In June and July, over 1,750 participants from more than 60 countries affiliated with close to 900 institutions took part in Networks 2021, one of the largest-ever gatherings of network scientists. The conference was the first to combine the annual meetings of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA’s annual Sunbelt meeting) and the Network Science Society (NetSci). The inaugural three-week event included over 200 satellite, workshop, parallel, and plenary sessions.
IUNI led and hosted Networks 2021, planning for which spanned over five years. This gathering was initially scheduled to take place in person in Washington, D.C., but transitioned to an all-virtual event as pandemic travel and social distancing restrictions continued across the globe.
Networks 2021 began on June 21 with two weeks of workshops and satellite sessions. The main conference started on July 5 and continued through July 10. The gathering featured nearly 1,000 scholarly talks delivered across over 160 parallel sessions. IUNI Advisory Council Member Brea Perry (Professor, IU Sociology) presented in one of the four plenary talks, a discussion about the social brain and mental illness.
The PDF of the final program of the main conference is the historical record of Networks 2021. This 882-page volume is fully searchable and contains abstracts for most of the nearly 1,000 scholarly talks presented.
Attendees from both INSNA and NetSci expressed support for continuing to regularly combine the annual meetings of the two societies every few years, and leadership from the two societies will consider this. Upcoming meetings for the societies are planned for 2022. NetSci’s next meeting, NetSci 2022, will be in Shanghai, China during June and July. NetSciX will take place February 8–11 in Porto, Portugal, likely in a virtual setting. INSNA will hold Sunbelt XLII in Cairns, Australia, July 12–16.