Applications for the third Complexity Global School (CGS) are now open. Like last year, the school will be hosted at Universidad de los Andes (Uniandes), in Bogot\u00e1, Colombia, but for the first time, applicants from all countries are eligible to apply. Roughly 60 students will be selected for the school, which will run July 28 \u2013 August 8, 2025. Supported by the Omidyar Network and the Ford Foundation, the school is free for all admitted students \u2014 tuition, room, board, and a travel stipend are included. Applications are due by March 2, 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe are looking for courageous thinkers who want to learn new methods, while simultaneously helping in our search for new paradigms to understand political, economic, and social life,\u201d says Will Tracy, organizer of the event and Vice President at the Santa Fe Institute. \u201cOur search for new paradigms is fiercely interdisciplinary. We are interested in early-career academics from across the social and natural sciences, as well as intellectually driven practitioners from government, civil society, and industry.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CGS features a series of lectures introducing fundamental mechanisms and models of complex systems and how they relate to political economies. Core topics will include network analysis, computational social science, applied scaling theory, emergent engineering, and digital humanities. Students will learn how to apply those topics, methods, and models to diverse phenomena such as inequality, climate change, belief dynamics, technological disruption in social systems, federalism, and belief dynamics, and the future of work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bringing a complex-systems lens to the study of inequality offers several benefits, says Juan Camilo C\u00e1rdenas, economics professor at Uniandes and co-leader of the TREES initiative. \u201cComplexity often involves diversity or heterogeneities that make it difficult to understand social phenomena. Such heterogeneity is frequently connected to inequalities, where some groups benefit more while others receive less, sometimes creating social tensions \u2014 especially when these inequalities are unfair or socially undesirable. Complex systems also frequently generate emergent patterns that cannot be explained solely by the actions or motivations of individuals but rather by the dynamics and interactions among them. These dynamics can create disparities that are more difficult to predict using conventional approaches. Students from different parts of the world and various disciplines can help unravel how inequalities, diversity, and heterogeneities interact, thereby contributing to better knowledge about addressing inequalities that harm society and the planet it depends on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CGS has onsite and remote components. The onsite component includes an intensive 12-day program focusing on interactions between faculty and students, and the formation of project groups. During the remote component \u2014 August to November \u2014 students will collaborate virtually with their groups to finish their projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe most valuable thing has been interacting with other people, and particularly learning to bridge language \u2014 not just social languages, but also academic languages,\u201d says Ebba Mark, a Ph.D. student studying social and economic inequality at the University of Oxford, who attended CGS 2024. Those interactions also help push research questions in new and deeper directions. \u201cEvery time you mention a topic that you're interested in, everyone is challenging you to define it a little bit better and to question some assumptions underlying the way you want to do the research.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Qixin Lin, a computational social science student at the University of Chicago, hoped to address questions about social inequality disparities, labor, and employment at CGS 2024. \u201cAfter the study here, I learned that sociology won\u2019t be the only approach I use to address the problem,\u201d she says. \u201cI can now also work with physicists and economists, and use other approaches to solve the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Patricio Cruz y Celis Peniche, a CGS 2024 student and a fifth-year graduate student at the University of California, Davis, studies how religious ideas from North America have spread through cultural transmission across Latin America. \u201cI originally came here with the idea of exploring questions related to how and why ideas travel through groups,\u201d he says. Instead, he found himself engaged in a project exploring why people undertake interdisciplinary research collaborations despite the additional challenges involved in 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 somewhat self-referential, he says. \u201cIn a way we are trying to see what motivates us to do it, especially when it is so difficult and requires a great deal of effort.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
El primer Complexity Global School<\/strong> fue simult\u00e1neamente en India y Sud\u00e1frica en diciembre de 2023 y estuvo abierto a estudiantes de Asia del Sur y \u00c1frica, respectivamente. Los participantes de ambas sedes \u2014 organizadas por el Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay<\/strong>, y la University of the Witwatersrand, Sud\u00e1frica<\/strong> \u2014 asistieron a conferencias y proyectos grupales transcontinentales en l\u00ednea. La segunda edici\u00f3n fue\u00a0en Uniandes, Bogot\u00e1, Colombia, en el verano de 2024, estuvo abierta a estudiantes de Am\u00e9rica Latina, Europa Occidental, el Caribe, EE. UU. y Canad\u00e1. El Complexity Global School<\/strong> est\u00e1 inspirado en el\u00a0Complex Systems Summer School<\/strong> del Santa Fe Institute<\/strong>, que ha estado funcionando por m\u00e1s de 30 a\u00f1os y cuyos exalumnos han ocupado cargos destacados en la academia, el gobierno y la industria.\u00a0Prueba.<\/p>\n\n\n\n NOTE: The school will be conducted in English, so proficiency in the language is essential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n