The Department of Anthropology and CSDE are co-sponsoring the Sam Dubal Memorial Lecture. This year’s lecture will be given by Dr. Natali Valdez. Dr. Valdez’s talk is entitled “Weighing the Future: Race, Science and Pregnancy Trials in a Postgenomic Era.” The talk is on Oct. 13 from 1:30-2:50pm and will be online via zoom. Registration information can be found here.
Contemporary clinical trials selectively draw on epigenetics to connect behavioral choices made by pregnant people, such as diet and exercise, to health risks for future generations. As the first ethnography of its kind, her book examines the sociopolitical implications of ongoing pregnancy trials in the United States and the United Kingdom, illuminating how processes of scientific knowledge production are linked to racism, capitalism, surveillance, and environmental reproduction.
Natali Valdez is a medical anthropologist and science and technology scholar who studies how race, gender, and power are enveloped into scientific knowledge production. She draws from Black feminism and postcolonial feminist science studies to critically examine epigenetic and postgenomic conceptions of the environment in social and biological (re)production. Her current and ongoing research interests include systemic racism, inter/transgenerational trauma, somatic therapy, big data, metabolic illness, and predictive medicine. She is an assistant professor at Purdue University, and this year she is a Presidential Visiting Fellow at Yale University.
CSDE Affiliate Clara Berridge and co-authors recently published two articles on technology use to support an aging population. The first article, “AI Companion Robot Data Sharing: Preferences of an Online Cohort and Policy Implications” is featured in the Journal of Elder Policy, where authors report peoples’ perspectives on small AI companion robots for older adults, along with attendant issues related to facial expression and conversation data collection and sharing. The second, “How I want technology used in my care: Learning from documented choices of people living with dementia using a dyadic decision making tool” is published by the journal Informatics for Health and Social Care, where they draw on the perspectives of people living with dementia. While technologies for aging in place are promoted to support care partners and people living with dementia, perspectives of people living with dementia are underrepresented in both use decisions among families and discussions within academia and industry.
CSDE Affiliate Dan Brown (College of the Environment) recently published a co-authored article in PNAS, titled “Large-scale land acquisitions exacerbate local farmland inequalities in Tanzania”. Land inequality stalls economic development, entrenches poverty, and is associated with environmental degradation. The authors’ paper studies inequalities in land assets, specifically landholdings and farm size, to derive insights into the distributional outcomes of LSLAs. Using a household survey covering four pairs of land acquisition and control sites in Tanzania, they use a quasi-experimental design to characterize changes in land inequality and subsequent impacts on well-being. Their results demonstrate that without explicit consideration of distributional outcomes, land-use policies can systematically reinforce existing inequalities.
Delaney Glass, Ph.D. candidate and NIH T32 Fellow at CSDE was awarded the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant over the summer for her dissertation research “Effects of Extreme Stressors in Adolescence”. This dissertation grant funding is in addition to a Wenner-Gren grant awarded earlier this year. Based in the CSDE Biodemography Lab, her project will examine the embodiment of displacement and poverty-derived psychosocial stressors through the assessment of relationships between pubertal and metabolic hormones among Jordanian non-refugee and Syrian refugee adolescents. Upon completion of the project, she will share research findings with interested stakeholder organizations serving youth communities in Northern Jordan.
CSDE Affiliates Monica Keith (Anthropology) and Melanie Martin (Anthropology) recently published a paper in Women’s Health Issues, titled the “Social Determinant Pathways to Hypertensive Disorders of Pregnancy Among Nulliparous U.S. Women“. The article is a write-up of their winning solution for the NICHD DASH Data Challenge, which was supported by CSDE. The study used data in the NICHD Nulliparous Pregnancy Outcomes Study: Monitoring Mothers-to-Be (n = 6,501) to examine links between upstream social determinants of health, allostatic load during pregnancy, and risk of hypertensive disorders during pregnancy. Our model results demonstrated that the social environment exerted stronger effects on allostatic markers than did individually, behaviorally mediated dietary, exercise, or smoking pathways. Demographic aspects of the social environment (e.g., household income, partnered status) were the most salient predictor of hypertensive risk across groups, but showed stronger effects among Black women.
CSDE Affiliate Sameer Shah (Environmental and Forest Sciences) has just published a co-authored paper in Environmental Research Communications that details the challenges and opportunities in linking environmental and social sciences data to address climate change. They argue that the integration of physical and social science data can enable novel frameworks, methodologies, and innovative solutions important for addressing complex socio-environmental problems. Unfortunately, many technical, procedural, and institutional challenges hamper effective data integration – detracting from interdisciplinary socio-environmental research and broader public impact. The evidence for their claims is based on the experiences of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and their Early Career Researchers.
CSDE Affiliates, Melissa Knox (Economics), Jessica Jones-Smith (Public Health), and co-authors published their article “Seattle’s sweetened beverage tax implementation and changes in interior marketing displays” in the Journal of Public Health Policy, where they assessed changes in interior marketing displays within large food stores before and after the implementation of Seattle’s SSB tax. The authors used Poisson difference-in-difference (DID) models to estimate whether presence and variety of interior beverage marketing displays in Seattle changed from before to after the tax compared to displays in non-taxed comparison area stores, overall, and by beverage type.
CSDE Affiliate Steven Goodreau (Anthropology) and co-authors recently published their article “Changes in Sexual Behaviors with Opposite-Sex Partners and Sexually Transmitted Infection Outcomes Among Females and Males Ages 15–44 Years in the USA: National Survey of Family Growth, 2008–2019” in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Rates of reported gonorrhea and chlamydial infections have increased substantially over the past decade in the USA and disparities persist across age and race/ethnicity. Authors aimed to understand potential changes in sexual behaviors, sexual network attributes, and sexually transmitted infection (STI) screening that may be contributing to these trends. They analyzed data from 29,423 female and 24,605 male respondents ages 15–44 years from the National Survey of Family Growth, 2008–2019. They used survey-weighted linear or logistic regression to evaluate linear temporal trends in sexual behaviors with opposite-sex partners, network attributes, and STI testing, treatment, and diagnosis. Significant declines were observed in condom use at last vaginal sex, mean number of vaginal sex acts, proportion of condom-protected sex acts in the past 4 weeks, and racial/ethnic homophily with current partners among males and females from 2008–2010 through 2017–2019. Among males, mean number of female partners in the past 12 months and concurrency also declined, while the percent reporting ever having sex with another male increased. Past-year testing for chlamydia and any STI increased among females. Research is needed to understand how these changes interact and potentially contribute to increasing reported gonorrhea and chlamydia diagnoses and identify avenues for future intervention.
CSDE Affiliate Betty Bekemeier (Psychosocial & Community Health) and co-authors published their article “Strategies for enacting health policy codesign: a scoping review and direction for research” in the journal Health Science. Strategies for supporting evidence-informed health policy are a recognized but understudied area of policy dissemination and implementation science. Codesign describes a set of strategies potentially well suited to address the complexity presented by policy formation and implementation. Authors examine the health policy literature describing the use of codesign in initiatives intended to combine diverse sources of knowledge and evidence in policymaking. They find that policy codesign is theoretically promising and is gaining interest among diverse health sectors for addressing the complexity of policy formation and implementation. The maturity of the science is just emerging.