BRICSS seminar series
The ESSA special interest group Building Resilience with Social Simulations (BRICSS) is organising a webinar series designed to foster discussion in the field of ABMs of crisis and disaster management. This webinar series is a first step towards establishing and nurturing a multi- and interdisciplinary community that aims to advance scholarly knowledge on social simulation for crises and to establish social simulation as a relevant and trusted tool for decision makers when preparing for, responding to, and learning from crises.
The webinars will take place every two months, approximately on the third Thursday of the month, starting on January 22nd (this date is indicative, and we will inform you of any changes).
To sign up for the series and join BRICSS, please reach out to us at vittorionespeca@gmail.com! We will add you to our mailing list so you can stay informed about the webinars and other activities by this group. We are currently looking for presenters. If you are interested, feel free to send us an email and propose a topic! We particularly encourage early- and mid-career researchers to present and discuss their work. Presentations do not need to be based on a completed paper; they can also focus on preliminary ideas, works in progress, theoretical contributions, or visions and research agendas.
The list of topics includes, but is not limited to, developing, calibrating, validating, and using ABMs for studying and supporting policy making (e.g., formulation, evaluation, and agenda setting) related to:
Crisis and disaster risk management: relevant theories and ABMs for different phases of crisis/disaster management, such as preparedness, mitigation, detection, response, recovery, learning from past crises, etc
Whole-of-society approaches: studying collaboration and coordination among governmental agencies, NGOs, civil society, businesses, and other actors through ABM and network theory (e.g., network formation and change, information diffusion, and interplay of network structure and agency in highly dynamic environments).
Information, knowledge management, and ICT: the role of information systems, crowdsourcing platforms, and AI agents in facilitating information and knowledge diffusion and coordination in multi-actor networks.
Resilience studies: modelling absorption, adaptation, and transformation dynamics (e.g., in the context of climate change), including the interplay between short- and long-term dynamics via multiscale modelling.
Collective intelligence studies: ABMs capturing self-organised/emergent mechanisms that enable systems to sustain and strengthen resilience over time by supporting collective capabilities such as sensing (or detecting), remembering, learning, creating, and deciding.
Humanitarian and supply chain studies: models representing the specific characteristics of humanitarian operations and the ways these operations can be enhanced.
Safety and security studies: models to study how threats induced either unintentionally or deliberately by humans can be managed.
The politics of crisis management: studies of emergent dynamics in legitimacy, crisis communication, meaning-making, learning from past crises, disproportionate policy reactions, and other related issues, looking at their impact on resilience building and robust governance over time.
Forms of engagement and uptake of crisis expert advice in the public administration (including uptake of advice resulting from ABMs).T
In the future, we envision this seminar series as a platform for dialogue and collaboration between modellers and crisis/disaster management scholars who, while not themselves modellers, are interested in engaging with the modelling community. To support this aim, we may also invite crisis and disaster management scholars to present case studies or theoretical perspectives that could be further developed through modelling and simulation
Vittorio Nespeca, Loïs Vanhée, and Francesca Giardini
The Management team of BRICSS