James Raymer will join CSDE as a visiting scholar during February 5-February 26! He is a Professor of Demography at the Australian National University (faculty website).

His research focuses on methodologies and frameworks to study demographic processes. He is especially interested in understanding migration in situations where data are inadequate or missing, and has engaged in many interdisciplinary and international research collaborations on topics ranging from statistical estimation of migration flows to population estimation and forecasting. James will be presenting at the CSDE seminar on Friday, Feb. 23rd on research, titled “Modelling Migration to Understand Demographic Change”. Learn more about James and the event here!

James is looking forward to connecting with CSDE’s many social and statistical demographers.  Don’t hesitate to reach out to schedule a meeting, take a walk, go out for lunch, host a meeting!  If we can help with logistics, let us know!

James’ visiting office will be in 218 Raitt Hall and you can reach him via email at james.raymer@anu.edu.au.

CSDE Affiliate Dr. Erin McElroy (Geography) authored an article in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, titled “DIS/POSSESSORY DATA POLITICS: From Tenant Screening to Anti-Eviction Organizing“, which places tenant screening data grabbing practices in tension with the ongoing work of housing justice-based tool making. While the tenant screening industry has spent decades amassing eviction data to facilitate the blocklisting of tenants with prior eviction records and thereby reifying racial capitalist geographies, housing organizers today rely on some of this same data to illuminate evictor networks and organize anti-eviction campaigns. This has been particularly important in the wake of corporate landlordism in which evictions are executed through opaque shell companies. Tenant-made tools attempt to undo this uneven landscape in which landlords own troves of data about tenants, but in which tenants don’t even know their own landlords’ names. While opening up all eviction data to the public might appear to be an antidote, doing so can also provide screening companies with even more data to use in blocklisting.

CSDE Affiliate Dr. Kavita Dattani (Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies) released work in the Journal of Cultural Economy, titled “Spectrally shape-shifting: biometrics, fintech and the corporate-state in India“. Through a hauntological frame, this article investigates how the ghosts of colonial pasts are re-emerging in India’s national universal biometric identity system, Aadhaar, and a software infrastructure built on top of it, India Stack. It shows how Aadhaar and India Stack facilitate the extraction of data as a form of ‘data colonialism.’ Examining data colonialism through an enquiry of how the multifarious and unstable relations of colonialism are bound up with the extractive processes of digital data, the article uses a historical approach considering the shifting trajectories of identity ecologies in India to see what is dispossessed through Aadhaar and India Stack.

CSDE Affiliate Dr. Sasha Johfre (Sociology) recently co-authored an article with Dr. Aliya Saperstein in Annual Review of Sociology, titled “The Social Construction of Age: Concepts and Measurement“. Age as an individual characteristic is ubiquitous in social science research. Yet age is rarely treated as a phenomenon that requires explanation or theoretical attention. To advance research in sociology, demography, and beyond, authors develop a framework that considers age as a system of inequality with concepts and processes that operate across micro and macro levels of analysis. At the individual level, they argue a person’s age is best conceptualized and operationalized as multidimensional. Authors include recommendations for ways to measure age more precisely and expansively in social scientific research through considering dimensions of age beyond chronology.

CSDE Affiliate Dr. Janelle Taylor (Anthropology, University of Toronto) is among the co-authors of an article lead-authored by Dr. Catherine R. Butler in JAMA Network, titled “Experiences of US Clinicians Contending With Health Care Resource Scarcity During the COVID-19 Pandemic, December 2020 to December 2021“. The second year of the COVID-19 pandemic saw periods of dire health care resource limitations in the US, sometimes prompting official declarations of crisis, but little is known about how these conditions were experienced by frontline clinicians. This study sought to describe the experiences of US clinicians practicing under conditions of extreme resource limitation during the second year of the pandemic.