COALESCE LAB

I am proud to announce the newly founded COALESCE Lab, a research lab dedicated to studying processes of social cohesion, polarization, and exclusion from a social network perspective. While these processes are fundamentally relational, they are often studied on an individual level, or on the basis of social media networks. The COALESCE Lab aims to contribute to international research on these processes by focusing in-depth on the everyday relationships among citizens and their societal consequences. It thus aims to connect micro-level relationships to individual and macro-level outcomes.

To do so, the COALESCE Lab conducts mixed-methods research: it has a strong core of computational analysis on network patterns, but also adds qualitative analysis on the meaning of these patterns for individuals and the causal mechanisms underlying their emergence, and agent-based modeling and simulation to study possible macro-level outcomes in more depth. Although the lab is formally embedded in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the UAB, it aims to be an interdisciplinary environment.

The lab was founded to unite the members working on the different projects about social networks and cohesion, polarization, and exclusion, to create synergies and collaboration. So far, we have offered six jobs to early career scholars (see the "job opportunities" section). We are also happy to host academic visitors and PhD students, postdocs, and researchers who wish to join the lab with external grants if their research topics closely align with that of the lab (see the "job opportunities" section for possible grants).

The lab will soon have its own web.