "reality" as foundation for our work withinformation with reification—which denotes something we do. And to replace reification with accountability. It is no longer academically legitimate to claim, in academia and in public informing, that we are not responsible, that we are simply doing our job—reporting "objectively" what we see. We have a key role to play in the world in change; and we have to change the way we perform in that role.

The mirror also stands for a surprising, seemingly magical solution to our cultural entanglement.

We can go through the mirror—and into a completely new academic and social reality.

This is done in three easy steps.

The first—what makes this apparent magic academically possible—is truth by convention. Quine identified it as a phase, and a sign of maturing, that every field of science goes through. Truth by convention, where we postulate the meaning of words by making a convention, is the natural alternative, and antidote, to reification. It is the natural "Archimedean point" for once again giving information, and knowledge, the power to "move the world". </em>. <p>The next step is to use truth by convention to postulate an epistemology. In the holoscope, we postulated the design epistemology—which turns the "relationship we have with information" we are proposing into a convention. A convention is not a reality claim, so there is no need for consensus; the holoscope is simply a tool or a toolkit. Truth by convention is its principle of operation.

The third and last step is methodology definition—where we spell out the fundamental assumptions. At this point they become known; they become part of our "social contract"! We can then define what the word like "information" and "culture" mean, even give them purpose. Once again the consensus is not needed—such definitions are binding only within the methodology.

The result is that the academia now has the historical privilege, and the obligation—because its social role, and because of the academic tradition it institutionalizes—to guide the society through the mirror. To liberate the "oppressed".

On the other side of the mirror, we find ourselves in a completely new academic and cultural reality—where we are free to, and empowered to, be creative in ways in which our new situation requires. We can

• Liberate the academic researchers from reifying their disciplines; and from the traditional "observer" role—and empower them to perceive themselves as creators and not mere observers of our world; and to create the way they do their work to begin with
• Liberate the people from reification the institutions—and hence from the systems, and the power structure
• Liberate the people from reification of their "needs" and other forms of "reality" perception—and take up "human development", as we shall see later</blockquote>
• Liberate our language, and method, and worldview from the reification of inherited concepts—and empower us to create completely new ways of seeing the world, and speaking and acting

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<p>The concepts defined by convention are called keywords; we've been using them all along.

We turned "information" into a keyword by defining it as "recorded experience". The substance of information, according this definition, is not "reality" but human experience—where "experience" is interpreted in a most general sense, to include also results of academic work and other forms of insight as (to use the colloquial phrase) "aha experiences". Information is, according to this definition, not only written text, but any artifacts that embody human experience.

Information includes also prototypes. Instead of only writing articles and observing the world—on the other side of the mirror the researchers can give their insights direct impact on systems. Hereby information is given agency; knowledge is given its power to make a difference.

And in particular—to rebuild the culture!







The result will be an enormous liberation, and empowerment.

Narrow frame

Scope