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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Reproductive Justice: Historical Context and Contemporary Implications for Population Health

Join us for a Panel on Reproductive Justice this week featuring Bettina Judd, Monica McLemore, and Megan Eagen-Torkko. CSDE Trainee Taylor Riley will moderate the presentation and discussion with the expert panelists. Taylor is also an expert and this should be an important discussion about how to think about reproductive health and reproductive justice. We are grateful to CSDE Executive Committee member Dr. Anjum Hajat for organizing this panel.

 

 

Biographies

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Bettina Judd, PhD

Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist and performer whose research focus is on Black women’s creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. Her book Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, December 2022) argues that Black women’s creative production is feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect she calls “feelin.” She is currently Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.

Her poems and essays have appeared in Feminist Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Torch, Mythium, Meridians and other journals and anthologies. Her collection of poems titled patient. which tackles the history of medical experimentation on and display of Black women won the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize and was released in November of 2014. As a performer she has been invited to perform for audiences within the United States and internationally.

Monica McLemore, PhD, MPH, RN

Dr. Monica R. McLemore is a tenured professor in the Child, Family, and Population Health Department and the Interim Director for the Center for Anti-Racism in Nursing at the University of Washington School of Nursing. Prior to her arrival at UW, she was a tenured associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco and was named the Thelma Shobe Endowed Chair in 2021. She retired from clinical practice as a public health and staff nurse after a 28-year clinical nursing career in 2019, however, continues to provide flu and COVID-19 vaccines.

Her program of research is focused on understanding reproductive health and justice. To date, she has 96 peer reviewed articles, OpEds and commentaries and her research has been cited in the Huffington Post, Lavender Health, five amicus briefs to the Supreme Court of the United States, and three National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine reports, and a data visualization project entitled How To Fix Maternal Mortality: The first step is to stop blaming women that was published in the 2019 Future of Medicine edition of Scientific American.

Her work has also appeared in publications such as Dame Magazine, Politico, ProPublica/NPR and she made a voice appearance in Terrance Nance’s HBO series Random Acts of Flyness. She is the recipient of numerous awards and was past-chair for Sexual and Reproductive Health section of the American Public Health Association. She was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2019 and resigned in 2022 due to inaction specific to the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe vs. Wade. She became the Editor in Chief of Health Equity Journal in 2022.

Meghan Eagen-Torkko, PhD, CNM, ARNP

Meghan Eagen-Torkko held a faculty appointment in the College of Nursing at Seattle University prior to joining the faculty at the UWB School of Nursing and Health Studies in 2015. She completed her Ph.D. in nursing with a specialization in women’s health at the University of Michigan in 2015, where she was a Rackham Merit Fellow. She has worked as a certified nurse midwife since 2009 and continues to practice with Public Health Seattle-King County, where her practice specializes in family planning and women’s health.

Moderator: Taylor Riley, MPH (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in epidemiology and a CSDE trainee. Her research focuses on social and structural determinants of sexual and reproductive health inequities, with a specific focus on abortion and perinatal care and outcomes. Prior to her doctoral training, Taylor was a Senior Research Associate at the Guttmacher Institute conducting research on unintended pregnancy, abortion, and contraception.

Postdoctoral Position (net worth poverty and child well-being) – Duke University

Drs. Christina Gibson-Davis, Lisa Keister, and Lisa Gennetian of the Sanford School of Public Policy and the department of Sociology of Duke University seek a full-time post-doctoral candidate to collaborate and provide support for a project on net worth poverty and child well-being. Net worth poverty refers to households whose net worth (or wealth) is less than one-fourth of the federal poverty line. The post-doctorate will work closely with Drs. Gibson-Davis, Keister, and Gennetian to investigate the correlates and consequences of net worth poverty in the lives of children and young adults; to investigate how policies, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, could be used to redress net worth poverty’s negative effects; and to understand how the racialization of wealth in the US informs the negative repercussions of net worth poverty. The post-doctoral candidate’s primary responsibilities will be to conduct analysis on large scale data sets, such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Doctoral training in public policy, sociology, economics, or a related social science field is required.

 

Attend the Upcoming CSSS Seminar with Emre Kiciman, Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research AI

The Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences Seminar Series has their next seminar on Wednesday, February 1 at 12:30 pm. Emre Kiciman, Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research AI, will give a seminar titled, “Lessons being learned from an open-source causal AI suite.”

This seminar will be offered as a hybrid session. Below please find the abstract and information about joining in-person or on Zoom.

Abstract:

Critical data science and decision-making questions across a wide variety of domains are fundamentally causal questions.  Answering these questions via causal analysis requires combining human domain expertise and sophisticated analytical frameworks in ways that often challenge practitioners.  In this presentation, I will describe some of Microsoft’s contributions towards an open-source causal AI suite that aims to broaden access to causal methods, including the DoWhy library for scaffolding best practices of a trustworthy causal analysis; the EconML library for estimation methods based on the latest advances in causal machine learning; the Causica library for end-to-end causal discovery and effect inference; and the ShowWhy no-code interfaces for causal machine learning tasks.  I will describe some of the applications of our tools and the lessons we are learning from their usage, including three topics that represent what we see as particularly critical open research challenges: how we elicit and capture domain knowledge; methods for validation, refutation, and sensitivity analyses; and support for unstructured and high-dimensional text and image data within a causal analysis.

This seminar will be located at 409 Savery Hall

To join by Zoom, please use the information below.

