Sociology seminars

This research webinar examines how neuroscience and settlement research explain refugee trauma, mental health and recovery after resettlement. Belinda Liddell discusses neuroimaging evidence on the effects of visa insecurity, family separation, discrimination and social exclusion on brain function, trauma recovery and psychological wellbeing. The biological consequences of uncertainty are considered alongside implications for interventions and refugee mental health care. Tahereh Ziaian presents an international study of refugee and migrant youth in Australia, Canada and the United States. It identifies factors supporting settlement, social inclusion, wellbeing and lasting integration, with recommendations for policies, services and family support. A moderated expert panel connects these findings to trauma-informed clinical practice, settlement services and policy. The webinar is free.

Extreme weather evolves over minutes, hours and days, but research on how people change their responses during an event remains limited by the difficulty of collecting repeated observations. This team developed longitudinal panel surveys that revisit the same people during an unfolding threat and after the event, collecting data across three hurricanes and two atmospheric rivers. The speakers explain the evolving survey design and collaborations, then present findings from Hurricane Ian on changing warning awareness, information use, risk perception and efficacy beliefs, alongside people’s later reflections on their decisions. They discuss how openly available data can support other researchers and outline plans to extend collection and analysis to additional types of extreme weather. Online via Vimeo with advance attendee registration, including an option for attendees outside NOAA. Live captions are available and a recording is planned.

Twinkle Tripathy studies how changing connections in a social network can increase the influence of a selected stubborn agent under the Friedkin–Johnsen model of opinion dynamics. The proposed edge changes resemble recommendation mechanisms in online networks. The talk identifies topological conditions under which these modifications consistently increase the chosen agent’s influence, with effects that remain robust when stubbornness parameters and interaction weights change. Demonstrations on Erdős–Rényi random graphs illustrate the approach.

Narrative inquiry can illuminate health and health inequalities, but public health research often lacks sustained critical engagement with race and racism. This presentation introduces a critical race narrative methodology as a multi-phase approach to reflexive inquiry into race, racism and health. Grounded in critical race theory, it explains the methodology’s epistemological commitments and phases through research on structural racism and Black women’s access to HIV services in Toronto. It also examines methodological tensions involved in advancing race consciousness within narrative inquiry.

Elena Fuentes-Afflick examines the state of the biomedical research workforce and the conditions needed to sustain a healthy, productive research enterprise. This NIH Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series event is offered in person and through NIH VideoCast.

Agents coordinating only with nearby neighbours may settle on different actions in different network regions. This talk identifies a geometric condition determining when such local coordination can approach optimal collective efficiency. Where the condition fails, network structure also limits correlations achievable across a broader class of dynamic games.

Luís Bettencourt argues that cities and urban systems provide a more useful basis for understanding development than national averages and targets. Regional, urban and neighbourhood differences expose limitations of treating countries as uniform units. The proposed framework describes development as expanding physical, social and economic connections and interdependence. The lecture examines how this approach accounts for empirical patterns across periods and geographies, simultaneous changes in multiple development measures, and heterogeneity at both national and neighbourhood scales. It contrasts national target setting, with its ecological fallacies and distributional effects, with coordinated processes involving innovation communities, infrastructure connectivity and basic services.

This panel examines the UK housing crisis through affordability, supply, taxation and the institutions governing land and credit. High prices relative to incomes and rising rental burdens affect younger people particularly strongly, while inadequate social housing contributes to inequality and exclusion. Housing conditions also influence health, family formation, energy vulnerability, carbon emissions and productivity. The discussion assesses progress on planning reform, land-value capture, social housing and tenure security. It asks whether property taxation and the speculative private housebuilding model need reform, and explores alternatives for expanding access to adequate housing.

Steven Bernstein examines how international norms and practices interact to produce change and continuity in global governance. Contemporary descriptions of a rupture in the international order may exaggerate some changes while overlooking slower developments over preceding decades. The lecture develops four scenarios of change, using examples from ecological governance, development and the rules-based international system to assess the strengths and limitations of prevailing conceptual frameworks.

Yael Parag proposes degrees of isolation and connection as a framework for analysing energy systems, rather than a binary distinction between isolated islands and connected grids. The framework links infrastructure design, governance, operating practices, resource dependence and collective perceptions across spacecraft, community systems, microgrids, islands and countries. Comparative cases examine how security, independence, climate goals, costs, technical constraints, ideology and geopolitics shape these arrangements and change over time. Montserrat illustrates both vulnerabilities and opportunities, including coordinated design of water, sewage and energy microgrids. The lecture also considers how regional exchange, cooperation and shared identity influence resilience, treating energy islands as evolving configurations within wider social and geographical settings.

