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



Causal thinking when causal inference is not the method

Available Seats 150
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Room 1430, Institute for Social Research

Causal thinking is not the same as causal inference

This session begins with a distinction that is easy to say but hard to practice: causal thinking is not the same thing as causal inference. Causal inference methods can be powerful, but they do not exhaust what it means to reason causally. Indeed, we might consider causal thinking through any of the empirical strategies we use; otherwise our work leaves us with correlations that imply more than they can support. Further, we are asking how we consider evidence from multiple sources that may seem contradictory even, as we build a causal story of the social world (evidentiary pluralism). We are asking what it means to think in causal ways about place: about conditions, mechanisms, histories, background structures, feedback loops, selection, and intervention. We are also asking what happens when the causal field is visible to some researchers and invisible to others. 

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