CSDE is pleased to welcome back some of our former T32 trainees and fellows as External Research Affiliates! Delaney Glass (Assistant Professor, University of Toronto) focuses on cultural and ecological contributions to the timing and pace of human growth, development, and puberty. Anwesha Pan (Assistant Professor, Utah State University) researches the association between environmental stressors (e.g., poverty, famine) and female reproductive health. Hanjie Wang’s (Postdoctoral Fellow, Boston University) current work focuses on the comparative analysis of electric vehicle policies in China, the U.S., and India, alongside the underlying politics of global EV trade and investment policies. Aasli Abdi Nur (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Oxford) researches the use of individual-level modeling approaches to study gender, fertility, and family dynamics across the life course, and epistemic inequalities in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge and their impact on demographic research.

• Delaney Glass – Delaney Glass is a mixed-methods, biocultural anthropologist and human biologist working primarily with Arab communities in North America and Jordan. She examines biocultural drivers and population health consequences of early life adversity and social inequalities on child and adolescent linear growth/body size, pubertal development, mental health, and wellbeing. She uses frameworks and methods from medical anthropology, evolutionary biology, and qualitative health research. She is an Assistant Professor of Biocultural Medical Anthropology at The University of Toronto. Much of her prior research, including her dissertation, has been focused on cultural and ecological contributions to the timing and pace of human growth, development, and puberty. This area of her research is concerned with the ways early life adversities (psychosocial, nutritional, energetic) shape puberty and adolescent development, especially in global contexts of forced displacement, migration, and social inequality. Current directions in this area are focused on maximizing longitudinal observational data from Vietnam, The United States and Argentina, data science techniques, and anthropological knowledge to understand drivers of puberty. She welcomes students who are interested in these broad topics and related topics (e.g., philosophical / history of science approaches about the social consequences of early puberty).

• Anwesha Pan – Anwesha Pan is a biological anthropologist working primarily with the populations in South Asia and the United States. Her research focuses on the association between environmental stressors (e.g., poverty, famine) and female reproductive health. She uses theories and methods from anthropology, evolutionary biology, and demography to understand environmental adversity throughout the life course and disparities in reproductive health.

• Hanjie Wang – Hanjie Wang is a Political Scientist with research and teaching interests in international and comparative political economy, environmental politics, and Chinese politics. Her current work focuses on the comparative analysis of electric vehicle policies in China, the US, and India, alongside the underlying politics of global EV trade and investment policies. She has a broad interest in the role of governments in facilitating green technological transitions and in the interactions between trade and environmental policies. She earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of Washington and will commence her role as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center starting August 2024. Hanjie has received training in demographic methodology from the UW Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE) in 2024, and she is interested in examining how population changes influence environmental impacts.

• Aasli Abdi Nur – Aasli Abdi Nur, PhD, MPH, is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford specializing in Computational Demography. She currently works on the Connecting Generations project with Professor Ridhi Kashyap, studying demographic changes and their implications for kinship and intergenerational overlap, care, and support. In addition to her departmental appointment, she is also a Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow at Nuffield College. Aasli’s research uses computational and demographic methods explore two main areas of interest. The first focuses on the use individual-level modeling approaches to study gender, fertility, and family dynamics across the life course. The second examines epistemic inequalities in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge and their impact on demographic research. Prior to joining Oxford, Aasli worked as a Research Scientist in the Institute for Disease Modelling at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Washington, where she served as a graduate fellow with the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology. Aasli holds an MPH from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University and a BA from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has been published in the Journal of Global Health, BMJ Global Health, Women and Birth, and the International Journal of Social Research Methodology.

When: Friday, Oct 25, 2024 (12:30-1:30PM)

Where: 360 Parrington Hall and on Zoom (register here)

We are looking forward to hosting Ipsita Dey (Comparative History of Ideas, UW) on Friday, Oct. 25th  in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative. 

In this presentation, Ipsita Dey wil discuss her paper that engages theoretical frameworks in historical consciousness and geographic imaginaries, and introduces and situates the Fiji’s Sigatoka Valley as a “farmscape,” a site where colonial pasts, racial tensions, and climate anxieties are diversely (re)imagined through agriculture. She draws from ethnographic work on an agro-forestry biodiversity conservation initiative at the Sigatoka Sand Dunes National Park (SDDNP) to examine how plantation logics of land distribution and property-defined personhood shape how locals design and envision shared environmental futures. As park rangers, government administrators, and local community members imagine the growth and impact of a “foraging” forest of fruit trees at the border between the SSDNP and the local informal settlement Kulukulu, they reframe the sand dunes area as a site of food secure and self-sufficient futures. This local confidence in soil fertility and agricultural capacity of the sand dunes is, however, in direct contrast to apocalyptic climate change rhetoric, soil sample reports of diminishing nutritional quality, and conservation discourse that frames the sand dunes as a “barren” place. The locals’ (both Indo-Fijian and iTaukei) belief in the agricultural promise of sandy soils reconfigures “barrenness” as a marker of sociocultural disruption (ethnic land disputes), rather than an environmental quality of land. Thus, a boundary which clearly delineates and organizes claims to land between the Park and local residents is essential to imagining political, economic, and ecological possibilities. Even as the liberal logic of the plantation persists, it produces a shared “agricultural consciousness” among Indo-Fijian and iTaukei locals that challenges representations of Fiji as a place that is slowly dying. I argue that sugarcane plantation history shapes both how boundary construction/land claims and agricultural productivity/resilience become the terms of environmental imagination in Sigatoka. In this paper that reveals how and why agricultural development becomes synonymous with Fijian environmental thinking, Dr. Dey positions the Sigatoka Valley as a place of expanding relational possibilities between iTaukei and Indo-Fijians that imagines Fijian futures outside of categorical and agonistic ethnic accounting.

Ipsita Dey is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative History of Ideas Department. She comes to UW Seattle from Princeton University, where she received her PhD in Anthropology. Her work is at the intersection of Pacific Island Studies, Indigeneity Studies, South Asian Diaspora Studies, Environmental Anthropology, and ethnographic ethics. Ipsita’s current book project, “Home on the Fijian Farmscape”, explores how Indo-Fijians articulate connections to land and country through agricultural practice, claiming a complex mode of diasporic nativity in response to resurgent Fijian indigenous ethno-nationalist politics.

During election season, efforts to curb the spread of misinformation are especially salient – but they are always essential to the wellbeing of our democracy. At this critical moment, CSDE Affiliate Emma Spiro (UW Information School) was featured by the Seattle Times’ Save the Free Press Initiative in an article about her new role as Faculty Director of the Center for an Informed Public. Read the full story here.

Text data has gained popularity over the last decade due to the increased data availability, the emergence of new methods, and the decreasing costs of computational resources. Based on the book Text As Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences, this workshop introduces the methods that could be used to select and represent text, conduct research discoveries, and build measurements out of text data.

We will review the principles briefly, take an overview of the methods for each section, and deep dive into one or two of the most common methods using Python. This workshop is designed to help researchers in social science and demography with no prior experience in working with text.

The event will take place on Tuesday, Oct 22, 2024, from 10 – 11:30 a.m. Learn more and register here.

New research from CSDE Affiliate Kemi Doll (Obstetrics & Gynecology) and co-authors finds that a common endometrial cancer screening procedure missed cases in almost 10% of Black female patients. The article, entitled “Endometrial Thickness as Diagnostic Triage for Endometrial Cancer Among Black Individuals” and recently quoted in a Health.com article, highlights the high probability of false negatives for Black women in a retrospective study and recommends tissue biopsy in an effort to reduce this rate. Read the full study here.