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Understanding Society as a Complex System

What you'll learn

The aim of this course is to give you a solid grasp of the core concepts within the domain of social complexity

By the end of the course you should be familiar with and be able to apply the most important models from social complexity

Requirements

There are no prerequisites to this course aside for a firm grasp of the english language and a basic level of general scientific knowledge

Description

OverviewThis course is an accessible introduction to the application of complexity theory to the social sciences, the course will be primarily focused upon the domain of sociology, but we will touch upon elements of psychology, anthropology, political science and economics. The aim of the course is to introduce you to the variety of models from complex systems and illustrate how they apply to these different domains. This course is a first of its kind and somewhat expental in nature, where we will be drawing upon research from many different areas and using complexity theory to contextualize it into a coherent paradigm, giving us a fresh perspective with which to interpret some of the core questions within the social sciences.ContentThe course is broken down into four main sections, in each section we will apply one of the major modelling frameworks from complexity theory to interpreting social phenomena. We will firstly give an overview to this area of social complexity before starting our first section on systems theory as we lay down a basic model of a social system, we will go on to use this model in helping us understand, social structure and institutions.Next we will take an overview to nonlinear social science, as we discuss the process of self-organization, feedback loops, chaos theory and self-organized criticality. The third section to the course is dedicated to social network analysis, we will cover the main topics in this new area as we talk about the basics of social graphs, clustering, network structure and the process of diffusion. Finally we will be looking through the lens of complex adaptive systems theory, exploring the model of a fitness landscape, talking about adaptive capacity, social resilience and the process of evolution.

Overview

Lecture 1 Course Overview

Section 1: Social Systems Theory

Lecture 2 Social Complexity Part 1

Lecture 3 Social Complexity Part 2

Lecture 4 Social Systems

Lecture 5 Institutions

Lecture 6 Social Structure

Section 2: Self-Organization & Nonlinearity

Lecture 7 Self-Organization

Lecture 8 Feedback Loops

Lecture 9 Attractors & Chaos

Lecture 10 Social Dynamics

Section 3: Social Network Science

Lecture 11 Network Science

Lecture 12 Community Structure

Lecture 13 Network Structure

Lecture 14 Network Diffusion

Section 4: Complex Social Systems

Lecture 15 Complex Adaptive Systems

Lecture 16 Adaptive Systems

Lecture 17 Evolution

Lecture 18 Functions

This course is designed to be accessible to a broad audience but will be of particular interest to researchers and students within the various social sciences wishing to apply complexity theory within their own work. Some background in social theory and complexity theory would be an advantage but not a prerequisite.

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