Seminar Series

We are thrilled to have Dr Guillermina Altomonte present at our seminar on Friday 27 November, from 2.00pm to 3.00pm.

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Chasing Independence: Growing Old in the Shadow of an American Ideal

In twenty-first-century America, as people live longer than ever before, it’s taken for granted that older adults should be active and self-reliant. News stories describe nonagenarians who run marathons, reality shows feature attractive older women competing for the love of a widowed bachelor, and policymakers encourage aging “in place” rather than in a nursing home.

This talk turns a critical eye on these expectations and asks what happens when independence becomes the yardstick by which we measure the quality of old age. It explores how, and with what consequences, independence operates as a metric for medical assessments, allocation of services, and even as a way to determine an older person’s identity and self-worth. Despite the elevation of independence as the dominant ideal of aging, it is always a moving target, redefined and pushed out of reach by individual, economic, and social constraints.

We are thrilled to have Dr Audrey Alejandro present at our seminar on Friday 11 December, from 2.00pm to 3.00pm.

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Science Fiction as a Methodology for Theory Generation

Science fiction is one of the most popular fiction genres, long recognized for its capacity to critique social orders and to imagine them otherwise. Across the social sciences, however, it has mainly served as a resource—a source of data, an inspiration for critique, a methodological and pedagogical toolkit—rather than as a mode of inquiry: researchers write about science fiction far more than they write through it, and there is little methodological guidance for writing it as social research. Amid growing interest in creative methods and fiction as research, and calls to diversify academic writing, this article addresses this gap by developing science fiction writing as a qualitative methodology for theory generation through two complementary moves.

Conceptually, drawing on possible-worlds narratology, it introduces fictional actualization—the passage of a world from a virtual or possible state to inhabited textual reality—as the core mechanism through which composing science fiction does theoretical work. Practically, it operationalizes this account through a creative writing procedure built on four groundwork documents—world-building, characterization, plotting, and scene-making—drafted before the prose and recursively revised as theory and composition act back on each other.

I argue that science fiction not only can generate theory but, as a creative method, offers three affordances supporting a distinctive kind of theorizing: the genre’s conventions provide resources for theoretical variation that expand the social imagination; the craft demands of making a fictional world coherent and inhabitable act as a theoretical discipline, forcing abstract claims to be specified and embodied; and fictional actualization transforms the reader’s relation to theoretical knowledge, from comprehending propositions to inhabiting, feeling, and experiencing the social configurations they describe. The article thereby contributes to legitimizing fiction as research and making it more accessible by offering social scientists a formalized and teachable procedure for theorizing through fiction writing.

Autumn Term

Overseas Chinese Engagement in Brazil and Paraguay: Migrants’ Associations, Diaspora Agencies, and Extraterritorial Policies. Dr Douglas de Toledo Piza, Assistant Professor of International Affairs, Lafayette College.

Authoritarian Communication at Scale: What Text-as-Data Reveals about Russia. Dr Lanabi La Lova, LSE Fellow, Department of Methodology, LSE.

Upward network influence and social integration: Do student friendships stimulate interethnic parental ties? Dr Zsófia Boda, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Essex.

Planetary Causal Inference: combining computer vision and earth observation to analyze disparities in health and living conditions among neighbourhoods in Africa, 1990 to date. Professor Adel Daoud, Associate Professor in Computational Social Science, Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linkoping University.

Death by Design: Producing Racial Health Inequality in the Shadow of the Capitol. Professor Sanyu A. Mojola, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University.

Winter Term

Kiss, Marry, Kill: Appearance-Based Discrimination in Politics. Dr Rachel Bernhard, Associate Professor, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

How Ideologies Become Invisible: Methodological Reflections on the Study of ‘Common Sense’. Dr Iman Dawood, LSE Fellow, Department of Methodology, LSE.

Methods of Care: Relational Accountability in Data Practices. Dr Saide Mobayed Vega, LSE Fellow, Department of Methodology, LSE.

