Presencial: Sala Àngels Torrents, CED

Virtual: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7905645674
Codi: 1984

COLLOQUIUM Miranda Lubbers (Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Director of the COALESCE Lab, ICREA Acadèmia fellow; ERC Advanced Grant holder). A network science approach to social cohesion.

Abstract.- Research on societal cohesion has long ignored the broad acquaintanceship networks that are thought to hold our societies together. These networks contain intimate and supportive (“strong”) ties that have captured most of the attention of social scientists, and hundreds of more superficial (“weak”) ties between, for instance, neighbours, colleagues, other parents at children’s schools, fellow members of associations or religious congregations, or social media contacts (acquaintances; Goffman, 1963; Morgan, 2009). In this talk, I argue why analyzing how acquaintanceship networks are composed and structured, how they differ across social groups, how they are mobilized, and how they affect individuals and societies should be a core task of the social scientific enterprise. I also propose a novel methodology and a research agenda for studying broad acquaintanceship networks, that I pursue through the ERC AdG project PATCHWORK.