Computational Social Sciences Summer School on Conflict › view all

July 23 - August 3, 2018 | Jacobs University Bremen | Funded by Volkswagen Stiftung

From July 23 until August 3, 2018, the first of three Computational Social Sciences Summer Schools with more than 50 international junior researchers and experts from social and computer sciences will take place at Jacobs University. This year's summer school is organized by BIGSSS and will focus on conflict research. During the two-week summer school at Jacobs University, the participants will examine the new challenges and opportunities offered by digitization for social sciences.

Making New Data Sources Accessible

A mix of social and computer science, the still young field of computational social science deals with computer-aided data and word processing in social sciences. On the one hand, it deals with questions of how new data sources – such as Facebook and Wikipedia – can be tapped and made systematically accessible for social science research. On the other hand, modern and powerful computers also offer new analysis possibilities. Computational social science also deals with questions of how computer-based methods can be used to analyze and model complex social systems, phenomena, and structures. The CSS summer school series serve as a research incubator aimed at fostering the use of data-driven methods in the social sciences and developing a contribution to the research fields of conflict, migration, and social cohesion.

Highly Topical Issues in Conflict Research

Participants will get to the bottom of these aspects together with experts from the various disciplines in several research projects on the topic of conflicts. The projects address diverse and highly topical issues in the area of conflict research. These include social movements and changing values. Examples include the #MeToo debate or the rise of the AfD party, but also the emergence of civil wars or terrorism.

A Focus on Terrorist Attacks and Climate Change

During the summer school, Adam Pah from Northwestern University in the USA and Nicolas Payette from the Laboratory of Agent-Based Social Simulation in Rome, for example, will specifically address the question of what influences the planning and execution of terrorist attacks. Together with the participants, they will shed light on the role played by major events, for example. In another project, Davide Natalini from the Global Sustainability Institute of Anglia Ruskin University in England and Bruce Edmonds from Manchester Metropolitan University will examine how climate change affects conflicts in society and social structures.

Further Summer Schools Planned

The summer school is the prelude to a series of three events on the subject of computational social science. Other summer schools will be held in the next two years in Italy and the Netherlands, focusing on migration and social cohesion.  The summer schools are financed by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Contact and More Info

Arline Rave (BIGSSS) Organizational management

Prof. Dr. Adalbert F.X. Wilhelm (BIGSSS) Scientific management

Email: css@bigsss-bremen.de

For more info, please also check our CSS website.