Maximilian Kasy examines the human choices and ownership structures shaping artificial intelligence. After introducing how AI works, he focuses on who determines its objectives and controls the resources needed to build it: data, computing capacity, expertise and energy. The lecture argues that these decisions, rather than autonomous technological inevitability, influence the distribution of AI’s benefits and harms in an already unequal society. It presents a framework for understanding AI capabilities and considers democratic control of objectives and public oversight as responses to those concerns.

Eric Beinhocker and Nick Hanauer present Market Humanism as a proposed framework for an economy centred on human flourishing. They interpret the period since the financial crisis as a gap between economic paradigms, with consequences for democracy, climate action and responses to artificial intelligence. Drawing on economics, philosophy, behavioural and social sciences, complex systems, evolutionary theory and computer science, they outline the proposed framework and its implications for policy and business. The discussion considers how it could alter politics and public narratives, and the practical opportunities and difficulties of moving towards such an economy.

David Obura draws on IPBES and other assessments to examine interconnected disruptions affecting biodiversity, climate, economies, societies and governance. The lecture asks how underlying drivers and potential tipping points relate to the international order and what constructive transformations could emerge from present crises. It considers differentiated responsibilities across countries and sectors, pathways that recognise ecosystems as foundations of human wellbeing, and ways to balance nature, economies and social outcomes. Existing multilateral institutions offer starting points, but changes in conservation priorities, finance and governance are needed to move towards safer and more equitable conditions.

Digital platforms generate unprecedented traces of human behaviour, offering new methodological approaches to understanding collective action, polarisation, and social dynamics. Through analysis of millions of digital traces across multiple studies, we demonstrate how online behaviours predict offline action: Brexit-related tribal discourse responds to real-world events, machine learning models achieve 80% accuracy in predicting real-world protest attendance from digital signals, and social validation through "likes" emerges as a key driver of mobilization. Extending this approach to conspiracy narratives reveals how digital traces illuminate psychological mechanisms of belief and community formation. Longitudinal analysis of YouTube conspiracy content demonstrates how narratives systematically address existential, epistemic, and social needs, while examination of alt-tech platforms shows how emotions of anger, contempt, and disgust correlate with violence-legitimating discourse, with significant differences between narratives associated with offline violence versus peaceful communities. This work establishes digital traces as both methodological innovation and theoretical lens, demonstrating that computational social science can illuminate fundamental questions about polarisation, mobilisation, and collective behaviour across contexts from electoral politics to conspiracy communities.

How societies describe and represent introduced species affects the policies used to manage them. This seminar uses perspectives from the humanities and social sciences to examine political, symbolic and practical aspects of biological invasions. Examples from contemporary art and media connect framing and perception with concrete conservation decisions.

Oh Joon examines children’s rights through the United Nations’ interconnected concerns with peace, development and human rights. He discusses the shift from treating children only as recipients of protection and education to recognizing them as rights-holders, and considers the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the role of development cooperation. The lecture applies this framework to Rohingya children displaced to Bangladesh, focusing on statelessness and barriers to education. It considers diplomatic cooperation between Bangladesh and Myanmar and the need for sustained international attention to the humanitarian situation.

In this webinar, Dr David Pagliaccio discusses the findings of his recent pre-print on workplace bias and discrimination faced by LGBTQIA+ brain scientists in the US.

Waiting is one of healthcare’s core experiences. It is there in the time it takes to access services; through the days, weeks, months or years needed for diagnoses; in the time that treatment takes; and in the elongated time-frames of recovery, relapse, remission and dying.Funded by the Wellcome Trust, our project opens up what it means to wait in and for healthcare by examining lived experiences, representations and histories of delayed and impeded time.In an era in which time is lived at increasingly different and complex tempos, Waiting Times looks to understand both the difficulties and vital significance of waiting for practices of care, offering a fundamental re-conceptualisation of the relation between time and care in contemporary thinking about health, illness, and wellbeing.

Studies show that abuse, neglect or trauma during childhood can lead to lifelong struggles including with mental health. Fortunately research also indicates that solutions and interventions at various stages of life can be developed to help. But even among people who remain resilient or do not experience acute stresses, a lack of opportunity early in life due to poverty or systemic racism can still constrain their ability to realize their full potential. In what ways are health and other outcomes affected by early life difficulty? What can individuals and institutions do to enhance opportunity?" "This daylong event will feature talks by neuroscientists, policy experts, physicians, educators and activists as they discuss how our experiences and biology work together to affect how our minds develop and what can be accomplished in helping people overcome early disadvantages.

Cristina Rivera Garza examines how personal archives can challenge the erasure associated with gendered and state violence. Drawing on the family papers used in her account of her sister Liliana’s 1990 femicide, she considers how language, punctuation, repetition and playful forms preserve a person’s presence. The lecture connects these close readings with collective memory and the afterlives of femicide. Rivera Garza asks how documentary and writing practices can make victims materially present in public memory, engaging with Christina Sharpe’s concept of archives of breathlessness.