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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Santana and Co-authors Review Mental Health Risks and Recommendations for Wildfire Researchers

CSDE Affiliate Francisca Santana (Environmental and Forest Sciences) and co-authors highlighted the mental health risks facing wildfire researchers in a recent forum piece in Fire Ecology. Mental health risks include direct and secondary trauma compounded by climate anxiety and ecological grief. Drawing on their own experiences conducting interdisciplinary, community-engaged research in western North America, Santana and co-authors synthesize actionable recommendations for individual researchers, supervisors, and institutions to support researcher wellbeing. The piece calls on the wildfire research community to cultivate communities of care to sustain both researcher mental health and the quality of wildfire scienc

Burt Investigates Heterogeneity in Violent Victimization Within the LGBT Population

Motivated by intersectionality theory and building on existing research, CSDE External Affiliate Callie Burt (Georgia State University) and Caitlin Dorsch used data from the National Crime Victimization Survey to examine heterogeneity in violent victimization rates among LGBT subgroups compared to non-LGBT counterparts. Rates of violent victimization are highest for bisexual individuals, followed by transgender, lesbian/gay, and non-LGBT individuals. Sociodemographic differences explain between 15% and 41% of disparities depending on subgroup, leaving the bulk unexplained. Burt and Dorsch also make a methodological contribution by identifying current limitations in how sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity are measured in large population surveys and suggest revisions for more precise and inclusive measurement

Ma and Colleagues Examines Financial Concerns and Psychological Distress Among Asian Americans During COVID-19

In a recent article published in Frontiers in Public Health, CSDE Affiliate Kris Pui Kwan Ma (Family Medicine) and her colleagues examined how financial concerns affected psychological distress among Asian American adults, and whether benefit finding (a cognitive appraisal and behavioral adaptation process) and received pay (i.e., work for pay/profits or receive financial assistance) moderated this relationship. Using survey data from the 2021 Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander COVID-19 Needs Assessment Project, the authors found that financial concerns were associated with greater psychological distress. While higher levels of benefit finding were independently linked to lower distress, benefit finding alone did not buffer the effect of financial concerns. Instead , Asian Americans who reported higher benefit finding and received pay were most protected from psychological distress when facing financial hardships, pointing to the combined importance of adaptive coping and economic support, when considering the significant and disproportionate financial insecurity that exacerbated and persisted in Asian Americans with limited English proficiency during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cha Explores Link Between Educational Quality and Cognitive Impairment in Mid-to-Later Life

CSDE Affiliate Hyungmin Cha (Sociology) recently published research on how childhood state education quality shapes the risk of cognitive impairment in mid-to-later life in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Behavior & Socioeconomics of Aging. Cha and co-authors linked data from the 2000–2020 Health and Retirement Study to historical records on state public education systems. Greater state-level educational resources, indicative of educational quality, were associated with a decreased risk of cognitive impairment, with or without dementia, among both White and Black adults aged 55 and older. Associations did not differ by race.

Civilizing Contention: International Aid in Syria’s War – Rana Khoury

We look forward to welcoming Rana Khoury from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on Friday, April 17th 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.

In Civilizing Contention, Rana B. Khoury asserts that to understand civilian and refugee activism in war, we must regard the international actors and organizations that enter the scene to help. When these organizations respond to crises, they work with local actors. In so doing, they facilitate the activists’ participation in something like a civil society even in the depths of war. Yet as aid imposes its structures and routines, it also leaves activists unprotected from the violence of war and its aftermaths.

Khoury pursues these ideas through analysis of Syria’s war that emerged from the 2011 Arab Uprisings. She traces the afterlife of a social movement that did not merely take up arms or capitulate to repression. Interviews with Syrian activists and international aid workers in Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon provide insight into action among actors in the war, while original social-media data offers additional evidence. Civilizing Contention deepens knowledge of civilian and refugee agency by explaining how ordinary people act in extraordinary ways in a world structured by powerful forces.

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Rana B. Khoury is an assistant professor of political science at Illinois. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University and M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Rana’s research interests include contention, displacement, and humanitarianism in the Middle East, as well as qualitative and multi-method research. Her research has been published in Perspectives on Politics, World Development, Middle East Law and Governance, and Forced Migration Review. Her book, Civilizing Contention: International Aid in Syria’s War is forthcoming with Cornell University Press.