Open call for the Complexity Global School (CGS) 2025
Registrations are now open for the third edition of the Complexity Global School (CGS). As last year, the school will be in the Universidad de los Andes (Uniandes), in Bogota, Colombia. However, for the first time, people from any country will be able to apply. Approximately 60 students will be selected to participate in the school, which will be from July 28 to August 8, 2025. Thanks to the support of the Omidyar Network and the Ford Foundation, The school will be completely free for all admitted students, including tuition, room, board and a transportation stipend. The deadline for apply to is the March 2, 2025.
“We are looking for courageous thinkers who want to learn new methods while helping us seek new paradigms for understanding political, economic and social life.”, notes Will Tracy, organizer of the event and vice-president of the Santa Fe Institute. “Our search for new paradigms is deeply interdisciplinary. We are interested in early-career academics in the social and natural sciences, as well as intellectually motivated professionals from government, civil society and the private sector.”
The CGS includes a series of lectures that introduce the fundamental mechanisms and models of complex systems and their relationship to political economies. Major topics include network analysis, computational social science, applied scaling theory, emergent engineering, and digital humanities. Students will learn to apply these topics, methods and models to diverse phenomena such as inequality, climate change, belief dynamics, technological disruption in social systems, federalism and the future of work.
Juan Camilo Cardenas, professor of the Faculty of Economics at Uniandes and one of the leaders of the initiative. TREES, highlights the benefits of applying a complex systems approach to the study of inequalities: “Complexity helps us to better understand inequalities because it allows us to see how differences between individuals and groups generate social tensions, especially when those inequalities are perceived as unfair or negative. In complex systems, patterns emerge that are not explained just by looking at individual decisions, but by understanding how people interact with each other. This makes some inequalities difficult to predict with traditional methods. By bringing together students from different countries and disciplines, we can find new ways to understand how diversity, inequalities and differences are related, and thus find more effective solutions to inequalities that harm society and the planet.”
The CGS includes on-site and remote components. The component on-site consists of a 12-day intensive program which focuses on interaction between teachers and students, as well as the formation of project groups. During the remote component - from August to November - students will collaborate virtually with their groups to finalize projects.
“The most valuable thing has been interacting with other people, especially learning to overcome language barriers - not only language barriers, but also academic language barriers.” states Ebba Mark, D. student in social and economic inequality at the University of California, Berkeley. Oxford University, who attended the CGS 2024. These interactions also help to reframe and deepen the research questions. “Every time you bring up a topic that interests you, everyone challenges you to define it a little better and to question the assumptions that underlie the way you plan to research it.”
Qixin Lin, student of computational social sciences at the University of Chicago, The company expected to address questions about social inequalities, labor and employment during the CGS 2024. “After studying here, I learned that sociology will not be the only approach I will use to tackle the problem,” points out. “Now I can also work with physicists and economists, and use other approaches to find solutions.”
Patricio Cruz and Celis Peniche, student of the CGS 2024 and fifth year doctoral student at the University of California, Davis, investigates how North American religious ideas have spread through cultural transmission in Latin America. “I initially came here with the idea of exploring questions related to how and why ideas travel through groups,” he says. Instead, he became involved in a project exploring why people undertake interdisciplinary research, despite the additional challenges of breaking disciplinary conventions. The members of his project group represented five countries and brought expertise in economics, physics, engineering, anthropology and mathematics, making the question self-referential, he says. “In some ways, we're trying to figure out what motivates us to do it, especially when it's so difficult and requires a lot of effort.”
The first Complexity Global School was held simultaneously in India and South Africa in December 2023 and was open to students from South Asia and Africa, respectively. Participants from both venues - organized by the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa - attended conferences and transcontinental online group projects. The second edition was held at Uniandes, Bogota, Colombia, in the summer of 2024, and was open to students from Latin America, Western Europe, the Caribbean, USA and Canada. The Complexity Global School is inspired by the Complex Systems Summer School from Santa Fe Institute, which has been in operation for more than 30 years and whose alumni have held prominent positions in academia, government and industry. Proof.
NOTE: The school will be conducted in English, so a good command of the language is essential.