Inequality and Fairness in social networks and algorithms. Professor Fariba Karimi, Professor of Social Data Science, Graz University of Technology.

If You Build It, They Will Vote: How Infrastructure Builds Support for Public Transit. Dr Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Faculty Director, Local Politics Lab, Harvard Kennedy School.

Diffusion interrupted: social network and contextual influences on the trajectory of solar panel diffusion in the U.S., 2013-2019. Dr Kinga Makovi, Associate Professor of Social Research and Public Policy, NYU Abu Dhabi.

Spring Term

Rethinking Misinformation Interventions: Beyond the Search for a Magic Bullet. Professor Adam J. Berinsky, Mitsui Professor of Political Science, Director at MIT Political Experiments Research Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Autumn Term

Quantifying the effect of research policies governing scientific editors. Fengyuan 'Michael' Liu, Global PhD Fellow, Data Science and AI Lab, New York University, Abu Dhabi.

The limits of explainability for reducing algorithmic discrimination. Dr Kate Vredenburgh, Assistant Professor, Department of Philsophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics.

The Tools of Racial Disenfranchisement: Lessons from 135,457 Individual Voter Records. Dr Daniel de Kadt, Assistant Professor, Department of Methodology, London School of Economics.

Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right: Evidence from England's National Health Service. Dr Zachary Dickson, LSE Fellow, Department of Methodology, London School of Economics.

Winter Term

Causal Representation Learning with Generative Artificial Intelligence: Application to Texts as Treatments. Professor Kosuke Imai, Professor of Government and of Statistics, Harvard University.

Security from Below: A Hermeneutic-Contextualist Methodology for Studying Marginalised Security Actors. Dr Bohdana Kurylo, LSE Fellow.

Mediating Transnational Mining Disputes in Liberal Democracies. The Ghanaian Case. Dr Isaac Haruna Ziaba, LSE Fellow.

Comparing the Performance of Machine Learning Ensembles for Multilevel Regression and Poststratification Models. Dr Lucas Leemann, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Zurich.

Just a Number?: Age Misstatement and the Old-Age Pension in Colonial Ireland. Dr J. Andy Harris, Associate Professor, Division of Social Science, New York University, Abu Dhabi.

Visions of Financial Order: National Institutions and the Development of Banking Regulation. Dr Kim Pernell, Assistant Professor of Sociology, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas.

Autumn Term

Digi-queer Criminology and Addressing the Rise of Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate. Dr Justin Ellis - co-hosted with The Mannheim Centre, Department of Social Policy.

Are Campaign Promises Effective? Dr Michael Ganslmeier , Department of Methodology, LSE.

Analysing Age, Period, and Cohort effects using Scenario Trajectory Analysis with applications to political interest and social trust. Professor Patrick Sturgis and Professor Jouni Kuha, Department of Methodology, LSE.

What chance of change? Reflections from participatory research on poverty across recurrent crises by Ruth Patrick and Maddy Power. Professor Ruth Patrick, Social Policy, University of York.

Following the information footprint of firms. Dr Eddie Lee, Complexity Science Hub Vienna, Co-hosted with Data Science Institute, London School of Economics.
Why are things this way? Reflections on a coproduced artwork as research. Dr Eileen Alexander, Department of Methodology, LSE.

Winter Term

Collecting public opinion in fragile and conflict states – the challenges and the rewards. Johnny Heald, CEO, ORB International.
Qualitative methods for studying social security benefits: methodological reflections on an ongoing project. Dr. Kate Summers, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Methodology, LSE.

Race, Class, and What Else? Policies and Politics in Four American Cities. Professor Jennifer Hochschild, Professor of Government & Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University.

Polarization over the Priority of Political Problems. Professor Benjamin Lauderdale, Professor of Political Science, University College London.

Temporalities and timelines in the aftermath of Grenfell. Professor Flora Cornish, Professor in Research Methodology, Department of Methodology, LSE.

Spring Term

Climate Change Migration: Lessons from a Longitudinal Mixed Methods Study of Hurricane Katrina. Professor Mary Waters, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University.