Know your Rights & Building Power. A Conversation with Demographers of Color 

Friday 9 October 2020, 9-10:30amPST (Oct 9 event reg)

This virtual panel discussion features five PhD demographers of color who know about family and caregiving. Panelists will share about their career and life experiences. Join us for a sincere discussion of pivots, resilience, and hope. We are organizing this panel in response to feedback gathered at the 1st ever member-organized Demographers of Color & Allies Reception in April. This event will include all-group and break-out components.

Panelists:

Vilna Bashi Treitler (Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Wisconsin-Madison, M.S.  in Economics from University of Wisconsin-Madison, Master of International Affairs from Columbia University, B.A. in International Studies from University of South Florida, Tampa) is Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and a Professor of Sociology. Her scholarship and art centers on the intersection of race, migration, and inequality. Treitler is the author of The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fictions into Ethnic Factions (2013) and Survival of the Knitted: Immigrant Social Networks in a Stratified World (2007). She is editor of Race in Transnational and Transracial Adoption, and co-editor (with Manuela Boatca), Dynamics of Inequalities in Global Perspective. Her works in progress include a National Science Foundation-funded study on race and adoption in the U.S. and Europe, and a new book on racial thought. Dr. Treitler is the 2020 recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Oliver Cox, Charles S. Johnson, and E. Franklin Frazier Award – “three African American scholars…[who] placed their scholarship in service to social justice, with an eye toward advancing the status of disadvantaged populations.” Dr. Treitler is also an artist, who works in oil on canvas and Masonite; and in pigment painted and fired on glass.

Evelyn Patterson (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, B.A. Rice University) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University. She studies how the U.S. judicial system creates and perpetuates inequality. Drawing on her training in sociology, demography, and criminology, she studies the intergenerational transfer of racial and social inequalities in America with a particular focus upon social systems, organizations and institutions. Most of her work to date examines the role of the U.S. judicial system in creating and perpetuating inequality. Interaction with the judicial system disproportionately impacts marginalized populations by limiting their social mobility, blocking their economic opportunities, ensuring poor health outcomes, and minimizing their opportunities to escape the self-sustaining system of inequality embedded in America’s social structure. Dr. Patterson’s research applies demographic principles to investigate a variety of social problems and processes associated, broadly, with institutions and organizations. She situates the consequences of incarceration in an array of social processes, interrogating how incarceration as a social institution reconfigures and mutates other primary social institutions, including law, polity, education, kinship and economy.

Monique B. Williams (Ph.D. and M. A. in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania, B.A. in Urban Studies from Vanderbilt) is an Independent Consultant. Her company is called MBW Statistical Consulting. She advises C-suite executives and senior leaders of large-scale, federally-funded operations on data governance and providing services to customers. Before owning her own company full-time, Dr Williams worked as a Statistician for the U.S. Census, a Program Officer for the National Academies, and a Senior Statistician for the U. S. Government Accountability Office.

Dr. Tukufu Zuberi (Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Chicago, M.A. in Sociology from California State University, Sacramento, B.A. in Sociology from San José State University) is the Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations, and Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research asks what it means to be a human, a citizen, and a person. Dr. Zuberi’s books include Thicker than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie (2001); Africa Independence: How Africa Shapes the World (2015); Black Words and Memory Before the Destruction (forthcoming). He also edited the General Demography of Africa series and, with Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology. From 2003 to 2014, Dr. Zuberi hosted the Public Broadcasting System series History Detectives. His documentaries include African Independence and Before Things Fell Apart. Born Antonio McDaniel to Willie and Annie McDaniel, and raised in the housing projects of “Tassafaronga” in Oakland, California, he later embraced the name Tukufu Zuberi – Swahili for “beyond praise” and “strength.” He took the name because of a desire to make and have a connection with an important period in which social movements in the United States and other nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were challenging what it means to be a human being.

Moderators:

Mao-Mei Liu (Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Masters in Education and Political and Social Sciences from UPF, B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Molecular Biochemistry from Yale) is Research Faculty in the Department of Demography. Before UC Berkeley, Mao-Mei was a NIH/NICHD Postdoctoral Fellow (T32) at Brown University’s Population Studies and Training Center. Before and during graduate school, she worked as a community organizer for the Greater Four Corners Action Coalition in Dorchester and SEIU in Oakland, K-12 teacher in Barcelona & area, inter-cultural mediator in the Barcelona area and graduate researcher for the MAFE, Migration between Africa and Europe project. She will be a National Institutes of Health Reentry Scholar starting Jan 2021.

Omari H. Swinton (Ph.D. in Economics from Duke University, B.S. in Economics from Florida A&M) is an associate professor in the Economics department at Howard University where he teaches introductory, intermediate, and urban economics.  He is currently the Director of Graduate Studies and Chair of the Economics Department. His research interests include labor economics and education.  He currently is working on projects that examine the returns to effort for students, the obstacles to faculty diversity in higher education, and benefits of attending an HBCU.  Dr. Swinton is the immediate Past President of the National Economics Association, which was founded in 1969 as the Caucus of Black Economists to promote the professional lives of minorities within the profession.

This event is hosted by the Demographers of Color collective (organizers Asad L. Asad, Christina J. Cross, Gniesha Dinwiddie, Nadia Flores,  René D. Flores, Lisa Kaida, Hedwig Lee, Mao-Mei Liu, Juan Pedroza, Ndola Prata, Fernando Riosmena,  Gabriela Sanchez-Soto, Omari H. Swinton, Eddie Telles, Monique B. Williams, Xing Sherry Zhang)

Future DOC events (usually 2nd Fridays): Nurturing Family & PhDs. 10am-11:30amPST (Nov 13 event reg) | Round of Gratitude Dec 11 10am-11:30amPST (Dec 11 event reg) | Connection & Hope Jan 8 10am-11:30amPST (Jan 8 event reg)