When: Friday, Feb 28, 2025 (12:30-1:30PM)
Where: 360 Parrington Hall and on Zoom (register here)
We are looking forward to hosting Sasha Johfre (Sociology, UW) on Friday, Feb. 28th in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative.
This talk will discuss emerging perspectives on the social construction of age, with a focus on implications for demography and inequality research. I will draw on several of my ongoing projects about conceptualizing, theorizing, and measuring age as a social construct. “Aging” is often considered an individual and societal problem; but there is much more we can learn by going beyond this perspective and studying “age” as a multilevel and multidimensional system of inequality. Age is an under-theorized yet central piece of social structure, interactions, and individual experience. Being more precise in our theory and measurement of age opens the door for more expansive and impactful empirical and theoretical research on individuals and society.
Sasha Johfre is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, core faculty in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington. Her research considers the creation and consequences of conceptual categories, including ways that human difference (e.g. based on gender, race, age, etc.) is seen as real and natural. Through her work, she aims to build new conceptual and methodological tools that help people understand, interrogate, and intentionally engage in social processes. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Stanford University and a BA in evolutionary biology from Harvard University.
On Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025 from 12 – 2 pm, the Earl & Edna Stice Memorial Lectureship and Department of Sociology will host a talk by Sarah Mayorga (Brandeis University) in Savery 409. In this talk, Dr. Mayorga discusses findings from her forthcoming book, Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism. Based on interviews with 117 residents of two working-class neighborhoods in Cincinnati, Ohio, she describes and analyzes how residents make sense of their lives and neighborhoods.
Residents talked about neglect, trash, and security to interpret their neighborhood circumstances. They used these narratives, or urban specters, to explain the negative things happening in their neighborhoods, often obscuring the relations of racial capitalism that produced these conditions.
Mayorga overlays residents’ interpretations with an analysis of exploitation, dispossession, and dehumanization to identify how racial capitalist relations, such as underdevelopment, produce the everyday harm that residents reported.
Sarah is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Brandeis University. Her research focuses on the sociology of race and racism, urban neighborhoods, and Latinx migration. She earned her PhD from Duke University and previously held positions at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the University of Cincinnati.
Mayorga’s first book, “Behind the White Picket Fence: Power and Privilege in a Multiethnic Neighborhood” (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), won the 2015 American Sociological Association Latino/a Sociology Section’s Distinguished Contribution to Research Book Award.
On February 27th, Professor Lawrence Katz (Harvard University) will present a virtual lecture hosted by the Social Science Research Council entitled “Neighborhood Effects, Housing Mobility, and Place-Based Policies: Evidence from Experiments and Quasi-Experiments.” This lecture will cover his work on three landmark projects: Moving to Opportunity, enabling residents of public housing to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods; Creating Moves to Opportunity, providing additional support to families considering leaving high-poverty neighborhoods; and HOPE VI revitalization grants, investing in mixed-income developments in neighborhoods with distressed public housing. Learn more and register here.
CSDE Affiliates Jen Otten (Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences) and Marie Spiker (Epidemiology) along with Trainee Jane Dai (Health Services) and the WAFOOD team released the 5th wave of the Washington State Food Security Surveys (WAFOOD) series. A research brief, published on February 13 and focused on survey results, found that food assistance usage was high statewide and that food insecurity was higher in households with respondents identifying as Black or Hispanic, households with children, households with incomes under $15,000, and renters. Read the full brief here.
Occupational inequality is an important driver of racial, gender, and class inequalities in the American workforce. CSDE External Affiliate Elizabeth Korver-Glenn (University of North Carolina) recently published an article in Social Forces that focuses on residential property managers to understand how structural marginalization plays out in a segregated profession. Drawing on 80 in-depth interviews, the study demonstrates the burdens that fall on marginalized workers in property management and how those burdens result in financial and health-related consequences for renters. Read the full study here.