Social Complexity An Introduction

What you'll learn
The aim of this course is to give you a solid grasp of the core concepts within the domain of social complexity
By the end of the course you should be familiar with and be able to apply the most important models from social complexity
Requirements
There are no prerequisites to this course aside for a firm grasp of the english language and a basic level of general scientific knowledge
Description
OverviewThis course is an accessible introduction to the application of complexity theory to the social sciences, the course will be primarily focused upon the domain of sociology, but we will touch upon elements of psychology, anthropology, political science and economics. The aim of the course is to introduce you to the variety of models from complex systems and illustrate how they apply to these different domains. This course is a first of its kind and somewhat experimental in nature, where we will be drawing upon research from many different areas and using complexity theory to contextualize it into a coherent paradigm, giving us a fresh perspective with which to interpret some of the core questions within the social sciences.ContentThe course is broken down into four main sections, in each section we will apply one of the major modelling frameworks from complexity theory to interpreting social phenomena. We will firstly give an overview to this area of social complexity before starting our first section on systems theory as we lay down a basic model of a social system, we will go on to use this model in helping us understand, social structure and institutions.Next we will take an overview to nonlinear social science, as we discuss the process of self-organization, feedback loops, chaos theory and self-organized criticality. The third section to the course is dedicated to social network analysis, we will cover the main topics in this new area as we talk about the basics of social graphs, clustering, network structure and the process of diffusion. Finally we will be looking through the lens of complex adaptive systems theory, exploring the model of a fitness landscape, talking about adaptive capacity, social resilience and the process of evolution.
Overview
Lecture 1 Course Overview
Section 1: Social Systems Theory
Lecture 2 Social Complexity Part 1
Lecture 3 Social Complexity Part 2
Lecture 4 Social Systems
Lecture 5 Institutions
Lecture 6 Social Structure
Section 2: Self-Organization & Nonlinearity
Lecture 7 Self-Organization
Lecture 8 Feedback Loops
Lecture 9 Attractors & Chaos
Lecture 10 Social Dynamics
Section 3: Social Network Science
Lecture 11 Network Science
Lecture 12 Community Structure
Lecture 13 Network Structure
Lecture 14 Network Diffusion
Section 4: Complex Social Systems
Lecture 15 Complex Adaptive Systems
Lecture 16 Adaptive Systems
Lecture 17 Evolution
Lecture 18 Functions
This course is designed to be accessible to a broad audience but will be of particular interest to researchers and students within the various social sciences wishing to apply complexity theory within their own work. Some background in social theory and complexity theory would be an advantage but not a prerequisite.