Complexity in the Social World: The Challenging Case of Structural Racism

This two-day conference will examine how interdisciplinary collaboration can inform our understanding of structural racism and the way we think about complex topics.

Please register to attend at https://myumi.ch/2rxWR.

With the growth of both big data availability and computing power, there has been a rapid increase in new methods to understanding complexity in the social world. However, there may not have been a concurrent growth in the foundations of scientific inquiry, including complex thinking, broad causal thinking, and an integration of theories and frameworks across disciplines to guide empirical tests. Further, evidence suggests that the academic research model, with its resource-segregated networks, narrow scientific, discipline-specific training, and focus on measures of short-term productivity, contributes to a fragmented and even misleading understanding of the social world.

The rapid growth in racial inequities research through the concept of ‘structural racism’ is a case study in the challenges that arise without a thorough integration of theories drawn from source humanities and humanities-informed social science and with an academic model built on segregated resources that prioritizes short-term products. What has resulted is a literature that, at times, sidesteps difficult questions on how to understand the interconnected systems and processes that link racial patterns in social, economic, and political life over place and time.

Symposium purpose: This meeting is intended to address the challenges to the social science literature on race and the concept of structural racism. We will convene discussions about social scientific inquiry, the limitations of the academic research model, and innovative approaches to the study of racial patterns and inequities while working to desegregate research networks.