Boundaries of Belonging in Memory, Politics, and School

ABSTRACT
What social patterns emerge when communities remember, take positions, and cooperate? This talk explores three domains: collective memory, political polarization, and school coexistence, through the lens of complexity science. Using large-scale data and computational models, I show patterns in how communities draw boundaries: deciding what is remembered or forgotten, shifting ideological positions, and shaping cooperation and isolation in classrooms. Across domains, we see a common pattern: small-scale interactions–whether in remembering, in political choices, or in classroom cooperation–scale into collective outcomes that take the form of cohesion or fragmentation. By combining empirical evidence with modeling, I illustrate how such dynamics can be measured across domains and how this perspective helps us understand the collective processes that shape our social worlds.

SHORT BIO
Dr. Cristian Candia is a Chilean physicist and computational social scientist.
He is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Computational Research in Social Science Lab (CRiSS-LAB) at Universidad del Desarrollo in Chile, and also an External Faculty member at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO).  Cristian’s research combines data science and human behavior theories to study socioeconomic systems, with a focus on collective memory, political polarization, learning and business analytics, and network science. He has led public and private funded projects that connect academia, public policy, and industry to promote social innovation.
Beyond academia, he actively translates his research into practice. He has developed digital tools such as Lixandra and Discolab, which apply AI and network science to real-world challenges, and is the founder of Capybara, a startup that uses game-based social dilemmas to map student interactions in real time, helping schools anticipate bullying and build safer environments.