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



Early Career Scholars Lunch — Problem synthesis — what gets in the way of better science?

Available Seats 45
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Room 1430, Institute for Social Research

The academy as a place: incentives, networks, and the conditions for better science

The academy is not just where research happens. It is a place that shapes what questions are valued, who gets trained, who gets time to think, who gets mentored, who gets cited, who gets protected, who gets funded, and what kinds of knowledge become legible as “excellent.” This session should be honest about the academic model: It rewards speed, quantity, novelty, individual ownership, network privilege, citation performance, disciplinary legibility. It punishes slow, collaborative, interdisciplinary, community-engaged, methodologically careful, or theoretically deep work. But the session should also be constructive: How can scholars build better intellectual homes? How can early career scholars navigate without simply assimilating? How can senior scholars redistribute access to mentorship, methods, theory, collaboration, and time? How can we evaluate scientific contributions beyond citation counts and paper volume? How can people decide what kind of academic or nonacademic career will let them do the work they value? The goal is not despair. The goal is clear-eyed agency. 

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