The Social Demography Seminars(SDS) at the Center for Population and Development Studies provide a lively forum for scholars from across the university to discuss in-progress social scientific and population research. Social demography includes work that uses demographic methods to describe and explain the distribution of social goods across populations. The Social Demography Seminar series thus welcomes presentations on a wide variety of topics such as family, gender, race/ethnicity, population health—including mortality, morbidity, and functional health—inequality, im/migration, fertility, and the institutional arrangements that shape and respond to population processes. The long-term goal is to build a broad and multi-disciplinary community of social demographers at Harvard.
The seminars occur on Thursdays, 12:00-1:00 p.m. in the conference room at 9 Bow Street in Harvard Square, Cambridge, unless otherwise noted**. The seminars are geared towards faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and those with other academic appointments (e.g., research scientist or associate).
For additional information or to be added to the email list for announcements, please contact Lesley Harkins.
Winter/Spring 2021
**Our winter/spring seminars will be taking place online. **
January 28, 2021
Christina Cross, PhD, postdoctoral fellow (2019-2022); and assistant professor (beginning 2022) of sociology, Harvard University, will present “Color, class, and context: Examining heterogeneous family structure effects.”
February 4, 2021
Ichiro Kawachi, MBChB, PhD, John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Social Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, will present “Ten years on: Residential displacement and health outcomes following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.”
February 11, 2021
Lingxin Hao, PhD, professor, department of sociology, Johns Hopkins University, will present “A social network model of detecting labor market structure from massive employment relations.”
February 25, 2021
Nancy Krieger, PhD, professor of social epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, will present “COVID-19, structural racism, embodied histories, and the two-edged sword of data.”
March 4, 2021
Meg Lovejoy, PhD, research program director for the Workplace and Well-being Initiative, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and Pamela Stone, PhD, professor of sociology, Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, will present “Paradox of privilege: Gender, class and career interruption among high-achieving women.”
March 11, 2021
Sandra Susan Smith, PhD, Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice; and Faculty Director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, Harvard Kennedy School; and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, will present “Mobilizing social capital for pretrial release.”
March 25, 2021
Colter Mitchell, PhD, research associate professor at the Institute for Social Research, and adjunct research associate professor of sociology at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, will present “The potential (and pitfalls) using epigenetics for examining social and health inequalities.”
April 1, 2021
Anna R. Haskins, PhD, assistant professor of sociology, Cornell University, will present “Complexity and constraint: College attitudes and expectations among teens of the prison boom.”
April 8, 2021
Marie Bragg, PhD, assistant professor, department of population health at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, will present “Food marketing and the Federal Trade Commission: Advancing health equity in the food environment through policy.”
April 15, 2021
Adia Harvey Wingfield, PhD, Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Arts & Sciences, associate dean for faculty development, and professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, will present “Professional work in a ‘post-racial’ era: Black health care workers in the new economy.” Please REGISTER.
April 22, 2021
Margaret Frye, PhD, assistant professor of sociology, University of Michigan, will present “Educational expansion and family formation in sub-Saharan Africa.” Please REGISTER.
April 29, 2021
Daniel Schneider, PhD, professor of public policy , Harvard Kennedy School, will present “Essential and unprotected: Service sector work in a time of COVID-19.” Please REGISTER.
