Source: Centre for Urban Studies website.
AMCIS research focuses on how institutions affect inequalities in political participation and decision-making, life courses, educational and occupational careers, and well-being. Within AMCIS, researchers from Sociology, Political Science, Demography, Educational Science, and Economics work together to study the impact of institutions on inequalities in the fields of labour, education, and politics.
The Centre for Urban Studies connects more than 50 researchers and over 50 PhD students, bringing together urban scholars in human geography, planning, sociology, political science, anthropology, and international development studies. The Centre supports existing urban research programs and stimulates interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborative projects. By enabling international academic collaborations and science-practice interactions, the CUS stimulates the formation of global networks of urban scholars, practitioners and policy makers.
Source: Centre for Urban Studies website.
De bacheloropleiding Computational Social Science (UvA) bevindt zich op het snijvlak van sociale wetenschappen, geesteswetenschappen en informatica. Het omvat theorie, onderzoeksmethodologie en statistiek, evenals programmeer- en veranderingsvaardigheden. Studenten zullen zich specialiseren in duurzame digitale interventies voor complexe maatschappelijke uitdagingen (bijvoorbeeld kwesties met betrekking tot digitale surveillance en wereldwijde gezondheid). Studenten doen dit door middel van groepsprojecten van een semester die alle vaardigheden en kennis van het programma combineren en toepassen, waarbij ze vaak echte problemen aanpakken in overleg met echte projectpartners en maatschappelijke belanghebbenden.
Deze collectie bevat momenteel werk van studenten.
Urban Planning research and teaching at the University of Amsterdam focuses on the relationships between the social, spatial, and environmental dimensions of urban processes, and on ways of purposefully and positively impacting on them.
Our approach to research is characterized by the pursuit of an intimate link between theoretical depth and empirical grounding, with a particular emphasis on concept driven, action-orientated research and case study analysis. We aim to develop knowledge that is valuable not only to the academic community, but also has strong social impact, and helps shape urban futures. Key areas of research are: urban governance, critical transport studies, political ecology, urban sustainability and conflict. The empirical field of our research is international in scope, although Amsterdam features prominently as the city in which we are not only located, but also socially immersed and politically engaged. We are institutionally embedded within the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research and the Center for Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam, but our research scope and research collaborations reach out to academic institutions in over twenty countries across the world. Within Amsterdam we have active interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research collaboration with, for example, the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, the Free University, the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and the Municipality of Amsterdam.
All the staff of the Urban Planning programme group is actively involved in teaching the Bachelors programme in Human Geography and Urban Planning and the Masters Programme in Urban and Regional Planning , and the Masters Research Programme in Urban Studies. These programmes target different student groups, but common to all is that they aim at cultivating in students a both critical and constructive attitude towards different ways of understanding and impacting social, spatial and environmental processes in cities.
-The mission of the Urban Planning group is furthering research and teaching on social, spatial, and environmental processes in cities, their interrelationships, and ways of purposefully and positively impacting on them
-The aim of the Urban Planning group is to contribute to the capacity of cities to cope with urgent social, spatial, and environmental challenges
Crucial urban transformations and current debates on interrelated social, cultural and economic issues in cities and metropolitan areas form the backdrop for this research.
The aim of the Urban Geographies (UG) programme group is, first of all, to gain better understanding of the diverse and complex mutual relationships between the development of urban spaces and places, time-space behaviour, individual life courses and life chances. Although interesting research topics in themselves, the shared connections between these phenomena are crucial and therefore form the central focus of this programme. Researchers focus on the way spaces and places are affecting social behaviour and social opportunities, as well as how social behaviour and social interactions are creating and reshaping spaces and places.
The programme group ‘Political Sociology – Power, Place and Difference’ researches evolving relations of conflict and cohesion in various national and international settings. Our research on citizenship, politics, policies, social movements and the state extends beyond actor-centred approaches through relational analyses and a keen eye for power differentials.
Group members employ and develop a wide variety of interpretative and analytic methodologies for rigorous empirical research. We are committed to enhancing and developing comparative and theoretically informed research of current societal issues. The group supports diverse engagements outside the academic arena. In close collaboration with two other programme groups, we form one of the centres of European sociology.
How do people create status differences and maintain boundaries between groups? What are the social mechanisms of price setting in commercial markets? To what extent is the circulation of information and emotions different in social networks of various forms? How do new genres appear in music? What is the role of cultural capital in the recruitment practices of organisations? To what extent are the meanings of violence related to the severity? How are international beauty standards (re)produced? What is the role of emotions and culture in class room interactions? How do people develop a relationship with a place, and acquire a place-based identity?
These are just some of the questions we ask about social life. Clearly, at the cultural sociology programme group we study a wide variety of social phenomena. Also, we use a broad array of data and research methods and techniques, such as observational data, network analysis, computer simulated modelling, various forms of interviewing, video-analysis, statistical modelling of very large N datasets, and Q-analysis.
While the above questions show the broad interests that are represented in our group and our pragmatic approach to social scientific methodologies, we share an understanding that the dynamics (invention, accumulation, diffusion, adjustment and dissolution) of culture is crucial to understand human social life. Without culture, social life would be hard to imagine. While other species mostly rely on their instincts in order to survive, human beings use culture to do so. It is human nature to use culture in at least two different ways.
