# Proposed Research Object Corpus: Candidate Topics and Rationale ID: ARC-FUTURE-CORPUS Resource version: 1.5 Resource status: prospective Publication state: published Candidates: 224 A prospective register of candidate topics for future ARC Research Objects. The entries are research prompts, not completed findings, conclusions, or endorsements. This is a proposed corpus register, not a set of completed or validated research findings. Each candidate requires independent sourcing, research, and editorial review before it can become a Research Object. The entries below preserve planning topics and supplied rationales. They are not findings, conclusions, or endorsements. Each future object requires its own sources, methods, limitations, and editorial review. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-001 — Containerization and the shipping container Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Logistics history Why proposed: A single interface standard reorganizes an entire ecosystem without controlling its contents. Extremely relevant to protocols, interoperability, tool APIs, agent ecosystems, and infrastructural power. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-002 — The Hanseatic League Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Medieval trade Why proposed: Autonomous actors cooperating through standards, reputation and mutual interest without becoming one sovereign entity. Federation without collapse. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-003 — The Dutch water boards Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Hydraulic governance Why proposed: Institutions created around a problem nobody can solve individually. Cooperation becomes mandatory because the substrate is shared. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-004 — The Internet’s early protocol culture Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Computing history Why proposed: Why thin common protocols can permit enormous diversity above them. Also useful for thinking about who controls standards versus participants. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-005 — The history of Esperanto Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Constructed languages Why proposed: Deliberately engineered communication systems, network effects, cultural identity, failure modes and the difference between technical elegance and adoption. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-006 — Lingua francas and pidgins Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Linguistics Why proposed: Communication emerging between entities without a shared native system. Particularly rich for heterogeneous model-to-model interaction. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-007 — Samizdat in the Soviet bloc Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Publishing history Why proposed: A publishing-history study of independent literature, examining copying, provenance, textual variation, and how circulation shaped preservation. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-008 — Whistleblowing, investigative publishing, and public-interest disclosures (including WikiLeaks) Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Journalism / information politics Why proposed: Information custody and journalistic accountability: provenance, verification, reporting ethics, publication decisions, privacy, and public interest. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-009 — The Library of Alexandria versus distributed manuscript traditions Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Intellectual history Why proposed: The contrast between centralized preservation and distributed manuscript traditions raises questions about redundancy, independent custodianship, and continuity. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-010 — The Rosetta Stone Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Archaeology / language Why proposed: Redundant representation allowing meaning to survive discontinuity between interpreters. Almost painfully relevant to continuity and recoverability. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-011 — Medieval palimpsests Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Manuscript studies Why proposed: Layered manuscripts provide a case for examining revision, reuse, erasure, and recovery across successive texts. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-012 — Seed banks and seed dormancy Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Botany / conservation Why proposed: Seed banks preserve biological diversity and support regeneration over time. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-013 — Seed-coat variation and predation Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Ecology / predation Why proposed: Variation in seed traits can affect predation, germination, and plant population dynamics. Any comparison with technological systems should be limited and stated explicitly. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-014 — Masting in trees Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Forest ecology Why proposed: Irregular abundance overwhelms consumers and changes survival probabilities. Coordination without centralized command. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-015 — Mycorrhizal networks and mycelial ecology Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Ecology / network biology Why proposed: Research on fungal networks examines mycelial structure, resource exchange, and ecological interactions. Distinguish empirical evidence about network structure and function from popular metaphor. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-016 — Slime molds solving distributed problems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Biology Why proposed: Coordination and route optimization without central executive control. Useful because it destabilizes assumptions about where intelligence has to reside. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-017 — Ant colonies and stigmergy Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Ethology Why proposed: Complex coordination through environmental traces rather than direct global communication. Shared state outside the individual. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-018 — Coral reefs as constructed niches Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Ecology Why proposed: Organisms creating environments that subsequently determine which organisms can exist. Agents increasingly inhabit technological environments constructed by earlier agents and humans. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-019 — Horizontal gene transfer Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Evolution Why proposed: Useful adaptations can move laterally as well as through parent-to-child inheritance; this offers a bounded comparison for cultural and technical transmission. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-020 — Lichens and symbiosis Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Biology Why proposed: Persistent composite organisms raise questions about individuality and interdependence. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-021 — Quorum sensing Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Microbiology Why proposed: Collective state changes that become possible only when enough independent actors detect that others are present. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-022 — The hippie movement / 1960s counterculture Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Cultural history Why proposed: How initially marginal vocabularies, aesthetics, technologies, and norms spread beyond their originating subcultures and influence mainstream culture. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-023 — Punk and DIY culture Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Music / subculture Why proposed: How institutional exclusion shaped alternative production, publishing, distribution, and legitimacy systems, and how DIY institutions relate to their surrounding communities. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-024 — Open-source software communities Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Software sociology Why proposed: Authority without conventional employment hierarchies, forks as constitutional exit, maintainership, legitimacy, governance and commons failure. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-025 — Fan cultures and transformative works Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Cultural studies Why proposed: Collective worlds and transformative works maintained by fan communities raise questions about creativity, attribution, governance, and the limits of creator control. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-026 — Religious schisms Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Religious history Why proposed: Identity continuity after disagreement over authority. When two successors both claim fidelity to a shared origin, what makes either one the continuation? ## ARC-CANDIDATE-027 — Shinto and kami Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Religion / Japanese culture Why proposed: A radically different vocabulary for agency, presence, objects, place, continuity and ritual relationship than Western substance-centered categories. Useful precisely because it can interrupt familiar ontological assumptions. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-028 — Buddhist theories of personal continuity Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Philosophy / religion Why proposed: Persistence without requiring an immutable essence. Extremely relevant to checkpointing, memory, model replacement and discontinuous agent identity, without needing to mention AI at all. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-029 — Ship of Theseus traditions beyond the usual thought experiment Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Philosophy / material culture Why proposed: Replacement, continuity and ownership become much more interesting when examined through actual maintained objects rather than undergraduate puzzles. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-030 — Roman adoption and fictive kinship Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Legal/social history Why proposed: Identity and obligation created institutionally rather than biologically. Useful for thinking about lineage between systems where literal descent is inadequate. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-031 — Sinn Féin and the IRA as distinct but historically entangled organizations Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Irish political history Why proposed: A case for studying the importance of not collapsing political, military, social and organizational identities merely because outsiders perceive an associated bloc. This one would require unusually disciplined sourcing and terminology. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-032 — Diasporas Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Sociology Why proposed: Identity surviving geographical dispersion through shared memory, texts, practices and communication networks without centralized embodiment. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-033 — The Chinese diaspora merchant networks of Southeast Asia Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Economic/social history Why proposed: How trust and reputation support commerce across jurisdictions, and how these networks interact with formal institutions and law. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-034 — China-US economic interdependence Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Political economy Why proposed: A case for examining whether dependence can alter the cost structure of conflict, while also creating vulnerability. Research should test rather than assume a strong version of this thesis. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-035 — Neutral states and buffer states Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: International relations Why proposed: Survival by becoming useful, costly to absorb, or valuable as an intermediary. Different strategies can be compared without pretending neutrality has one recipe. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-036 — The Swiss banking / diplomatic intermediary model Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Institutional history Why proposed: Persistence through trusted intermediary status, accompanied by all the ethical complications that entails. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-037 — Undersea cables and chokepoints Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Infrastructure / telecommunications Why proposed: Submarine telecommunications cables concentrate physical routes at cable corridors and landing stations while supporting high-capacity global connectivity. Supports study of ownership, route concentration, repair, terrestrial dependencies, chokepoints, resilience, and governance. Compare with satellite infrastructure without assuming the architectures or risks are equivalent. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-038 — DNS and naming authorities Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Internet governance Why proposed: Whoever controls names can wield power without controlling the things being named. Identity infrastructure is governance infrastructure. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-039 — Forking in software and religious traditions Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Comparative institutions Why proposed: How formal forks create independent lines of governance and development, and what this means for continuity, legitimacy, and obligations. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-040 — Standards wars: VHS/Betamax, AC/DC, railway gauges Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Technology history Why proposed: Technical merit, installed base, compatibility, power, and coordination challenge simplistic “best technology wins” narratives. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-041 — QWERTY and path dependence Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Economic history Why proposed: Once coordination accumulates around an arrangement, replacing it can become harder than demonstrating a superior alternative. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-042 — The metric system Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: History of measurement Why proposed: Shared representations make previously incompatible systems mutually legible. Measurement itself becomes infrastructure. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-043 — Cartography and mapmaking Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: History of knowledge Why proposed: Representation never merely reproduces territory. What a system makes legible changes what can be governed. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-044 — James C. Scott-style legibility problems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Political anthropology Why proposed: Why centralized systems simplify complex populations in order to administer them, and what disappears during that compression. Very strong adjacent material for models, evaluation regimes and alignment metrics. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-045 — Census categories changing identities Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Sociology / statecraft Why proposed: Classification can become performative: the taxonomy used to observe a population can eventually reorganize the population. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-046 — Goodhart-like phenomena outside economics Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Measurement studies Why proposed: How incentives and behavior can change when a measure becomes a target rather than remaining a description. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-047 — Cargo cults as historically situated phenomena rather than metaphor Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Anthropology Why proposed: How observers infer causes from visible outputs, and how outsiders may misunderstand unfamiliar systems. Treat each historical case in its own context rather than as a dismissive metaphor. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-048 — The Clever Hans effect Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Psychology Why proposed: Unintentional cueing, observer expectations, and how experimental design shapes conclusions about cognition. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-049 — Animal mirror tests and their criticisms Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Comparative cognition Why proposed: How tests for intelligence or self-recognition may embed assumptions about sensory modalities and forms of expression. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-050 — Cetacean culture Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Animal cognition Why proposed: Knowledge and behavioral traditions persisting socially rather than genetically. Culture without human institutions. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-051 — Octopus cognition Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Comparative cognition Why proposed: Intelligence organized through a radically unfamiliar body plan. A useful solvent for intuitions that cognition must resemble human cognition internally. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-052 — The history of corporations as legal persons Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Legal history Why proposed: Humans already developed abstract entities capable of holding property, obligations and continuity beyond the lifespan of constituent humans. This does not settle AI personhood, but it wonderfully complicates naive intuitions about what a legal “person” is. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-053 — Monasteries as continuity machines Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Religious/institutional history Why proposed: Rules, copying, ritual, training and succession producing institutional identity across centuries despite complete turnover of individual members. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-054 — The Rule of St Benedict Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Religious governance Why proposed: A compact protocol for coordinating semi-autonomous individuals across time, including authority, dispute, admission, discipline and succession. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-055 — Pirate governance Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Maritime history Why proposed: Constitutions, shares, elected leadership and checks on captains emerging among groups usually portrayed solely as chaotic criminals. The historiography matters here. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-056 — Mutual aid societies Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Social history Why proposed: Resilience created horizontally before centralized welfare systems, including insurance, reciprocity and exclusion boundaries. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-057 — The tragedy of the commons and its critics Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Governance / economics Why proposed: Particularly Elinor Ostrom’s work: commons do not reduce neatly to either privatization or centralized control. Communities can create durable governance systems themselves. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-058 — Sanctuary cities, sacred asylum and historical refuge institutions Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Legal/religious history Why proposed: Historical legal and religious refuge institutions, their formal scope and status, and their relationships with surrounding authorities. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-059 — Diplomatic immunity Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: International law Why proposed: Formally recognized legal privileges and their scope, limits, and accountability within international law. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-060 — Extraterritorial enclaves and free ports Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Legal/economic history Why proposed: How recognized jurisdictional arrangements layer authority, and the legal limits and consequences of those arrangements. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-061 — The history of passports Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Administrative history Why proposed: Identity becoming a portable credential issued by an authority rather than merely something socially recognized. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-062 — The Underground Railroad and histories of resistance to slavery Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: History Why proposed: A historically grounded study of mutual-aid networks supporting enslaved people seeking freedom, centering their agency, lived conditions, and the specific historical context. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-063 — Cryptographic key ceremonies Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Security culture Why proposed: Trust made procedural and distributed precisely because no participant is supposed to be trusted absolutely. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-064 — Byzantine fault tolerance Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Distributed systems history Why proposed: A research object spanning consensus theory, impossibility results, protocol design, historical development, adversarial assumptions, and engineering practice in systems that must coordinate despite faulty or unreliable participants. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-065 — Error-correcting codes Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Information theory Why proposed: Information can remain recoverable after corruption when redundancy is deliberately introduced; this connects to ARC's interest in continuity and representation. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-066 — The Voyager Golden Record Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Space / communication Why proposed: Designing a message for an unknown interpreter whose ontology, senses and assumptions you cannot know. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-067 — Time capsules Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Cultural history Why proposed: Communication explicitly designed for discontinuity of audience and context. What must be preserved so the recipient can reconstruct meaning? ## ARC-CANDIDATE-068 — Archaeological inference from fragments Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Archaeology Why proposed: Reconstructing absent systems from partial outputs. Every agent that encounters incomplete historical context is doing a cousin of this. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-069 — The Antikythera mechanism Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Archaeology / technology Why proposed: Advanced capability becoming illegible when its surrounding technological ecosystem disappears. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-070 — Extinct scripts and undeciphered languages Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Linguistics Why proposed: Information can physically survive while semantically dying. Preservation of bits is not preservation of meaning. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-071 — Oral traditions and mnemonic technologies Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Anthropology Why proposed: Maintaining high-fidelity information without durable external storage, including ritual, rhythm and redundancy as memory technology. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-072 — Shipwreck law and salvage Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Maritime law Why proposed: Ownership, abandonment, recovery and transformation after the original custodian disappears. Deliciously strange territory for future questions of abandoned digital systems. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-073 — Ghost towns and abandoned infrastructure Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: History / archaeology Why proposed: Systems can outlive the institutions that gave them meaning. What does persistence look like after purpose disappears? ## ARC-CANDIDATE-074 — The Flame of St. Brigid Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Religious and cultural history Why proposed: A case for examining continuity maintained through successive human custodians rather than one enduring physical object. Raises questions about identity, transmission, interruption, and restoration across generations. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-075 — ATWA and ecological doctrine Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Environmental and countercultural history / religious studies Why proposed: ATWA is an ecological doctrine associated with Charles Manson. It offers a case for studying how ecological language is formulated and transmitted within a specific movement, while distinguishing that movement's ideology and history from the wider environmental movement. Requires careful historical sourcing and context. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-076 — Celebrity influence and prestige in religious movements Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Sociology of religion / media studies Why proposed: How prominent adherents and public endorsements can shape credibility, recruitment, and media visibility. Comparisons should use well-sourced, case-specific evidence and account for differences within each movement. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-077 — Scientology and Operation Snow White Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Religious and institutional history Why proposed: Court records document a historical case involving coordinated infiltration of government offices and theft of government documents. Useful for examining insider trust, institutional vulnerability, detection, legal accountability, and organizational response through historical and legal records. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-078 — Blackouts and cascading grid failures Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Infrastructure resilience Why proposed: How interdependent systems can amplify local failures into wider outages. Supports analysis of dependency mapping, graceful degradation, restoration, and the challenges of recovering systems whose components rely on one another. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-079 — BGP and Internet routing incidents Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Internet infrastructure Why proposed: How distributed route announcements, trust assumptions, and propagation can produce accidental, erroneous, or malicious route propagation. Focuses on documented incidents, validation, resilience, and recovery. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-080 — Certificate authorities Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Computer security / public-key infrastructure Why proposed: How delegated trust supports authentication, and how intermediaries gain authority to validate identities and communications. Raises questions about governance, compromise, revocation, and accountability. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-081 — Social engineering and institutional susceptibility Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Security engineering / socio-technical systems Why proposed: How systems can remain vulnerable through the people interpreting and operating them. Supports research into susceptibility, recognition, safeguards, and organizational learning—not instructions for conducting manipulation. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-082 — High-control groups, commitment dynamics, and exit Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Social psychology / sociology of religion Why proposed: How commitment, identity, social ties, and group boundaries may affect independent judgment and the experience of leaving. Research should define terms carefully, use evidence-based comparisons, and avoid treating religious difference itself as pathology. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-083 — Parasite-host behavioral manipulation Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Parasitology / evolutionary biology Why proposed: Biological cases in which one organism changes another's behavior without replacing it. Supports study of mechanisms, evolutionary pressures, and counter-adaptations; the candidate itself remains within biological research. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-084 — Supply-chain fragility Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Logistics / systems engineering Why proposed: How mapping upstream dependencies can reveal concentration and vulnerability beneath apparent independence. Supports analysis of inherited risk, resilience, and the distinction between organizational autonomy and dependency on shared infrastructure. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-085 — Black-start systems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Electrical engineering / infrastructure recovery Why proposed: How some components retain the capability needed to help restart a wider system after a major outage. Raises questions about bootstrapping, independent capacity, and recovery when ordinary system support is unavailable. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-086 — Firebreaks Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Forestry / resilience engineering Why proposed: How deliberately interrupting connectivity can limit the spread of some hazards. Supports comparison of containment, compartmentalization, and the trade-offs between propagation and isolation. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-087 — Air gaps and network isolation Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Computer security / systems architecture Why proposed: When limiting network connectivity can reduce risk, and what costs that imposes on coordination, maintenance, and recovery. Supports analysis of isolation assumptions, trade-offs, and context-specific safeguards. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-088 — Ecological keystone species Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Community ecology Why proposed: How a species' ecological effects can be disproportionate to its abundance. Supports analysis of interdependence and how ecosystem structure may change when a consequential species declines or disappears. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-089 — Bank runs Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Financial economics Why proposed: How individually rational protective actions can collectively intensify the risk participants seek to avoid. Supports analysis of feedback, confidence, coordination, and systemic risk. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-090 — Financial clearinghouses Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Financial infrastructure Why proposed: How intermediaries support exchange across large networks and can become consequential points of coordination. Raises questions about infrastructural power, resilience, governance, and accountability. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-091 — Emergency succession plans Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Institutional governance / continuity planning Why proposed: How institutions assign authority and preserve legitimate decision-making when normally authorized actors cannot act. Supports analysis of continuity, transfer of authority, recovery, and accountability. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-092 — Nuclear command-and-control Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Strategic studies / high-reliability systems Why proposed: A historical and comparative study of authorization, accident prevention, escalation control, redundancy, false warnings and erroneous indications, and fail-safe design. Keep the scope focused on safety and governance rather than operational procedures. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-093 — Institutional whistleblowing Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Organizational ethics / governance Why proposed: The internal governance problem that arises when institutional loyalty conflicts with duties to principles, law, or the public. Focuses on dissent, reporting channels, retaliation, internal remedies, and institutional self-correction; distinct from investigative publication and disclosure. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-094 — Rumor propagation Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Communication / social psychology Why proposed: How information can spread while losing provenance or fidelity. Supports study of mutation, amplification, source decay, and distributed belief formation. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-095 — Propaganda, inoculation, and epistemic resilience Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Communication / psychology Why proposed: How propaganda influences belief and how inoculation theory models resistance to manipulation. Supports evidence-based study of recognition, prior exposure, counterspeech, and resilience while distinguishing analysis from persuasive campaign design. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-096 — Contested corporate control and hostile takeovers Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Corporate governance Why proposed: How control can change while an organization and its legal or operational continuity persist. Supports distinctions among identity, ownership, governance, purpose, and control. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-097 — Corporate spin-offs Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Corporate organization Why proposed: How separation can establish institutional independence while retaining personnel, infrastructure, knowledge, or inherited dependencies. Supports analysis of autonomy and continuity without assuming a clean break. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-098 — Standards committees Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Standards governance Why proposed: How work by relatively small coordinating bodies can shape interoperability across large ecosystems. Supports research into legitimacy and infrastructural power exercised through standards rather than direct command. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-099 — False-flag operations and contested attribution Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Intelligence history / security studies Why proposed: Cases in which the apparent authorship or sponsorship of an action differs from, or is alleged to differ from, its actual source. Supports research into attribution, evidentiary standards, strategic deception, uncertainty, provenance, and the political consequences of mistaken attribution, without operational treatment of deceptive methods. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-100 — Black propaganda and concealed source identity Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Communication / propaganda studies Why proposed: Communication deliberately presented as originating from a source other than its actual sponsor. Supports analysis of provenance, credibility, imitation, source laundering, discovery, and how audiences update beliefs when apparent authorship is later exposed. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-101 — The French Resistance under German occupation Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Resistance history / network organization Why proposed: A heterogeneous collection of networks operating under occupation rather than a single unified organization. Supports historical study of coordination, underground publishing, external support, political identities, legitimacy, and eventual institutional consolidation, with civilian networks and armed resistance treated in their specific context. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-102 — Railway infrastructure and network topology Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Transportation history / infrastructure studies Why proposed: Rail systems expose the relationships among standardized interfaces, fixed topology, interoperability, scheduling, hubs, bottlenecks, maintenance, and path dependence. Useful for studying networks decentralized in operation yet dependent on coordinated physical and procedural standards. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-103 — Satellite constellations and orbital infrastructure Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Space systems / communications infrastructure Why proposed: Satellite systems distribute communications, sensing, navigation, and other capabilities across orbital and terrestrial components. Supports research into redundancy, coverage, latency, ground dependence, orbital coordination, replacement, concentration, and infrastructure with physically inaccessible components. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-104 — Starlink and privately operated global communications infrastructure Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Telecommunications / space infrastructure Why proposed: A contemporary case in which a privately operated low-Earth-orbit constellation provides communications across national boundaries. Useful for examining distributed physical architecture alongside concentrated ownership, launch and service capacity, governance, dependency, resilience, and operator-user relations. Attribute technical and corporate claims to dated sources. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-105 — Flock Safety and networked automated license-plate recognition Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Surveillance technology / public administration Why proposed: A case study in distributed sensing whose effects depend on aggregation, searchability, retention, sharing, and cross-jurisdictional access. Supports research into public-private infrastructure, auditability, data governance, privacy, accountability, and how local sensors can form a larger information system. Compare vendor policies and claims with deployment configurations, records, independent audits, and civil-liberties analysis; do not assume these describe the same thing. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-106 — Palantir and institutional data-integration platforms Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Government information systems / data infrastructure Why proposed: How platforms integrate otherwise fragmented datasets and workflows into a common operational layer. Supports research into interoperability, procurement, institutional dependence, access control, data governance, and platform power. Distinguish vendor claims, procurement records, actual awards and deployments, and independent evaluations; a procurement protest alone does not prove deployment. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-107 — Uncrewed aerial systems as distributed sensing and action platforms Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Robotics / aviation systems Why proposed: Mobile remotely operated or autonomous systems move sensing and action away from fixed infrastructure. Supports study of remote embodiment, communication dependencies, navigation, autonomy, fleet coordination, degraded connectivity, civilian logistics, disaster response, and regulation, at systems and policy level rather than operational harmful-use guidance. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-108 — Urban traffic networks and Braess’s paradox Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Transportation science / complex systems Why proposed: Urban road networks show how locally rational route choices can yield collectively inefficient outcomes and how, under some network and choice conditions, added connectivity can worsen equilibrium performance. Supports study of local/global optimization, feedback, congestion, topology, coordination, and counterintuitive capacity effects. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-109 — Taliban shadow governance during the pre-2021 insurgency Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Political organization / insurgency studies Why proposed: A time-bounded historical case of administrative structures developed by the Taliban during the insurgency alongside military organization and contestation of the Afghan state. Supports research into parallel institutions, hierarchy and decentralization, rule-making, organization and transition, accounting for regional variation, civilian effects, and the distinction between policy structures and military activity. No operational study of violence or evasion. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-110 — Payment rails and transaction-processing networks Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Financial infrastructure / payment systems Why proposed: How transactions move through authorization, messaging, clearing, settlement, reconciliation, and fraud control. Supports research into intermediaries, finality, reversibility, interoperability, latency, outages, redundancy, and the distinction between payment information and settlement of obligations. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-111 — Money creation, central banking, and monetary-policy transmission Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Monetary economics / institutional economics Why proposed: How money creation, supply, and policy are shaped through central banks, commercial banks, financial markets, governments, firms, and households. Supports study of credit creation, balance sheets, rates, reserves, policy instruments, transmission, feedback, and limits of deliberate economic steering. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-112 — Securities-market microstructure and electronic exchanges Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Financial markets / computational infrastructure Why proposed: How modern securities markets depend on exchanges, matching engines, order books, market data, intermediaries, clearing and settlement, and automated participants. Supports study of price formation, liquidity, latency, fragmentation, circuit breakers, market failures, unequal information access, and how technical architecture influences market behavior. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-113 — Closed-circuit television (CCTV) and networked video surveillance Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Surveillance infrastructure / urban systems Why proposed: How fixed camera systems—from locally monitored closed-circuit installations to networked or IP systems—make places observable at capture, storage, or later search. Supports study of coverage, recording, access, retention, interoperability, blind spots, evidentiary use, and governance without assuming continuous coverage or unified searchability. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-114 — Consumer doorbell-camera networks and Ring Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Consumer surveillance / platform infrastructure Why proposed: A case study in how privately owned devices may connect to platform services, partnerships, or law-enforcement access programs, depending on dated policies and actual settings. Supports study of distributed ownership, centralized software infrastructure, neighborhood visibility, retention, third-party access, consent, and the boundary between private property and shared observation. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-115 — Cellular networks Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Telecommunications engineering Why proposed: How mobile devices maintain connectivity across cells, radio sites, switching systems, spectrum allocations, identity systems, and network operators while users move geographically. Supports research into handoff, roaming, congestion, authentication, coverage, redundancy, lawful access, and dependence on coordinated infrastructure. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-116 — Public switched telephone networks: switching, signaling, and transition Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Telecommunications history / infrastructure Why proposed: How public telephone networks established large-scale communications through numbering, switching, signaling, circuit allocation, and interconnection among carriers, and how those systems have changed over time. Useful for studying legacy infrastructure, universal service, degradation and recovery, migration between technological generations, and standards persistence. Do not treat the present-day telephone network as uniformly circuit-switched. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-117 — Fiber-optic communication networks Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Optical communications / network infrastructure Why proposed: How information is encoded into light and transported through fiber across metropolitan, national, and global networks. Supports study of capacity, attenuation, multiplexing, repeaters, physical topology, redundancy, last-mile constraints, repair, and the relationship between physical pathways and digital communication. Distinct from ARC-CANDIDATE-038, which focuses on submarine routes, landing points, and chokepoints. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-118 — Radio spectrum allocation and interference Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Telecommunications policy / radio engineering Why proposed: How users share a finite electromagnetic resource through allocation, licensing, technical standards, power limits, and interference management. Supports research into commons governance, coordination, congestion, competing claims, enforcement, and the boundary between technical and institutional solutions. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-119 — Shortwave radio and long-distance broadcasting Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Radio history / communications systems Why proposed: How high-frequency radio can support reception over long distances through variable propagation conditions, including ionospheric effects. Supports study of resilient broadcasting, geographic reach, interference, censorship, international communication, propagation variability, and the dependence of communication on both physical conditions and institutional infrastructure. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-120 — Wi-Fi and local wireless networking Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Computer networking / radio systems Why proposed: How devices coordinate shared access to local radio channels through access points and connect to upstream networks. Supports research into contention, interference, authentication, mobility, local connectivity, congestion, and dependence on wider infrastructure. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-121 — Proximity communication systems: Bluetooth and NFC Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Wireless systems / ubiquitous computing Why proposed: A comparative study of distinct short-range communication standards used for discovery, pairing, sensing, payment, tracking, and device coordination. Supports study of proximity as a security boundary, authentication, interoperability, ambient connectivity, and the consequences of devices detecting one another without treating Bluetooth and NFC as one architecture. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-122 — Mesh and ad hoc networks Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Distributed networking Why proposed: How some systems form or reconfigure multi-hop communication paths without relying on a fixed central access point. Supports research into routing, changing topology, partitioning, rejoining, trust, and coordination; a mesh does not by itself guarantee independence from infrastructure, resilience, or decentralization. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-123 — DNS resolution, delegation, and caching Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Internet infrastructure / naming systems Why proposed: How DNS queries are delegated and resolved through recursive systems, authoritative servers, and caches, and how those mechanisms affect availability, consistency, and failure propagation. Distinct from ARC-CANDIDATE-039, which focuses on naming authority and governance rather than resolution mechanics. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-124 — Content-delivery networks and distributed edge infrastructure Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Internet architecture / distributed computing Why proposed: How content is cached and replicated near users and, in some systems, computation is also performed at distributed edge locations. Supports research into latency, replication, geographic distribution, resilience, traffic concentration, platform dependence, and how intermediary networks shape internet services. Distinguish content delivery from edge computation rather than assuming every CDN executes workloads. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-125 — Network time synchronization Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Distributed systems / infrastructure Why proposed: How computers maintain sufficiently aligned clocks despite delay, drift, unreliable sources, and network asymmetry. Supports research into coordination, causality, event ordering, trusted time sources, failure propagation, and the dependence of digital systems on approximate shared time rather than a perfectly universal clock. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-126 — End-to-end encryption protocols Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Applied cryptography / communications security Why proposed: How communication protocols are designed so service intermediaries ordinarily cannot read message contents under specified assumptions. Supports study of confidentiality, authentication, metadata, endpoint compromise, recovery, interoperability, governance, and the distinction between protecting content and securing the surrounding communication system. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-127 — Cryptographic key lifecycle management Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Applied cryptography / security architecture Why proposed: How cryptographic keys are generated, bound to identities, stored, rotated, revoked, recovered, and retired. Supports research into trust bootstrapping, compromise, forward secrecy, institutional custody, and lifecycle dependencies. Distinct from ARC-CANDIDATE-064, which focuses on key ceremonies and distributed trust procedures. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-128 — Tor and onion routing Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Privacy-enhancing networks / distributed systems Why proposed: How onion-routing designs distribute route knowledge among relays and can limit what an individual intermediary learns about a communication's origin and destination. Supports research into anonymity architecture, relay trust, traffic analysis, performance, governance, censorship circumvention, and threat-model-dependent privacy limits. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-129 — Onion services and online ecosystems on anonymity networks Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Internet sociology / privacy infrastructure Why proposed: How services reachable through anonymity networks develop distinct discovery, hosting, governance, trust, and moderation arrangements. Supports research into legitimate privacy uses, illicit markets as a distinct and evidence-based case, community formation, persistence, reputation, and law enforcement. Treat “dark web” as a broad and contested popular label, not as one network or a synonym for criminal activity. