Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability & Regional Conference Latin America: Brazil

Dear Colleagues,

we are happy to announce that the Global Center of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability (GCSMUS or SMUS) together with the Research Committee on “Logic and Methodology in Sociology” (RC33) of the International Sociology Association (ISA) and the Research Network “Quantitative Methods” (RN21) of the European Sociology Association ( ESA) will organize the 2nd International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability (“SMUS Conference”), which will simultaneously be the “1st RC33 Regional Conference Latin America: Brazil”, and take place online at the University of São Paulo (Brazil) from Thursday, September 8th , to Saturday September 10th , 2022.

The three-day conference aims at continuing a global dialogue on methodsand should attract methodologists from all over the world and all social and spatial sciences (e. g. anthropology, area studies, architecture, communication studies, computational sciences, digital humanities, educational sciences, geography, historical sciences, humanities, landscape planning, philosophy, psychology, sociology, urban design, urban planning, traffic planning and environmental planning). The online conference programme will include keynotes, sessions and advanced methodological training courses.

With this intention, we invite scholars of all social and spatial sciences and other scholars who are interested in methodological discussions to suggest a session topic. Conference sessions should mainly address a methodological problem. All sessions on general issues of social science methodology and epistemology as well as on qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches are equally welcome. In addition, we especially invite scholars to suggest session topics on one of the following issues:

1. Spatial methods
2. Process-oriented, longitudinal and historical methods
3. Decolonizing social science methodology
4. Methods from, by and/or for the Global South
5. Overcoming methodological nationalism
6. Cross-cultural methods, transnational research and issues of comparability
7. Quantitative methods
8. Qualitative methods
9. Mixed methods
10. Strategies of data collection, storage and access
11. Digital methods, big data and digital humanities
12. Mobile, arts- and/or design-based methods
13. Interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary, participatory and/or collaborative research methods
14. Applied research methods for urban design, urban planning, traffic planning and environmental planning
15. Evaluation methods and methods of scientific validation
16. Research ethics
17. Methodological issues relevant for specific research topics (for example, urban research, sustainability research, social housing, crime and public safety, or spatial inequalities concerning gender, race and/or ethnicity)

Please find more information on the above institutions on the following websites:

• Global Center of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability (GCSMUS): https://gcsmus.org/
• Subscription to the GCSMUS Newsletter: https://lists.tu-berlin.de/mailman/listinfo/mes-smusnews
• ISA RC33: http://rc33.org/
• ESA RN21: www.europeansociology.org/research-networks/rn21-quantitative-methods
• University of São Paulo: https://www5.usp.br

Please also kindly forward this call to anybody to whom it might be of interest. Best wishes,
Fraya Frehse (GCSMUS Brazil Lead Partner, University of São Paulo, Brazil) & Nina Baur (GCSMUS Director & RC33 Past President, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany)

CfS + Rules for Session Organization (PDF)