When: Friday, Feb 14, 2025 (12:30-1:30PM)

Where: 360 Parrington and on Zoom (register here)

We are looking forward to hosting CSDE Affiliate Amy Bailey (Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago) on Friday, Feb 14th in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative. 

A number of public health and demographic theories point directly to the importance of past structures and experiences in explaining the health inequity patterns we observe today. The flexible resources Link and Phelan (1995) identify as the driving force behind fundamental causes – money, knowledge, power, prestige, and social connections – have been explicitly shaped by historical processes. Evidence suggests that the contemporary drivers of health and disease are systematically related to historical power relationships. In this paper, we advance history as a fundamental cause of disease. We argue that historical processes have shaped the contemporary patterns of inequitable access to power, social connections, prestige, economic assets, and knowledge, affecting risk of disease and the ability to protect individual and community health. We also identify the ways that historical processes have shaped multiple disease outcomes, multiple risk factors, access to flexible resources, and changes in intervening mechanisms. We believe that the residual trace of history may be viewed through three pathways: 1) Group-level segregation in social and economic spheres; 2) access to power, which shapes policy; and 3) psychological consequences of stigma. We illustrate with an extended example connecting historical white supremacist violence to contemporary pregnancy outcomes.

Amy Kate Bailey a sociologist, demographer, and epidemiologist whose research focuses on demographic approaches combining historical and contemporary sources of data and an interdisciplinary perspective. She earned an MPH in Epidemiology in 2024, and is a Double Dawg, earning a PhD and MA in Sociology at UW. Prof. Bailey is currently on faculty at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Department of Sociology, and a fellow of the Institute for Health Research and Policy. This year, she is a visiting scholar at CSDE. She serves as a Deputy Editor for Demography, and the Editorial Board for Social Science History. Her projects have been funded by NSF, NIH, and the USDA, in addition to multiple intramural sources. With colleagues, she has also constructed multiple data sets. Prof. Bailey’s work has been published in journals including the American Journal of Sociology, The American Sociological Review, Demography, Population Research and Policy Review, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Her 2015 book Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence, co-authored with Stewart E. Tolnay, received the 2016 PUMS Award from the Minnesota Population Center.

Recent analysis from CSDE Affiliate Dan Goldhaber (School of Social Work) highlights the ongoing challenges facing Washington students, teachers, and educational administrators. In response to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress results for Washington state, Goldhaber notes that student achievement has not recovered from the pandemic, and that students who were struggling before the pandemic are now facing even greater challenges, leading to widening achievement gaps. While Washington scores are on par with national results in many ways, they also serve to highlight the continuing difficulties that students have faced in recent years. Read the full article here.

In a recent story from the Portuguese newspaper Jornal de Negócios, CSDE Affiliate Kam Wing Chan (Geography) was quoted about the impact of China’s hukou (household registration) system on the Chinese economy. Chan’s analysis highlights how the system discriminates against migrants and contributes to reduced domestic consumption. Find the full (translated) article here.

Population health scientists have recently documented growing disparities in life expectancy across U.S. status. In a recent Stateline article, CSDE Affiliate Ali Mokdad (Health Metrics Sciences, Epidemiology) addresses this trend and describes how wealthier, more urban, and better-educated populations tend to have higher life expectancies. Mokdad, whose research was recently published with Affiliate Laura Dwyer-Lindgren (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation) in The Lancet, explains that this is partly due to the adoption of policies that promote health, such as stricter gun laws and expanded Medicaid coverage as well as preventable risk factors, including obesity and smoking. Read the full article here.