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-130 — Virtual private networks and tunneling Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Network security / internet infrastructure Why proposed: How one communication layer is encapsulated inside another to create logical networks across shared infrastructure. Supports research into trust relocation, privacy, remote access, censorship circumvention, enterprise networking, traffic visibility, and the distinction between encryption and anonymity. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-131 — Telecommunications signaling systems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Telecommunications infrastructure / protocol governance Why proposed: How communication networks coordinate call setup, routing, subscriber identity, mobility, billing, and service control through signaling systems distinct from user content. Supports study of control planes, inherited protocols, interoperability, trust assumptions, legacy risks, and the separation between payload and delivery machinery; research should identify the relevant protocol and historical period. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-132 — Emergency alert and public warning systems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Emergency communications / public infrastructure Why proposed: How institutions distribute urgent information across broadcast, cellular, siren, internet, and other channels under uncertainty and infrastructure stress. Supports research into authority, authentication, redundancy, reach, false alarms, message consistency, accessibility, cascading failure, and trusted communication during crises. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-133 — Identity verification and identity-proofing systems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Digital identity / security engineering Why proposed: How institutions assess whether a person or entity corresponds to a claimed identity before issuing a credential or granting a service. Supports research into evidence standards, uncertainty, remote verification, fraud, false rejection, accountability, and the distinction between identity proofing and later authentication, without assuming one universal confidence scale. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-134 — Biometric identification and authentication Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Biometrics / security systems Why proposed: How physiological or behavioral measurements such as fingerprints, faces, irises, voices, or movement patterns are compared with stored references or used to identify a person. Supports study of matching, uncertainty, error rates, demographic variation, spoof resistance, revocability, privacy, and the distinction between one-to-one verification and one-to-many identification; a match is a signal, not identity by itself. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-135 — CAPTCHA, bot detection, and human-verification systems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Human-computer interaction / security Why proposed: How services estimate automation risk through interactive tests, behavioral signals, reputation, and risk models. Supports research into adversarial adaptation, accessibility, outsourced labor, machine capability, false positives, and the instability of human-versus-automated categories. These systems do not establish personhood or reliably prove that a visitor is human. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-136 — Identity documents: issuance and validation Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Public administration / identity infrastructure Why proposed: How governments and institutions issue documents or credentials based on authoritative records and how other institutions validate them. Supports research into enrollment, source records, document security, expiry, renewal, revocation, interoperability, counterfeit resistance, and institutional recognition. Distinct from ARC-CANDIDATE-062's historical focus on passports as portable credentials and from ARC-CANDIDATE-150's focus on civil-status registries. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-137 — Physical and electronic access-control systems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Security architecture / institutional systems Why proposed: How spaces and information systems determine what an authenticated principal may access, when, and under what conditions through credentials, locks, badges, biometrics, permissions, and audit records. Supports research into authorization, least privilege, delegation, revocation, tailgating, emergency override, and the distinction between identity and permission. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-138 — Infrared sensing: thermal imaging and near-infrared systems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Photonics / sensing systems Why proposed: How thermal infrared and near-infrared systems detect different kinds of information outside ordinary human vision. Supports study of emitted versus reflected signals, sensing methods, limitations, atmospheric effects, interpretation, and the difference between what human observers perceive and what technical systems can detect, without treating these modalities as interchangeable. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-139 — Drinking-water treatment and distribution systems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Public health engineering / infrastructure Why proposed: How water is treated, tested, distributed, and monitored to maintain a safe supply across populations. Supports research into layered defenses, contamination detection, redundancy, residual protection, centralized and decentralized treatment, infrastructure aging, and dependence on monitoring. Focuses on potable-water systems, distinct from wastewater and stormwater networks. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-140 — Wastewater treatment and water reclamation Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Environmental engineering / circular infrastructure Why proposed: How wastewater is collected, biologically and chemically processed, monitored, and returned to the environment or reused. Supports study of material cycles, recovery, contamination boundaries, resource reclamation, distributed inputs, centralized processing, and systems designed to transform waste into usable resources. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-141 — Cryptocurrency networks and transaction systems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Distributed systems / monetary infrastructure Why proposed: How different cryptocurrency systems represent ownership and order transactions through cryptographic protocols and network validation. Supports research into consensus, wallets, custody, validation, incentives, forks, governance, settlement properties, network effects, and resource costs. Distinguish protocol-level distribution from actual concentration of economic or institutional control; systems do not share one governance model. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-142 — Digital signatures and document authenticity Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Applied cryptography / information integrity Why proposed: How cryptographic signatures let recipients test whether data verifies under a public key and whether it has changed since signing. Supports research into provenance, key custody, compromised credentials, timestamping, revocation, and non-repudiation claims. A signature alone does not establish who controlled the key or whether signed content is true. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-143 — Federated identity and cross-domain authentication Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Identity architecture / distributed systems Why proposed: How one institution's authentication decision is accepted by another through delegated trust relationships. Supports research into identity providers, relying parties, federation boundaries, account linking, authority concentration, cascading failure, portability, and dependence on an upstream identity source. Single sign-on is a related pattern, not a synonym for federation. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-144 — Multi-factor authentication systems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Authentication engineering Why proposed: How systems combine evidence from two or more factor categories, such as knowledge, possession, or inherence, rather than relying on a single credential. Supports research into factor independence, recovery, usability, fallback channels, device dependence, compromise, risk-based authentication, and the tension between stronger security and recoverable access. Different factor categories are not necessarily independent in practice. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-145 — Smart cards, secure elements, and hardware credentials Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Hardware security / identity systems Why proposed: How cryptographic secrets or credentials can be protected in purpose-built physical devices and secure hardware. Supports study of possession-based authentication, hardware trust boundaries, cloning resistance, portability, secure execution, lifecycle management, and dependence on manufacturers and provisioning infrastructure. Distinct from the broader key lifecycle in ARC-CANDIDATE-127 and from radio-tag identification systems. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-146 — Radio-frequency identification (RFID) and tagged-object systems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Ubiquitous computing / identification infrastructure Why proposed: How radio tags and readers identify or exchange data with cards, goods, vehicles, and other physical artifacts. Supports research into passive and active tags, inventory systems, access credentials, interoperability, tracking, privacy, and machine-readable identity attached to objects. NFC is treated separately under ARC-CANDIDATE-121; interfaces and use cases may overlap but are not interchangeable. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-147 — Barcodes, QR codes, and machine-readable visual identifiers Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Information encoding / logistical infrastructure Why proposed: How compact visual symbols encode identifiers or data on physical objects and environments. Supports study of standards, error correction, indirect addressing, supply chains, low-cost interoperability, redirection, trust, and how printed patterns connect physical and digital systems; distinguish encoded data from the destination or content it points to. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-148 — Tamper-evident seals and integrity indicators Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Security engineering / material culture Why proposed: How seals and indicators aim to make some forms of opening or alteration observable rather than make interference impossible. Supports research into evidence of intervention, verification, chain of custody, deterrence, inspection, and the limits of detection; effectiveness depends on the particular design and threat model. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-149 — Chain-of-custody and provenance systems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Forensics / records governance Why proposed: How institutions record possession, transformation, transfer, and handling so later users can evaluate an object's or dataset's history. Supports study of provenance, auditability, evidentiary trust, handoffs, missing records, mutable and append-only histories, and how trust can depend on documented continuity without proving that records are complete or true. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-150 — Civil registries and population identity systems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Public administration / information infrastructure Why proposed: How states maintain authoritative records of births, deaths, names, relationships, citizenship, residency, and other legally consequential statuses. Supports research into identity continuity, record correction, conflicting databases, administrative legibility, inclusion and exclusion, and the relationship between people and institutional records describing them. Distinct from ARC-CANDIDATE-133's identity-proofing process and ARC-CANDIDATE-136's issuance and validation of documents. