Seminar Series - Spring 2013
Next Seminar
Friday, May 24, 2013
12:30 - 1:30 pm Raitt 121 Steve Harrell, Anthropology, UWPopulation explosion and the un-buffering of the ecosystem in Late Imperial China It is well known that Malthus's main argument about checks on population growth had to do with what we would now call carrying capacity. He was particularly pessimistic about the ability of China's population to grow, given its already high numbers and density. Nevertheless, population had grown dramatically in the 150 years before Malthus wrote his Essay, and was destined to grow rapidly for another 50 years afterwards, adding up to almost a 200% increase between 1650 and 1850. Superficially, the fact of China's population explosion in the early modern period would seem to support the ideas of Ester Boserup, who saw population growth as a spur to technological change and increased labor inputs, rather than seeing the environment as an absolute brake on population. But Malthus also described the resources necessary to provision a population as "a fund; which, from the nature of all soils, instead of increasing, must be gradually diminishing." This talk tells the story of how a combination of technological innovation (new crops) increased labor inputs allowed the population of China to grow, but at the cost of " "diminishing the fund," not only by exhausting direct agricultural resources such as soil, but also by removing or weakening buffers against disaster, including ecological, institutional, infrastructural, and cultural factors. |
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Spring 2013 Seminar Schedule
April 5, 2013 PAA Prep SeminarRyan Gabriel, Aditya Khanna, and Jenn Laird will present their PAA papers. Each will have 15 minutes, and there will be about 15 minutes for Q&A. Ryan Gabriel, Sociology, "Residential Mobility and Attainment of Interracial Couples" |
April 12, 2013 No seminar: PAA |
April 19, 2013 Zack Almquist, University of California, IrvinePhD Candidate in Sociology; Assistant Professor at Univ of Minnesota in fall 2013US Census Spatial and Demographic Data in R with Applications to Spatially Embedded Social Networks The US Decennial Census is arguably one of the most important data sets for social science research in the United States. The UScensus-suite of packages allows for convenient handling of the 1990, 2000, and 2010 US Census demographic and spatial data in R. These packages rely heavily on the spatial tools developed by Bivand, Pebesma, and Gomez-Rubio (2008), i.e., the sp and maptools packages. This talk will provide some background for working with these data sets in R, helper functions, and further discuss some social network applications to these data sets. For a full detailed discussion of this work see Almquist (2010). Further, the information provided by the US Census data is aggregated by areal unit, for reasons of both privacy and administrative cost. Unfortunately, such aggregation does not permit fine-grained assessment of geography at the level of individual households. In this talk, we propose to partially address this problem via the development of point process models that can be used to effectively simulate the location of individual households within small areal units. While we anticipate many practical uses for this procedure one particularly salient example comes from the social network literature, for further details see Almquist & Butts (2012). |
April 26, 2013 Wendy Roth, University of British ColumbiaAssociate Professor of SociologyHow Does Immigration Change Cultural Schemas of Race? Changing Racial Schemas among Puerto Rican and Dominican Migrants to the United States To download paper, please click here. |
May 3, 2013 Pam Smock, University of Michigan-Ann ArborDepartment of Sociology, Director & Research Professor, Population Studies CenterThe Intergenerational Transmission of Cohabitation and Marriage in the U.S.: The Role of Parents' Union Histories Over two decades ago, in his presidential address to the Population Association of America, demographer Larry Bumpass posed the question: “What’s Happening to the Family?” The issues he raised in that address motivate this paper. Most broadly, we are interested in tracing patterns that may continue to fuel family change. Specifically, this paper investigates the intergenerational transmission of cohabitation and marriage, focusing on mothers' union histories and their young adult children; we seek to extend knowledge about linkages between parental cohabitation and marital histories and children’s own union formation behavior. We draw on 24 waves (1979-2010) of nationally representative data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY79) main youth and young adult (YA) surveys. These longitudinal data allow us to capture both mother’s reports of children’s living arrangements while growing up and young adult reports of their own union formation behavior. |
