The labeEx SMS brings together researchers from five Research Units of the University of Toulouse le Mirail specialized in sociology, history, geography and anthropology and other teams or researchers from Toulouse specialized in political science and economics, informatics and information and communication. The total number of researchers involved is 470.
The objective of LabeEx SMS is to build a new vision of social worlds based on the originality arising from the project researchers’ experience in the analysis of social networks, an experience which makes the Toulouse site unique in the French and European Human and Social Sciences context. It is impossible to understand social networks or for them to account for the complexity of social phenomena in isolation from other dimensions of these social worlds, including the material devices that underlie everyday social activity, forms of regulation(standards, rules and norms) that provide the framework for the same activity and the territories in which it unfolds. The Toulouse site has the advantage of including a group of researchers who have not only mastered the most up to date approaches to these different dimensions of the social world, but who have been working for several years to make them converge around methodological seminars and workshops. This broad range of competencies justifies the project’s ambition.