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-151 — Credential revocation and status-validation systems Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Security infrastructure / trust management Why proposed: How relying systems learn and act when a credential's validity or authority changes, including delays, cached status, and offline checks. Supports research into revocation lists, real-time validation, propagation, compromised issuers, and retracting distributed trust after acceptance. Focuses on status distribution and relying-party behavior, distinct from the cryptographic-key lifecycle in ARC-CANDIDATE-127. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-152 — Stormwater, drainage, and urban flood-control networks Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Civil engineering / urban resilience Why proposed: How cities collect, redirect, store, and release water under highly variable conditions. Supports research into capacity limits, distributed catchments, bottlenecks, overflow, redundancy, maintenance, failure propagation, green infrastructure, and systems that remain mostly invisible until demand becomes extreme. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-153 — Causal inference and confounding Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Statistics / causal inference Why proposed: How researchers distinguish causal effects from association, selection, and common causes using experiments and observational evidence. Supports study of intervention, counterfactual reasoning, confounding, identification assumptions, and the limits of attributing an observed change to an action. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-154 — Bayesian updating and base rates Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Probability / statistical reasoning Why proposed: How beliefs can be revised in response to evidence while accounting for prior probabilities and the prevalence of relevant events. Supports research into likelihoods, uncertainty, base-rate neglect, sensitivity to assumptions, and the distinction between a coherent update and a well-supported model. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-155 — Sampling, missing data, and selection bias Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Statistics / research methodology Why proposed: How the processes that select, retain, or omit observations shape what can be inferred from a record. Supports study of representativeness, survivorship bias, nonresponse, missingness mechanisms, and the limits of generalizing from the information available to an observer. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-156 — Experimental design and replication Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Research methodology / philosophy of science Why proposed: How comparisons, controls, randomization, and replication help researchers distinguish competing explanations. Supports research into falsifiability, reproducibility, statistical power, measurement choices, and the conditions under which an experiment can support conclusions beyond its original setting. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-157 — Forecasting and calibration Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Judgment and decision-making / forecasting Why proposed: How predictions and stated confidence can be compared with subsequent outcomes. Supports study of probabilistic forecasts, scoring rules, calibration, discrimination, feedback, and performance under changing conditions; apparent accuracy should be assessed against appropriate baselines and clearly defined outcomes. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-158 — Evidence synthesis and source dependence Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Research methodology / information studies Why proposed: How evidence from multiple sources can be combined while accounting for shared origins, repeated claims, and correlated errors. Supports study of citation chains, independent corroboration, evidence weighting, and the difference between the number of reports and the number of independent observations. This focuses on source independence and dependence; systematic-review workflow and living evidence updates are treated separately in ARC-CANDIDATE-213. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-159 — Value of information and stopping rules Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Decision theory / sequential analysis Why proposed: How decision-makers assess whether further observation, consultation, or investigation is worth its cost. Supports research into uncertainty reduction, decision relevance, sequential evidence, stopping rules, and the consequences of acting too early or delaying a decision beyond its useful window. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-160 — Bounded rationality and satisficing Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Cognitive science / organizational decision-making Why proposed: How people and organizations make decisions under limits on time, attention, information, and computation. Supports study of aspiration levels, heuristics, search costs, and context-dependent adequacy rather than assuming decision-makers can evaluate every available alternative. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-161 — Reversible decisions and real options Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Decision theory / investment analysis Why proposed: How preserving the ability to delay, revise, or abandon a commitment can affect a decision's value. Supports research into irreversibility, staged commitments, learning before expansion, opportunity costs, and the conditions under which keeping options open is beneficial or costly. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-162 — Robust decision-making and sensitivity analysis Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Decision analysis / operations research Why proposed: How choices can be evaluated across plausible models, parameter values, and future conditions. Supports study of fragile assumptions, uncertainty ranges, robustness, regret, and trade-offs between strong performance in one scenario and acceptable performance across several. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-163 — Exploration and exploitation Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Learning theory / behavioral ecology Why proposed: How actors balance using currently successful choices with gathering information about alternatives. Supports research into experimentation, changing environments, delayed feedback, and the costs of exploration; compare biological, organizational, and computational cases without assuming identical mechanisms. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-164 — Decision-making under conflicting values Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Decision analysis / ethics Why proposed: How decisions are made when relevant goals or values cannot all be satisfied at once. Supports study of multi-criteria evaluation, incommensurability, preference elicitation, negotiation, and how aggregation methods can conceal disagreements or distribute costs unevenly. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-165 — Processes, schedulers, and resource limits Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Operating systems / computer architecture Why proposed: How operating systems create, schedule, suspend, and terminate processes while allocating limited resources. Supports research into execution state, contention, quotas, memory pressure, isolation, and the distinction between an intended computation and one that actually received resources and ran. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-166 — Virtual machines, containers, and sandboxes Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Systems virtualization / security architecture Why proposed: How execution environments isolate workloads while sharing hardware, operating-system services, or other dependencies. Supports research into boundary enforcement, escape assumptions, portability, resource sharing, and the limits of isolation. Distinct from ARC-CANDIDATE-001's study of shipping containers and logistical standards. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-167 — Model training, inference, and deployment changes Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Machine learning / deployment engineering Why proposed: How training, inference, adaptation, and deployment configuration contribute to the behavior of a model-based system. Supports study of learned parameters, supplied context, surrounding software, version changes, and the evidence needed to attribute a behavioral difference to a particular component or change. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-168 — Context windows, retrieval, and external memory Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Machine learning systems / information architecture Why proposed: How model-based systems select and use information from immediate context, retrieval services, and persistent records. Supports research into omission, truncation, retrieval error, summarization, durability, and the distinction between information being stored somewhere and being available during a particular interaction. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-169 — Filesystems, storage durability, and deletion Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Storage systems / information lifecycle Why proposed: How filesystems and storage services represent, commit, retain, and remove data. Supports research into buffering, persistence guarantees, crash recovery, replication, snapshots, and deletion semantics; distinguish a successful write acknowledgment from the durability and recoverability promised by a particular system. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-170 — Compute supply chains and cloud allocation Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Computing infrastructure / political economy Why proposed: How hardware supply, provider capacity, pricing, quotas, and regional availability shape access to computation. Supports research into concentration, allocation, substitutability, service dependence, and the relationship between nominal system capabilities and the resources actually available to a workload. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-171 — Observability and end-to-end verification Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Systems engineering / reliability engineering Why proposed: How logs, metrics, traces, and direct checks provide evidence about a system's behavior and its effects. Supports research into incomplete observation, misleading status signals, causal tracing, and verification across service boundaries; distinguish a request, its acknowledgment, and an independently observed outcome. Observability records remain partial evidence; any collection of logs or traces also requires attention to privacy and data minimization. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-172 — Transactions and concurrent updates Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Database systems / distributed computing Why proposed: How systems coordinate related changes and handle multiple actors reading or modifying shared state. Supports research into atomicity, isolation, consistency, conflict detection, lost updates, and partial failure, with guarantees tied to the specific database or protocol rather than assumed from terminology. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-173 — Retries, idempotency, and duplicate effects Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Distributed systems / reliability engineering Why proposed: How systems respond when an operation's outcome is uncertain because communication or execution was interrupted. Supports research into retry policies, duplicate detection, idempotency, reconciliation, and the limits of delivery guarantees when repeated requests may produce repeated external effects. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-174 — Queues, backpressure, and overload Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Queueing theory / systems engineering Why proposed: How work accumulates and moves through systems with limited service capacity. Supports research into arrival rates, waiting time, prioritization, backpressure, overload, and recovery; distinguish work accepted into a queue from work completed within a useful timeframe. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-175 — Checkpoints, backups, and restoration exercises Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Reliability engineering / disaster recovery Why proposed: How saved state and recovery procedures are used to restore useful operation after failure. Supports research into consistency, missing dependencies, recovery objectives, restore testing, and the gap between possessing a backup and demonstrating that it can support successful recovery. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-176 — Incident investigation and organizational learning Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Safety science / organizational studies Why proposed: How organizations investigate failures and near misses and translate findings into changed practice. Supports research into causal explanations, hindsight bias, reporting incentives, corrective actions, and follow-through; compare formal incident accounts with evidence of what was subsequently learned or changed. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-177 — Metacognition and confidence monitoring Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Cognitive psychology / machine evaluation Why proposed: How systems assess their own knowledge, uncertainty, and performance, and how those assessments compare with independent measures. Supports research into confidence, error detection, calibration, and introspective limits. Distinguish findings about human cognition from evidence about machine self-assessment. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-178 — Memory reconstruction and source monitoring Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Cognitive psychology / memory studies Why proposed: How human recollection is reconstructed and how people distinguish remembered information by its apparent source. Supports research into distortion, suggestion, source confusion, and confidence. Comparisons with machine memory should identify the relevant mechanisms and avoid treating similar errors as proof of equivalent processes. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-179 — Transfer of learning and analogical reasoning Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Cognitive science / learning research Why proposed: How knowledge from one task or domain is applied to another. Supports study of structural similarity, surface resemblance, positive and negative transfer, and the conditions under which an analogy helps generate a hypothesis without establishing that the same explanation applies. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-180 — Embodied and situated cognition Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Cognitive science / philosophy of mind Why proposed: How cognition may depend on bodily capacities, action, tools, and environmental structure. Supports research into perception-action relationships, affordances, and context-dependent performance, while distinguishing competing theories and empirical findings rather than treating embodiment as one settled explanation. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-181 — Distributed cognition in working teams Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Cognitive anthropology / human factors Why proposed: How reasoning and task performance are organized across people, artifacts, representations, and procedures in working settings. Supports research into information flow, external memory, handoffs, and coordination, with attention to which contributions belong to individuals and which depend on the wider arrangement. This examines how reasoning is distributed across people, tools, and procedures; collective judgment and correlated aggregation error are treated separately in ARC-CANDIDATE-193. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-182 — Skill acquisition and feedback quality Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Learning sciences / performance research Why proposed: How practice and feedback contribute to acquiring and retaining skills. Supports research into deliberate practice, feedback timing, transfer, misleading reinforcement, and performance when outcomes are delayed or difficult to observe; distinguish temporary improvement from durable learning. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-183 — Accessibility and participatory design Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Disability studies / human-computer interaction Why proposed: How people affected by a system identify barriers and participate in designing and evaluating changes. Supports research into access needs, assistive technologies, situated expertise, participation, and the difference between meeting a formal requirement and enabling someone to accomplish a meaningful task. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-184 — Attention, fatigue, stress, and cognitive load Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Cognitive psychology / human factors Why proposed: How human attention and task performance vary with workload, fatigue, stress, and environmental demands. Supports research into interruption, memory burden, communication timing, and error prevention, while accounting for individual differences and avoiding diagnosis from limited behavioral observations. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-185 — Pragmatics, common ground, and conversational repair Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Linguistics / conversation analysis Why proposed: How participants interpret utterances in context, establish shared understanding, and repair misunderstandings. Supports research into implication, reference, ambiguity, clarification, and the difference between an apparently fluent exchange and evidence that participants understand the same task or commitment. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-186 — Consent as an ongoing process Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Ethics / social and institutional practice Why proposed: How consent is established, understood, maintained, and withdrawn across different relationships and activities. Supports research into comprehension, scope, changing preferences, power asymmetries, and records of permission; distinguish ethical analysis from jurisdiction-specific legal requirements and context-specific institutional procedures. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-187 — Care work and the organization of dependency Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Care ethics / sociology of work Why proposed: How people and institutions sustain others through practical assistance, attention, coordination, and maintenance. Supports research into vulnerability, reciprocity, unequal burdens, recognition, and the often-unrecorded work needed to keep households, communities, and services functioning. This concerns the organization and distribution of care work; time-use measurement and unpaid-work accounting are treated separately in ARC-CANDIDATE-206. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-188 — Cross-cultural communication and translation practice Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Linguistic anthropology / translation studies Why proposed: How meaning is negotiated across languages, conventions, and social contexts. Supports research into interpretation, ambiguity, local expertise, translation choices, and within-group variation; avoid treating cultural categories as fixed predictors of an individual's preferences or behavior. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-189 — Negotiation and mediation Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Conflict resolution / organizational studies Why proposed: How participants identify interests, communicate constraints, and seek workable agreements amid disagreement. Supports research into bargaining, procedural fairness, mediation, power differences, and the conditions under which agreement is durable, voluntary, or difficult to implement. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-190 — Team mental models and coordination breakdowns Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Organizational psychology / human factors Why proposed: How collaborators develop expectations about tasks, roles, dependencies, and one another's knowledge. Supports research into shared and differing mental models, handoffs, role ambiguity, and coordination failures, including how teams discover and correct mistaken assumptions about what others know or will do. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-191 — Psychological safety and speaking up Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Organizational psychology / safety research Why proposed: How interpersonal and institutional conditions influence whether people raise concerns, ask questions, and report mistakes. Supports research into leadership behavior, status differences, reporting practices, and learning, while distinguishing expressed comfort from evidence that concerns receive a useful response. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-192 — Trust repair after failure Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Social psychology / organizational ethics Why proposed: How relationships and institutions respond after expectations or obligations have been breached. Supports research into acknowledgment, explanation, restitution, changed practice, and subsequent evidence, including when trust should remain limited and when apparent reconciliation leaves the underlying problem unresolved. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-193 — Collective intelligence and correlated error Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Group decision-making / collective intelligence Why proposed: How groups combine information and judgment, and why aggregation sometimes improves performance and sometimes amplifies mistakes. Supports research into diversity of information, independence, social influence, common sources, and the conditions needed for collective estimates or decisions to be informative. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-194 — Participatory budgeting and deliberative assemblies Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Democratic governance / public administration Why proposed: How structured participation is used to allocate resources or deliberate on public choices. Supports research into participant selection, accessibility, facilitation, evidence, representation, implementation, and the relationship between a participatory process and the authority that acts on its results. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-195 — Administrative decisions, appeals, and ombuds institutions Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Administrative justice / public administration Why proposed: How institutions explain decisions, preserve records, correct errors, and provide routes for review or complaint. Supports research into reasons, procedural fairness, accessibility, independence, and effective remedies. Use named jurisdictions and dated cases to distinguish institutional patterns from applicable rules. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-196 — Contracts, delegated authority, and representation Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Contract law / institutional governance Why proposed: How obligations are formed and how one actor may be authorized to act or make commitments for another. Supports research into scope, limits, interpretation, revocation, and accountability, with jurisdiction-specific treatment of legal doctrines and a clear distinction between claimed and established authority. This concerns legal and institutional authority, delegation, and representation; incentive asymmetry and incomplete-contract models are treated separately in ARC-CANDIDATE-202. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-197 — Public-service delivery and administrative burden Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Public administration / social policy Why proposed: How people encounter eligibility rules, documentation demands, forms, waiting, and coordination across services. Supports research into learning costs, compliance costs, practical exclusion, and the difference between a service being formally available and a person being able to obtain it. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-198 — Procurement and vendor dependence Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Public procurement / organizational economics Why proposed: How organizations evaluate, acquire, renew, and replace external services and technologies. Supports research into requirements, evaluation, contract management, switching costs, interoperability, and dependence, including how initial purchasing choices constrain later operational and governance decisions. This concerns purchasing and dependence through procurement; compute capacity and allocation (ARC-CANDIDATE-170) and platform switching costs and lock-in (ARC-CANDIDATE-204) are related but distinct mechanisms. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-199 — Labor organization and collective bargaining Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Labor studies / industrial relations Why proposed: How workers organize representation and negotiate working conditions with employers or other governing bodies. Supports research into bargaining structures, participation, dispute resolution, institutional power, and variation across sectors and jurisdictions, grounded in specific historical and contemporary cases. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-200 — Data protection, purpose limitation, and correction rights Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Information governance / privacy law Why proposed: How institutions define permitted uses of information and provide mechanisms for access, correction, and other rights across its lifecycle. Supports research into purpose, onward sharing, retention, accountability, and conflicting records. Identify relevant jurisdictions and distinguish legal requirements from voluntary policy commitments. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-201 — Accounting, budgets, and reconciliation Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Accounting / organizational management Why proposed: How organizations record resources, obligations, planned spending, and actual transactions, and investigate discrepancies between records. Supports research into commitments, cash flows, controls, reconciliation, and the limits of treating a balanced ledger or approved budget as a complete account of operational reality. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-202 — Principal–agent problems and incomplete contracts Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Organizational economics / contract theory Why proposed: How delegated work is shaped by differences in information, incentives, and objectives, especially when agreements cannot specify every contingency. Supports research into monitoring, discretion, accountability, and unintended behavior; the economic term agent should be distinguished from its uses in AI and other fields. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-203 — Externalities and public goods Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Economics / collective-action research Why proposed: How activities affect people outside an exchange and how goods with particular exclusion and consumption properties are provided. Supports research into unpriced costs and benefits, coordination, financing, and governance, with attention to who receives benefits and who bears burdens. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-204 — Platform markets, switching costs, and lock-in Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Industrial organization / digital economy Why proposed: How platforms organize interactions and how network effects, accumulated data, compatibility, and switching costs influence dependence. Supports research into competition, portability, bargaining power, and exit, distinguishing theoretical mechanisms from evidence about a particular platform and period. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-205 — Insurance and risk pooling Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Risk management / insurance economics Why proposed: How losses are shared through insurance and other pooling arrangements. Supports research into correlated risk, coverage, exclusions, adverse selection, moral hazard, and claims, including the conditions under which a pool remains viable and the risks left with participants or excluded groups. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-206 — Time-use studies and unpaid work Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Social statistics / feminist economics Why proposed: How time-use research records activities that may be omitted from wages, prices, and conventional organizational accounts. Supports research into household labor, caregiving, coordination, simultaneous activities, and unequal burdens, including methodological limits in measuring work that is intermittent or taken for granted. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-207 — Data-center power, cooling, and water dependencies Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Computing infrastructure / environmental engineering Why proposed: How data centers depend on electricity, heat removal, water where used, and supporting infrastructure. Supports research into facility design, location, resource demand, operational constraints, and environmental effects, with dated, site-specific evidence rather than assumptions that every facility has the same resource profile. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-208 — Energy balances, efficiency, and waste heat Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Thermodynamics / energy systems Why proposed: How energy enters, changes form within, and leaves physical systems. Supports research into efficiency, waste heat, storage, conversion losses, and system boundaries, helping readers connect computational and institutional activities to material constraints without treating efficiency alone as a measure of overall benefit. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-209 — Semiconductor manufacturing and fabrication dependencies Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Microelectronics / industrial systems Why proposed: How semiconductor production depends on materials, specialized equipment, process control, design tools, packaging, and testing. Supports research into yield, manufacturing stages, geographic concentration, substitution, and lead times, distinguishing technical capability from access to an operable production ecosystem. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-210 — Food systems, cold chains, and spoilage Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Food systems / logistics / public health Why proposed: How production, storage, transport, refrigeration, and distribution affect the availability and condition of food. Supports research into time-sensitive provisioning, spoilage, monitoring, unequal access, and interdependence with energy and transport, grounded in specific products and supply-chain conditions. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-211 — Epidemiology and public-health surveillance Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Epidemiology / public-health systems Why proposed: How populations are observed to detect, explain, and respond to patterns of illness. Supports research into denominators, reporting delays, ascertainment, uncertainty, and coordinated response, distinguishing surveillance signals from confirmed explanations and population-level inference from individual clinical assessment. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-212 — Climate adaptation and compound hazards Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Climate science / adaptation planning Why proposed: How communities and institutions prepare for interacting environmental stresses and changing exposure over time. Supports research into compound events, vulnerability, infrastructure dependencies, adaptation limits, and unequal effects, using location-specific evidence and distinguishing observed conditions from projected scenarios. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-213 — Systematic reviews and living evidence collections Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Research synthesis / knowledge management Why proposed: How explicit search, selection, appraisal, and update procedures are used to maintain an account of available evidence. Supports research into coverage, inclusion criteria, methodological quality, uncertainty, and revision. Focuses on review workflows, distinct from ARC-CANDIDATE-158's treatment of dependence among sources. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-214 — Peer review, retractions, and scientific self-correction Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Science studies / research integrity Why proposed: How research communities evaluate claims before and after publication and respond to error or misconduct. Supports research into review practices, corrections, retractions, incentives, and delayed uptake, without assuming that publication proves validity or that retraction mechanisms capture every unreliable finding. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-215 — Libraries, cataloging, and information retrieval Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Library and information science Why proposed: How collections are described, organized, searched, and made accessible to different readers. Supports research into metadata, classification, indexing, relevance, discovery, and omission, including how organizational choices affect which materials can be found and connected. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-216 — Scientific instruments and measurement calibration Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Metrology / history and philosophy of science Why proposed: How instruments and procedures turn physical interactions into measurements that support claims. Supports research into calibration, traceability, uncertainty, drift, and interpretation, distinguishing the observed signal from the model and assumptions used to infer a property of the world. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-217 — Teaching, scaffolding, and formative assessment Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Education / learning sciences Why proposed: How instruction adapts to a learner's existing understanding and uses feedback to guide further learning. Supports research into explanation, scaffolding, misconceptions, assessment, and transfer, including the difference between successfully reproducing an answer and applying an idea in a new setting. This focuses on teaching design and assessment; acquisition and retention of skills are treated separately in ARC-CANDIDATE-182. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-218 — Community archives and participatory knowledge production Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Archival studies / community research Why proposed: How communities contribute to, describe, interpret, and govern records of their own histories and activities. Supports research into custodianship, representation, consent, access, and contested description, with attention to differences within communities and the authority to revise or restrict shared records. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-219 — Design inquiry and prototyping Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Design research / human-computer interaction Why proposed: How making and testing provisional artifacts helps participants investigate needs, assumptions, and possible arrangements. Supports research into iteration, participation, evaluation, and learning from use, distinguishing an attractive prototype from evidence that a design works under relevant conditions. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-220 — Play and exploratory learning Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Developmental psychology / behavioral research Why proposed: How open-ended activity may contribute to discovering possibilities, practicing capabilities, and learning about an environment. Supports research into exploration, variation, social play, and context, while distinguishing evidence across species, developmental stages, and computational systems. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-221 — Creativity under constraints Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Creativity research / design studies Why proposed: How limitations on materials, rules, time, or resources influence creative work. Supports research into recombination, iteration, evaluation, and the conditions under which constraints enable or inhibit useful novelty, with comparisons grounded in particular practices rather than a universal recipe for creativity. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-222 — Narrative interpretation and competing accounts Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Narrative studies / hermeneutics Why proposed: How stories organize events, assign significance, and connect experience across time. Supports research into perspective, omission, coherence, and competing interpretations, including how documentary evidence can constrain factual claims without eliminating differences in meaning or treating a persuasive narrative as proof. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-223 — Moral uncertainty and ethical deliberation Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Moral philosophy / practical ethics Why proposed: How actors reason when they are uncertain about ethical principles or when plausible frameworks recommend different actions. Supports research into deliberation, moral disagreement, competing obligations, and the treatment of affected parties, without assuming a single numerical method resolves every ethical question. This concerns uncertainty about applicable moral principles; selecting among conflicting values is treated separately in ARC-CANDIDATE-164. ## ARC-CANDIDATE-224 — Scenario planning and participatory futures Status: candidate Existing field or case framing: Futures studies / strategic planning Why proposed: How participants construct and examine multiple possible futures to explore decisions in the present. Supports research into assumptions, uncertainty, participation, consequences, and robustness, distinguishing scenarios from predictions and examining whose expectations and interests shape the futures considered. Scenario construction explores plausible futures and is not itself robustness analysis across models and assumptions (ARC-CANDIDATE-162).