Partners, Affiliates, Colleagues & Friends of SoDy

Partnerships & Affiliations

The Seshat team systematically collects what is currently known about the social and political organization of human societies and how civilizations have evolved over time. This massive collection of historical information allows us and others to rigorously test different hypotheses about the rise and fall of large-scale societies across the globe and human history.

Several of our SoDy team - Dan Hoyer, Rachel Ainsworth, Jim Bennett and Samantha Holder - are part of the Seshat team and have worked on several major projects, analyses and publications since its founding in 2014.

Accelerator for Systems Risk Assessment

ASRA is a unique initiative catalyzing the development of practical tools decision-makers need to effectively cope with and navigate polycrisis, and is home to a global network of risk thinkers and doers - including SoDy’s Dan Hoyer, Florian Jehn and Rachel Ainsworth - who are radically rethinking risk in order to improve policy and decision-making to the benefit of nature and humanity.

Social AI Research Group at the University of Toronto

Our Founder & Director, Dr. Dan Hoyer, isn't just a “surprisingly upbeat collapseologist" who spends his time thinking about polycrises; he's also the Senior Researcher on a cutting-edge of a project to develop AI-integrated computational models to study human social behaviour using approaches from neuroscience, psychology, sociology, history, and cultural anthropology. This brings theoretical and empirical insights from across the social sciences to explore critical questions surrounding social cognition, perception and behaviour, and will allow us to understand the past better while boosting our ability to navigate the pressing challenges facing us in the future.

Complexity Science Hub

Dan Hoyer and Jim Bennett are Affiliate Faculty at the CSH in Vienna, which undertakes independent scientific research which embraces a pioneering approach: not only do they advance complexity science, but they apply it to problems that matter now. Within a network of top scientists, practitioners, and policymakers the CSH and its wider team seek to understand the challenges and risks confronting diverse facets of our society.

ALLFED

At the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED), Florian Jehn, SoDy’s Global Risk Lead, has worked with All Fed on projects including research on the hydrophobicity of soils, how rivers behave in Germany and the USA, possible research gaps in our understanding of climate change, exoplanet habitability, feeding everyone with seaweed and how to grow crops when we have lost all industrial infrastructure.

The Repatterning Collective

Exciting talks are underway with the Repatterning Collective about how we can join forces on a project…More to come soon!

Potsdam Research Institute for Sustainability

SoDy’s Research Director, Dr. Rachel Ainsworth, is an Affiliate Scholar at The Research Institute for Sustainability. RIFs conducts research with the goal of understanding, advancing, and guiding processes of societal change towards sustainable development.