Annual Symposium on Complexity in the Social World

9:00 AM

Check in (all day) | Light breakfast | Field guide activity (all day)

10:00 AM – 10:20 AM

Welcome plenary

Kate Cagney, Director, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan

10:20 AM – 10:30 AM

Symposium overview

Margaret Hicken, Research Professor, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan

10:30 AM – 11:45AM

How places make us and how we make place: Complexity, history, relation, and inquiry

Facilitated discussion: In the social and behavioral sciences, place is often reduced to a location, administrative boundary, institutional setting, or measurable exposure. Yet places are also made dynamically through history, memory, relationships with the land, social relationships, institutions, and power. People become connected to places, but those relationships are neither static nor freely chosen: racial, economic, political, environmental, and organizational structures shape who can belong, move, remain, feel secure, or be recognized within a place.

This facilitated discussion begins with artistic, humanist, and Indigenous approaches to place and asks what they reveal that conventional social-scientific concepts and measures often miss. It then considers how social scientists might translate richer understandings of place into theories, data, measures, research designs, and appropriately bounded empirical questions without mistaking those simplifications for the place itself.

The session will also address a practical challenge for early career scholars: how to think slowly and complexly while conducting research that must necessarily examine smaller parts of a much larger world. The goal is not to produce a total theory or model of place, but to learn how historical, relational, critical, and community knowledge can guide focused empirical inquiry, improve interpretation, and support a rigorous and intellectually rewarding scientific career.

11:45 AM – 12:15 PM

What makes a place? What makes a measure of place? A collective field guide activity

12:15 PM – 1:30 PM

Lunch

Pick up location: ISR 1450

1:30 PM – 2:30 PM

Causal thinking is not the same as causal inference

Facilitated discussion: 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.

2:30 PM – 3:30 PM

Understanding, not proving: Critical theory and rigorous scientific inquiry

Facilitated discussion: Strong scientific inquiry matters; researchers should ask questions to understand our social world, not to confirm a belief; Good research requires logic, evidence, openness to being wrong, careful inference, conceptual clarity, and willingness to revise claims. Critical theory can make scientific inquiry stronger, as it can reveal hidden assumptions, broaden what counts as relevant evidence, identify omitted causal fields, challenge narrow concepts, and expose how power shapes research questions. The session should reject two unhelpful extremes: (a) scientism without critique, or the idea that conventional scientific methods are neutral, complete, and untouched by power; and (b) critique without inquiry, or the idea that — because much of our science on place has been shaped by colonialism, racism, sexism, ableism, and hierarchy — rigorous standards of evidence, logic, and inference are merely oppressive tools. Strong critical theory and strong scientific inquiry should discipline each other. Critical theory helps us ask better questions and see more of the world. Scientific inquiry helps us avoid mistaking conviction, moral urgency, or political commitment for evidence.

3:30 PM – 4:00 PM

Break

4:00 PM – 5:00 PM

The Dataset Does Not Know the Place

Presentation by Rick Lowe, Artist-in-residence, followed by a discussion with Kate Cagney (University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research)

6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Speaker dinner at the University of Michigan Museum of Art Apse

8:00 AM

Check in (all day) | Light breakfast | Mapping activity (all day)

9:00 AM – 9:15 AM

Welcome (back)

9:15 AM – 10:30 AM

Cities as systems

Panel presentations: This session explores cities as complex systems through several different forms of evidence and modeling: scaling models, mobility data, and participatory approaches. We are not asking whether any one method fully captures the city. Rather, we are asking what each method helps us see, what it simplifies, and how interdisciplinary collaboration can make these tools more meaningful for understanding cities as lived, governed, historical, infrastructural, and unequal places.

10:30 AM – 11:00 AM

Break

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM

Rural as relational, not residual

Panel presentations: Unlike the cities session, this session does not center a single formal systems modeling tradition. That is intentional. Rural and small-town places are often poorly served by importing urban systems models. Instead, this session examines rural complexity through regional economies, digital infrastructure, participatory systems modeling, environmental health, and political economy. The goal is to ask what kinds of data and models help us understand rural places relationally — and what we miss when rurality is treated as residual, deficient, or disconnected from broader systems.

12:30 PM – 2:00 PM

2:00 PM – 3:30 PM

Neighborhoods in motion: Linked places, activity spaces, and lived landscapes

Panel presentations: This session asks us to move beyond the residential-neighborhood default. Neighborhoods are not isolated containers, and people’s exposures do not stop at the boundaries of their home census tract. Neighborhoods are linked through housing markets, mobility, organizations, institutions, and spatial data systems. Today’s speakers will help us think about how models, mobility data, qualitative research, and critical spatial theory can work together to better understand dynamic neighborhood life.

3:30 PM – 3:45 PM

Break

3:45 PM – 4:45 PM

The academy as place: access, opportunity, and the conditions for better science

Presentation by Darrell Hudson (University of Michigan, School of Public Health), followed by an audience Q&A, moderated by Zinzi Bailey (University of Minnesota, School of Public Health)

4:45 PM – 5:00 PM

Closing remarks