Place as Method, Theory, and Responsibility: Rethinking Scientific Inquiry for Complex Social Issues

The challenge: New data and approaches to study complexity in the social world has often been without a concurrent focus on the foundations of scientific inquiry, including complex thinking, broad causal thinking, attention to epistemic lens, and integrating multiple disciplinary approaches. Further, the academic research model, with its resource-segregated networks, discipline-specific training, and short-term productivity metrics, contributes to a fragmented and potentially misleading understanding of the social world. In the second annual ISR Symposium on Complexity in the Social World, we will use ‘place’ as the case study to facilitate discussions on rigorous social science in the public interest.


Using research on place as the case study, discussion topics will include:

  • Complex thinking about the social world
  • The contribution of the humanities the study of the social world
  • Epistemic lens and research transparency
  • Theories, frameworks, and the limits of traditional causal inference
  • The draw and danger of cool new data
  • Addressing the challenges of the academic model of science


Presentations on the science of place will include:

  • The relational nature of place in population social inequalities
  • The role of history in shaping place
  • The racialization of place; the spatialization of race
  • Place as a neutral and rational driver of social inequalities
  • Approaches to testing (causal) ideas around place



Welcome; Thinking in complex ways without necessarily using complex models

Available Seats 150
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Room 1430, Institute for Social Research

Place is not a variable: Complexity, systems thinking, and the limits of simple explanations

This session is not an argument against simple models, which can be useful, elegant, and necessary. However, simple models become dangerous when they train us to think simplistically. Further, complex models do not guarantee the requisite complex thinking about place. Here, scholars will share work that couples complex thinking with both ordinary tools (e.g., interviews, regression models, maps, archives, surveys, administrative data, or descriptive comparisons) and with big data or systems models.

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