Integral Facticity [+] Enactive Fallibilism
Integral Facticity examines human action and development as situated within biological, psychological, historical, social, institutional, and political-economic conditions. It asks how freedom, agency, identity, and development emerge within circumstances that are never entirely of our own making.
Enactive Fallibilism provides the Institute’s methodological orientation: knowledge is situated, revisable, and achieved through ongoing engagement with the world. Claims remain accountable to evidence, argument, experience, comparison, and practice rather than being treated as final or self-validating.
Together, the pair provides the philosophical and methodological foundation for the Institute’s wider research.
Health Informatics [+] Integral Human Development
Health Informatics studies how information, digital systems, institutions, and practices shape health, care, decision-making, and access to knowledge.
Integral Human Development places these systems within a broader account of dignity, agency, capability, participation, relationship, and flourishing. Drawing on the capability approach, contextual behavioral science, and the Catholic social tradition of integral human development, the axis asks not only whether systems function efficiently, but what kinds of human capacities and forms of life they enable.
This axis provides the principal applied domain for the Institute’s current work on health and human development.
Digital Ethnography [+] Political Anthropology
Digital Ethnography studies online communities, intellectual networks, organizations, platforms, and digital publics as lived social environments in which meaning, identity, authority, and collective life are continually negotiated.
Political Anthropology extends this inquiry toward power, institutions, civil society, political economy, state formation, collective identity, and the organization of public life.
The axis examines how communication and power interact across contemporary institutions, drawing in part on traditions of communicative action, public reason, and democratic theory while remaining attentive to conflict, domination, institutional structure, and historical change.
Digital Technology [+] Integral Humanism
Digital Technology investigates the role of digital media, computational systems, artificial intelligence, automation and emerging embodied technologies in shaping human capacities, relationships, institutions and public life. Its concern extends beyond technological performance to the conditions under which technical systems enable, mediate or constrain knowledge, agency and participation.
Integral Humanism situates these developments within a broader philosophical anthropology attentive to embodied existence, dignity, freedom, human development, social relationships and the plurality of human purposes. Drawing on the Institute's integral and post-secular intellectual foundations, the axis investigates technology neither as an autonomous source of progress nor simply as an external threat to human life, but as part of the historically situated conditions through which human beings act and develop.
Current research examines AI-assisted knowledge work, human–AI collaboration, cognitive accessibility and the relationship between technological assistance and human judgment. These investigations also inform the Institute's work in health informatics, digital ethnography and the development of IACT. Emerging interests in embodied AI and robotics remain exploratory.
Digital Curation [+] Knowledge Management
Digital Curation studies the selection, organization, preservation, verification, and long-term stewardship of digital knowledge.
Knowledge Management examines how knowledge moves through organizations and research environments: how it is created, retrieved, evaluated, shared, remembered, and mobilized.
Current work includes research workflows, provenance, institutional memory, AI-mediated knowledge systems, open-access practices, and the development of reliable knowledge architectures. The axis approaches curation not simply as storage, but as a form of stewardship that preserves context, accountability, and future usability.
Library Management [+] Information Science
Library Management examines libraries and curated research collections as active infrastructures for inquiry, learning, dialogue, and public formation.
Information Science provides methods for understanding how information is organized, described, retrieved, evaluated, and made accessible across changing technical environments.
Together, the axis explores collection development, research libraries, metadata and retrieval, plural forms of knowledge, information access, and the role of libraries and knowledge institutions in supporting publics underserved by purely commercial information systems.