First of all, people (re)produce meaning as we engage with others, with the objects which surround us and with the environment we are part of; we categorize and identify. For instance, in some situations we categorize others on the basis of gender, in others on the basis of their race, their nationality or, frequently, on the basis of some mixture of categories. In doing so, we include and exclude, and reproduce symbolic and moral boundaries in order to make that happen.
Secondly, unlike other species, we turn the world and ourselves into an object that we can try to understand and act upon. Culture in this sense can be understood as the great manifold of such expressions, including religion, music, literature, body ornaments, science and art. These forms of culture are usually enacted and embedded in institutions, organizations, fields, practices and social networks. We thus study the way in which particular cultural fields and organizations operate – such as fields of education, fashion, fine art, literature, media, music and sport – and their embedding in larger social structures of classes, nations and transnational fields. We also investigate how some groups are more able to monopolize their cultural expressions at the cost of marginalizing those of other groups.
The programme group Cultural Sociology studies culture in these two senses: the meaningful dimension of human life, as well as the cultural elements which human beings reproduce within, at least to some extent, institutionalized settings. We believe that those two senses of culture are closely interconnected and cannot be studied in isolation.
The programme group members are affiliated with several research centers within the University of Amsterdam: the Amsterdam Research Center for Gender and Sexuality, the Centre for Urban Studies, the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, and the Amsterdam Center for Globalization Studies. Over the past years, programme group members have received external funding from national or international funding organizations both from academic funding organizations (ERC, NWO) and various private stakeholders.
Source: Cultural Sociology, UvA
This Programme Group aims to analyse:
-Changing experiences of health and well-being, sexual identities and body regimes
-Social and cultural factors that influence the use of scientific knowledge in clinical settings, care and self-help practices.
-The exercise of biomedical power and the patterns of resistance to and acceptance of medical regimes and scientific knowledge and technology.
They address a broad range of topics, including research on AIDS/HIV, the body and food, morality, reproductive health, children, crime, pharmaceuticals, genetics, medical technologies and practice.
The research cluster has an interdisciplinary character, including researchers working in the fields of medical anthropology and sociology, postcolonial, gender and sexuality studies, and the social studies of (bio)medical science and technology.
The Programme Group is divided in 4 subprograms:
Environmental Geography focuses on human-ecosystem interactions and is well-placed to throw light on the daunting environmental challenges facing our planet. It could be argued that we have gone beyond the earth’s carrying capacity and are approaching planetary boundaries. Other arguments hold that human ingenuity will equip us to deal with new challenges in the future. This programme focuses on the relationship between humans and their ecosystems. This is done by taking a strong spatial perspective and researching the impact of both global and local environmental change on humans.
The Institutions, Inequalities, and Life courses programme (IIL) examines institutions in a broad way as the formal and informal rules and arrangements in society that govern individual behavior and social relationships. Examples of institutions are welfare states, labor market arrangements, educational systems, occupational groups, norms and rules in organizations, and gender role norms.
The programme not only studies how institutions develop and change, but also examines consequences of institutions for inequality and life courses. Attention is also given to the linkages between inequality on the one hand, and life courses on the other hand.
Inequality is conceived as the distribution of income, status, and wellbeing in a society. Institutions affect the degree of inequality in a society and they modify the individual determinants of status, income and well-being. For example, educational systems affect the influence of parents on children’s success in school, labor market rules affect gender inequality in wages and work careers, and pension systems affect income inequality at older ages.
With life courses, the programme especially refers to changes in the household- and family relationships that people experience as they grow older, as well as the age-related transitions in other life domains, such as leaving schooling, making a career, and retirement. Institutions affect life courses in many ways. For example, gender roles affect the formation of marriage and the way couples divide paid and household labor, welfare state arrangements affect divorce and fertility, and governmental care systems for the elderly may affect intergenerational relationships.
The IIL programme uses a mixture of methods and data including quantitative analyses of survey data, analyses of register data, experimental data, social network analysis, and policy analysis. An important goal of the programme is to invest in the collection, development, enrichment, and dissemination of cross-national and longitudinal survey data. By comparing individuals in a large number of countries with multi-level methods, better evidence can be obtained on the effects of institutions. With longitudinal survey data, individual changes over the life course can be related to life events so as to gain stronger evidence on causal effects.
The research program Challenges to Democracy studies the consequences of current political developments and their historical roots for democratic governance. How do democratic regimes maintain political stability? To what extent can they deliver political equality, legitimacy and prevent societal polarization? We address these and other fundamental questions both theoretically and empirically.
In recent decades, there has been a growing divergence between the organisation of society and the inherited conceptual framework of the 20th century political sciences. The group seeks to re-examine established notions of identities, categorizations and boundaries defined by classical political science concepts through different forms of empirical investigation.
Ongoing trends towards transnational integration of markets and economic transactions are giving rise to far-reaching transformations of governance both within and beyond the nation-state. The Political Economy and Transnational Governance (PETGOV) programme group focuses on the drivers, dynamics, and consequences of these epochal developments in political and economic life.