This is an ESRC funded seminar series, February 2014 – February 2017.[spacer height=”1px”]The seminar series convened by Dr Emma Uprichard (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick, U.K.), Professor David Byrne (School of the Applied Social Sciences, Durham University U.K.) and Professor Brian Castellani, (Sociology, Kent State University U.S.).
Overall aims:
- To create an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the methodological challenges of applying complexity to social science research problems;[spacer height=”2px”]
- To develop a mixed-methods toolkit to more effectively model complex social systems;[spacer height=”2px”]
- To improve complex systems methodological pedagogy of social science students by:[spacer height=”2px”]
- Developing a set of pedagogical and policy recommendations relating to complexity related research methods;[spacer height=”2px”]
- Providing feedback to the Nuffield/ESRC/HEFCE funded Q-Step Centres.[spacer height=”6px”]
Key methodological questions:
- How do we capitalize on big data and real-time data for complexity social science research?[spacer height=”3px”]
- How might we describe and explain patterns of change and continuity through time and space, and, importantly, how to do this whilst also accounting for a dynamic context?[spacer height=”3px”]
- Conversely, how do experiences and processes of time, temporality, space and place impact on the possibilities of change and continuity?[spacer height=”3px”]
- How might we explore causality in complex social systems for policy planning and intervention?[spacer height=”3px”]
- How can we bridge quantitative, qualitative and computational methods to better understand complex social systems empirically (e.g. via government surveys, public and commercial transactional data, neural nets, agent-based models, clustering techniques, network analysis, geographical modeling, visual complexity, case-based modeling, qualitative narratives etc.)?[spacer height=”3px”]
- How might we bring together different epistemological approaches to researching complexity in general, and conduct better inter- and multi-disciplinary complexity social science specifically?[spacer height=”3px”]