Join Zoom Meeting

https://washington.zoom.us/j/91889204671

Lecturer of Sociology – Purdue Liberal Arts

The Department of Sociology at Purdue University invites applications for a lecturer position beginning August 14, 2023. We are seeking qualified candidates with the ability to contribute to the strategic vision of the undergraduate curriculum in criminology and law and society, race and ethnicity, and others that align with the university’s missions. Lectureships are non-tenure track teaching positions with renewable three-year contracts, competitive salaries, and medical and retirement benefits.

Assistant Professor of Sociology – Capital University

The Department of Sociology and Criminology at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio invites applications for a full-time (9 months), tenure-track Assistant Professor position to begin in fall 2023. The area of expertise in sociology is open. The ideal candidate will be a sociologist who specializes in social justice-oriented sociology. Our future colleague will be expected to teach courses in sociology, develop a record of published scholarship, and perform service to the department, college, university, and the surrounding community. The teaching load for this position is 12 credits (typically comprised of three 4-credit courses or two 4-credit courses, one 3-credit course, and one 1-credit course) each fall and spring semester.

The Department of Sociology and Criminology houses undergraduate majors in sociology and criminology and minors in criminology, sociology, and social justice. Department faculty currently offer community-engaged courses and partake in interdisciplinary scholarship. With this position (and a second dedicated to criminology), the department has opportunities for growth in these and new directions. In the cover letter or teaching statement, we ask that candidates speak to community engagement, interdisciplinary work, and/or other possibilities for engaging Capital students in active learning.

Postdoctoral Fellowship – Digital Civil Society Lab

The Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL) at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS) is accepting applications for the 2023-2024 postdoctoral fellowship program.

We encourage applications from candidates representing a broad range of disciples including the social sciences, humanities, law, computer science, and engineering.

Each fellow will be primarily affiliated with the Digital Civil Society Lab, and potentially cross-affiliated with a department or school at Stanford University depending on the fellow’s specific disciplinary focus.

The annual fellowship stipend is $75,000, plus the standard benefits that postdoctoral fellows at Stanford University receive, including health insurance and travel funds. The fellowship program falls under U.S. Immigration J-1 Exchange Visitor Visa activities.

Postdocoral Position – UT Austin (marriage, family, and sexual relationships)

The University of Texas at Austin is seeking a postdoctoral research associate. The position is for one year, with the potential for a one-year renewal. Funding for this position comes from the John and Daria Barry Foundation. The annual salary is $54,000, plus benefits and travel funds. The ideal start date would be August 1, 2023, but is negotiable.

 

The required qualifications for this position are: a PhD in economics, sociology, statistics, psychology, human development, or a related field; a strong statistical background; experience managing and analyzing large datasets; the ability to balance several projects; facility with the statistical programs Stata or R, at a minimum; strong written and oral communication skills; and strong interpersonal and logistical coordination skills. Areas of particular research include marriage, the family, sexual relationships and reproductive decisions, and the technology and religious/cultural shifts that affect them. At least two years of experience conducting analyses on one or more of these topics is optimal. The right candidate will be expected to prepare articles for publication in scientific journals and presentations at academic conferences, and has the expectation that she or he will be lead author on manuscripts from the collaboration. The postdoctoral research associate will report to Dr. Mark Regnerus.

 

Interested applicants should submit a letter describing their research interests, career goals, and statistical analytic experience, as well as a sample of work, a CV, and the names of (but not letters from) two references; references will be contacted once finalists for the position are identified. Applications will be reviewed as they are received up until April 15 or until the position is awarded. Application materials and inquiries may be sent to regnerus@prc.utexas.edu.

 

Knox Delivers New Publication on Employment and Health in the US During COVID-19 Pandemic

In her new paper published in Preventative Medicine Reports, “Changes in Precarious Employment and Health in the United States Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic“, CSDE Affiliate Melissa Knox uses survey data on 623 adults at-risk for cardiovascular disease. This study aimed to investigate the association between changes in employment precarity and changes in health amidst the COVID-19 pandemic utilizing survey indicators and linear regression models. The authors aimed to understand the association between a change in the PES and 1) change in systolic blood pressure, 2) change in pulse pressure, 3) change in food insecurity, and 4) perceived stress.

*New* Data Repository Resource Available at UW

As federal agencies are increasingly likely to require data availability, the UW Libraries has joined Dryad to facilitate researchers ability to comply with new data sharing requirements.  The Dryad Data Platform is a curated resource that makes research data discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of data types and now counts over 75 institutions and publishers in its membership.  A libguide (http://guides.lib.uw.edu/dryad ) is available with information on how UW researchers can get started with the service.  Do note, however, Dryad is a generalist repository which does not provide protection of confidential information.  For that there are other options, including use of the CSDE’s UW Data Collaborative.

 

Dryad is the first open data publishing platform available to UW users. It will serve as a companion to UW Libraries ResearchWorks, which is best for texts and some small data sets. As a generalist repository, Dryad accepts data regardless of data type, format, content, or disciplinary focus.

The UW Libraries implementation of Dryad aligns with the increasing advocacy of public research universities to provide for the open sharing of research data and outputs. This announcement also comes at the heels of the National Health Institute’s new data management and sharing policy which went into effect January 23rd.  Dryad is one of the Generalist Repositories recommended by the National Institutes of Health.

Because UW Libraries is covering the full cost membership, UW users will not have to pay a fee to deposit data in Dryad.

For more information visit the LibGuide on UW Libraries website, or contact Jenny Muilenburg, Research Data Services Librarian.