Workshop: Crossing the Divide - Biological and Social Analyses (Register by April 15th)

The workshop will bring together biological and social researchers at the University of Toronto over a 4-day period (May 10–14, 2021). The goal is to foster exchange of methodological techniques between fields and to create a platform for future collaboration and conceptual synthesis.

To register, and for more details, please go to: http://bit.ly/3bxtAZB

Background

 The biological and social sciences have been marked by lively conceptual and methodological exchange arguably since their inception. Charles Darwin himself was strongly influenced by social thinkers of his times, including Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and Harriet Martineau. The Chicago School of Sociology developed its foundational approach to social research in the early 20th century through adapting ecological concepts drawn from biology. Building on these common ancestries, methodological exchange continued through the 20th century. Social researchers for example adapted ecological methods for measuring diversity, while biologists adapted network analysis methods pioneered by sociologists.

While such exchange has been extremely fruitful, it has also been hampered in the past by differing disciplinary conventions around statistical software packages. These barriers have dramatically fallen in recent years with the rise of free open source platforms. Most notably, R and Python have emerged as a contemporary lingua franca across diverse fields. The proposed workshop aims to capitalize on these recent trends to reinvigorate the tradition of methodological and conceptual exchange between the biological and social sciences.

Proposed Activities

The workshop will bring together biological and social researchers at the University of Toronto over a 4-day period (May 10–14, 2021). The goal is to foster exchange of methodological techniques between fields and to create a platform for future collaboration and conceptual synthesis. To this end, we have selected topics that in our view hold the greatest promise for impact and innovation within each field.