We look forward to welcoming Jen Rose Smith from the University of Washington on Friday, May 29 from 12:30 – 1:30 PM, in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom (Register Here). This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative.

Ice animates the look and feel of climate change. It is melting faster than ever before, causing social upheaval among northern coastal communities and disrupting a more southern, temperate world as sea levels rise. Economic, academic, and activist stakeholders are increasingly focused on the unsettling potential of ice as they plan for a future shaped by rapid transformation. Yet, in Ice Geographies, Jen Rose Smith demonstrates that ice has always been at the center of making sense of the world. Ice as homeland is often at the heart of Arctic and sub-Arctic ontologies, cosmologies, and Native politics. Reflections on ice have also long been a constitutive element of Western political thought, but it often privileges a pristine or empty “nature” stripped of power relations. Smith centers ice to study race and indigeneity by investigating ice relations as sites and sources of analysis that are bound up with colonial and racial formations as well as ice geographies beyond those formations. Smith asks, How is ice a racialized geography and imaginary, and how does it also exceed those frameworks?

Two posters by CSDE Trainees and Affiliates received awards at PAA 2026!

CSDE Trainee Julie Kim (Global Health) was recognized in the Family Demography theme for her poster, “Racial-Ethnic and Gender Inequalities in U.S. Internal Migration.” Kim developed high-resolution estimates of interstate migration by age, sex, race-ethnicity, and state in the United States from 2000–2022 using harmonized survey data within a Bayesian hierarchical framework. The results reveal substantial diversity in migration regimes across racial-ethnic groups,  including differences in mobility intensity, age patterns, and destination concentration, highlighting increasingly diverse geographic mobility systems in the United States. Congratulations, Julie!

Brandon Morande (Sociology) led joint work with CSDE Affiliate Amy Hagopian (Health Systems and Population Health), CSDE Affiliate Zack Almquist (Sociology), and Kim Serry, which was recognized in the Data and Methods/Applied Demography category. The team's study used street outreach data to investigate where people migrate following encampment clearances and employed relational event models to predict the likelihood of various outcomes. Results suggest that displaced residents remain nearby but reside in smaller camp communities. People appear unlikely to move indoors and instead face high risks of losing contact with service providers. These trends hold regardless of individual demographics, although people with certain health conditions demonstrate stronger place attachments. Congratulations, Brandon, Kim, Dr. Hagopian and Dr. Almquist!

In a recent article in Environmental Sociology, CSDE Affiliate Patrick Greiner (Sociology) and co-authors explore the relationship between financialization and the material footprint of nations — a measure of the raw material requirements needed to sustain a population’s consumption. Using panel regression and comparative analyses of affluent nations, the study finds that financialization helps uphold unsustainable consumption patterns, and that high-consuming nations tend to exhibit lower rates of economic growth and higher rates of financialization relative to lower-consuming nations in the sample. The authors argue that additional theorizing is needed to characterize the linkages between economic inequality, exploitation, and intensified environmental withdrawals in the world's wealthiest nations.

The University of St Andrews and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) invites applications by June 8 from qualified and highly motivated students for a 3.5-year jointly funded PhD studentship in Population, Health and Data Science. The successful candidate will work on a project that examines the social and environmental determinants of health and socio-economic outcomes in adolescence and emerging adulthood. This project adopts a life-course approach to investigate how adverse exposures in the socio-economic environments of adolescents accumulate or act during sensitive periods to shape outcomes in young adulthood across life domains.

Studies in Family Planning is calling for abstract submissions for a special issue on “Rethinking Contraceptive Futures,” by June 30, 2026. This call for abstracts invites contributions that broaden and challenge traditional understandings of contraceptive use, access, and meaning. Contributions may engage explicitly with family planning debates but should foreground contraceptive practices and their evolving meanings within broader social and demographic paradigms. 

The Social Science Research Council is pleased to announce the LEGO Foundation Fellowship, a new global research fellowship developed in partnership with the LEGO Foundation. Learn more here.  Applications open June 1 and will be due July 31.  The fellowship will provide flexible support of up to $300,000 over three years for early- and mid-career researchers whose work can strengthen understanding of how children thrive across diverse contexts.

The Northwestern Main and Advanced Causal Inference Workshop will hold its 15th annual meeting on Research Design for Causal Inference at Northwestern Law School in Chicago, IL. The  main workshop takes place Monday – Friday, August 3-7,  and the advanced workshop follows, Monday – Wednesday, August 10-12, with an optional machine learning primer on Sunday afternoon, August 9. In person-registration is limited to 125 participants for each workshop, so hurry up and register for in person attendance! There will also be a Zoom option, but attending in person is encouraged. Get more information and register now.

IUSSP and its co-organizes invite papers for a workshop, hosted by the Oslo Metropolitan University on January 28-29, focused on “Aftermath of a Pandemic: Changes in Mortality and Health.” Post-pandemic periods can reveal or amplify existing health inequalities, and the effects of pandemics often extend beyond the acute phase of infection, influencing long-term patterns of mortality and overall population health. This workshop will focus on these poorly understood effects. Submit a 300-word abstract and include a title, author(s), affiliation(s) via this form by September 11, 2026. Abstracts should be written in English. Attendance to the workshop is limited to 25 participants. Following the workshop, the organizers plan to pursue a special issue of a scientific journal.

Studies in Family Planning is calling for submission for a special issue on “Pandemic and Epidemic Impacts on Reproduction, Sexual and Reproductive Health, and Family Dynamics: Longer-Term Consequences and Cross-Crisis Perspectives,” due September 15, 2026. The special issue aims to broaden the field by situating COVID-19 within a broader landscape of pandemics and epidemics with demonstrable implications for reproduction, family life, and SRHR. In addition to longer-term analyses of the COVID-19 pandemic,

The IUSSP Early Career Awards aim to honour outstanding contributions to the broad field of population studies by early career scholars in different world regions and boost the global visibility of their achievements. Nominate colleagues by November 1, 2026. Nominees must have received their PhD within the last seven years and be IUSSP members. For more information about the Award and the nomination procedure and to fill out the application form, please go to IUSSP Early Career Awards.