TATO’s research agenda will focus on six major streams:
- abstraction
- meta- theory
- public sociology
- epistemic justice
- globalization
- systemic-conspiracy (military industrial complex).
This agenda will facilitate and assist scholars already working in these areas, and spearhead collaborative projects, starting with developing research papers, articles., blogs, and survey research. These six areas have distinct importance but also overlap in various ways. For example, Public Sociology, Epistemic Justice, and the Military-Industrial Complex all concern the worldviews of citizens and the outcomes of justice and peace. TATO's public role, beyond research, would be to educate citizenry as well as other think tanks and intellectuals on the 'deep' nature of the problem, and lead the way in extricating ourselves from it.
Abstraction is the core methodology, and motif/theme/aesthetic, but all research areas are vitally important. Centrality is given to abstraction for a multitude of reasons, including but not limited to:
- The meta-problem is that the "problem" is too abstract. Extant global crises, such as climate change are perpetuated in large part by systemic denial and ignorance of the consequences of society. Climate change is not a technical challenge so much as it is a political paradox, and the suppression of it is a free market aberration.
- Abstraction as a general process of simplification or ideation, subject to (ab-)use. Beward false or "vicious" abstractions, that bastardize and adulterate information. TATO maps knowledge with depth and veracity (truth distillation) into a superordinate knowledge framework and superrationality, enabling the depoliticizing and demystification of complex phenomena.
- The great volume and specificity of existing abstraction research - from philosophy and social theory to AI and globalization - needs consolidation and more validation and exposure. Abstraction can be revitalized in the emergent paradigm of metamodernism.
- Abstraction as a problem solving methodology is meta-, recursive, self-referential, self-evident. It is an autocritique; examination of conscience.
TATO's consolidated research library is 4000+, with 500+ critical titles (partial list below), on abstraction proper and sociological abstraction. We are inviting scholars already working on TATO’s core issues, to collaborate on the research agenda and consensus building via abstraction. A broad goal of the research agenda is to advance the paradigm of metamodernism, and to communicate findings through simple abstract models and profound statements. White Papers on the other five areas are forthcoming, with support.