Call for Abstracts! Power to the People: Participatory Modeling for Societal Resilience, XXI ISA World Congress of Sociology, 2027

We invite abstract submissions to the session “Power to the People: Participatory Modeling for Societal Resilience” at the XXI ISA World Congress of Sociology, taking place at Chonnam National University in Gwangju, South Korea, from 4-10 July 2027.

Submission period: 3 August-14 October 2026

Session Description:

Addressing contemporary societal challengesfrom disaster preparedness and climate adaptation to energy transitions—requires understanding how individual decisions, social interactions, and collective outcomes are interconnected. These challenges involve heterogeneous actors with diverse interests, resources, and perceptions, whose behaviors are shaped by social networks, institutional contexts, and evolving norms.

Participatory modeling offers a powerful approach for integrating these diverse perspectives into formal representations of complex social systems. By involving stakeholders directly in model development, it transforms modeling into a process of collaborative knowledge production, enhancing transparency, legitimacy, and collective learning. Agent-based modeling (ABM) is particularly well suited to this endeavor. ABM enables the representation of heterogeneous decision-making mechanisms, social influence processes, and network embeddedness at the micro level, while capturing emergent macro-level phenomena such as opinion polarization, norm evolution, diffusion dynamics, collective action, resilience, and inequality. As a boundary object, ABM facilitates dialogue between researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and citizens.

This session brings together scholars working at the intersection of analytical sociology, qualitative participatory methods, and agent-based modeling who are interested in questions such as:

• How to integrate stakeholders’ perspectives into modeling practices?
• What kind of calibration and validation are necessary and feasible when modeling complex and urgent issues, like crises and pandemics?
• How can participatory models be used to advance theories about human behaviors in crisis?
• What role should realism play in this context?

We seek contributions that advance theoretical, methodological, and empirical understanding of participatory approaches to improve the modeling of complex social systems and support more inclusive and effective policy design.

Abstracts can be submitted through the ISA Conference System, with a maximum of 300 words.

More information about the Congress can be found here.