May 10, 2013 Charlotte Lee, Florida State UniversityAssistant Professor, Department of Biological ScienceFood-dependent demography: Integrating human population and environment in preindustrial societies The inhabitants of pre-European-contact Hawai'i faced tremendous amounts of spatial and temporal environmental heterogeneity. Even within individual dryland farming areas, variation in climate and soil properties is substantial. What role could such variation have played in the dramatic population growth and social changes that took place between initial colonization of the archipelago and European contact? I will present an integrative modeling approach to explore the consequences of variability for dryland agricultural productivity and for the demography and well-being of agriculturalists. The centerpiece is a quantitative model for human demography which links food supply to human survival and fertility, thus relating crop production to population growth and health, as well as to agricultural surplus. Agroecosystem modeling links rainfall and temperature variability to soil nutrient status and dryland crop yield. Coupling the two models and applying them to the Kohala, Hawai'i dryland field system enables a description of the potential social consequences of partitioning the region into smaller administrative units over time. The general approach offers the flexibility to modify models for other locations and cultures, provided some data on the ecosystem, food production practices, and demography. |
May 17, 2013 Kathy O’Connor, Anthropology, UWMasculinity and Family in Men’s Health Higher male than female mortality is a worldwide trend that exists across the lifespan, and persists in the 21st century even in settings with high population life expectancy like the US. However, men’s mortality disadvantage has not been a local or global public health priority and remains poorly understood. Motivated by this, and the survival advantage associated with marriage for men, we explored the role of family in US men’s health using a mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) Community Based Participatory Research framework. Focus groups and interviews identified themes on men’s perceptions and enactments of health, and were followed by a targeted survey and biomarker study. In our sample of men in the Pacific Northwest, all men were insured, but despite good health resources, 70% were overweight and ?26% had high HbA1C. We found that family was a central construct in men’s health conceptualizations and enactments, as well as a key covariate of biomarkers. Qualitative results (N=47 men) support masculinity in the context of family as a key motivator for men’s health, contrary to a large literature on masculinity as a barrier. In the quantitative study (N=94 men), single males had higher dried blood spot cortisol levels than married or co-habiting men (p=0.0034), and a trend toward elevated inflammatory markers and testosterone compared to partnered men. Glycosylated hemoglobin, a marker of glucose control, declined with number of years partnered (p=0.015). Single men had a higher number of doctor visits than partnered men in the previous year (p=0.014). The congruent qualitative and quantitative data are striking and together strongly support that family and relationships are important constructs of men’s health and biology. Authors: Kathleen A. O’Connor, Shedra Amy Snipes, Benjamin Trumble, Tara Hayes-Constant, Jane Shofer, Steven Goodreau, Amanda Guyton, Eleanor Brindle and Richard Pelman |
May 24, 2013 Steve Harrell, Anthropology, UWPopulation explosion and the un-buffering of the ecosystem in Late Imperial China It is well known that Malthus's main argument about checks on population growth had to do with what we would now call carrying capacity. He was particularly pessimistic about the ability of China's population to grow, given its already high numbers and density. Nevertheless, population had grown dramatically in the 150 years before Malthus wrote his Essay, and was destined to grow rapidly for another 50 years afterwards, adding up to almost a 200% increase between 1650 and 1850. Superficially, the fact of China's population explosion in the early modern period would seem to support the ideas of Ester Boserup, who saw population growth as a spur to technological change and increased labor inputs, rather than seeing the environment as an absolute brake on population. But Malthus also described the resources necessary to provision a population as "a fund; which, from the nature of all soils, instead of increasing, must be gradually diminishing." This talk tells the story of how a combination of technological innovation (new crops) increased labor inputs allowed the population of China to grow, but at the cost of " "diminishing the fund," not only by exhausting direct agricultural resources such as soil, but also by removing or weakening buffers against disaster, including ecological, institutional, infrastructural, and cultural factors. |
May 31, 2013 Jon Wakefield, Statistics and Biostatistics, UWTBA |
June 7, 2013 End-of-Year Reception! |