The Social Complexity Atlas: Mapping the Adjacent Alternative

While the social sciences have been involved in the development of complex systems thinking since the late 1800s, it was not until the 1990s when, as John Urry states, the complexity turn in the social sciences was truly made. This turn took place within a wider shift across the academy and public sectors to the study of complexity, particularly in the natural, computational, and mathematical sciences. While this shift resulted in a computational methods revolution and significant theoretical and empirical advance across a wide number of topics, it has also led to a series of challenges – twelve to be exact – for those doing social inquiry. Fortunately, a global network of researchers, scholars, artists, social activists, policy makers, and civil servants have been working variously to overcome these challenges to venture into new territories, creating entirely new fields of social science synthesis and advance. In their forthcoming book, The Atlas of Social Complexity, Castellani and Gerrits chart these new territories, how they variously address the challenges the study of social complexity currently faces, and the complexity imagination they inspire to address the significant global social problems we currently face.

Brian is Professor of Sociology, Director of the Research Methods Centre and Co-Director of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing at Durham University, UK. He is also Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry (Northeastern Ohio Medical University, USA), Editor of the Routledge Complexity in Social Science series, CO-I for the Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus, and a Fellow of the UK National Academy of Social Sciences. Brian also runs InSPIRE, a UK policy and research consortium for mitigating the impact places have on air quality, dementia and brain health across the life course. Brian is trained as a public health sociologist, clinical psychologist, and methodologist and takes a transdisciplinary approach to his work. His methodological focus is primarily on computational modelling and mixed-methods. He and his colleagues have spent the past ten years developing a new case-based, data mining approach to modelling complex social systems and social complexity, called COMPLEX-IT, which they have used to help researchers, policy evaluators, and public sector organisations address a variety of complex public health issues.

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