COALESCE Lab

The COALESCE Lab is an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to advancing the understanding of social exclusion, cohesion, and polarization through the lens of social network analysis. These phenomena are inherently relational, yet they are frequently examined at the individual level or through social media data, resulting in significant gaps in our knowledge about how they emerge and persist in everyday life. The COALESCE Lab addresses these gaps by focusing on the everyday interactions among citizens and their societal consequences, aiming to bridge the divide between micro-level relationships and macro-level social outcomes. To achieve this, the lab employs a mixed-methods approach that integrates qualitative research to explore interaction patterns, social boundary formation, their meanings for individuals, and the causal mechanisms behind their formation and dynamics; survey-based and computational network analysis for statistical inference of societal patterns; and agent-based modeling and simulation to investigate potential macro-level dynamics and outcomes in greater depth. The lab, directed by Prof. Miranda Lubbers, is embedded in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). Within the anthropology department, in addition to contributing to personal network theory and empirical applications (e.g., in migration), the COALESCE Lab contributes to methodological development in techniques rooted in anthropology, such as cultural consensus analysis, the network scale-up method, and text analysis. Feel free to get in touch if you have any question, or if you are interested in applying for external grants to join the lab (e.g., via the programs of the Spanish Ministry, named FPU for PhD students and Juan de la Cierva and Ramón y Cajal for postdocs, or via a Marie Curie grant).