Karin Martin, UW Evans School of Public Policy & Governance
12:30 pm – 1:30 pm
*Q&A until 2:00 pm
School of Social Work, Room 305A
This project explores the interconnections between criminal justice system involvement, court-ordered debt, and poverty, in partnership with a Tacoma-based community organization. Two research questions motivate the project: 1) what is the nature and extent of criminal justice debt in Pierce County Courts? And, 2) what policy interventions can attenuate the social costs of court-ordered debt for low-income residents? To address these questions, the project draws on monetary sanction and sentencing data from Washington State’s Administrative Office of the Courts, in addition to focus groups with residents who owe money to the courts. We find that Pierce County courts (municipal, district, superior) assessed more than $332 million in monetary sanctions between 2011 and 2017, generating approximately $228 million in outstanding criminal justice debt—with significant racial disparities. Focus group participants report being trapped in a cycle of poverty penalization that includes being subject to incarceration, having cars impounded, and being assessed even more monetary sanctions stemming from the inability to pay the initial criminal justice debt. Housing insecurity, forgoing necessities (e.g. groceries, utility bills), and driver’s license suspension were common in our sample. Our analysis points to a number of policy changes that could reduce the harm of criminal justice debt in Pierce County.
Please join us for the second “Generation Mixed Goes to School” Listening Party on March 13th, in Kane Hall, room 225, 5:30-7:30.
These “radical listening” sessions will give the audience the opportunity to hear excerpts of the youth conversations about racial identity and engage in intergenerational dialoguing on mixed-race
We will provide a light dinner.
Open to the public, please RSVP here.
CSDE Affiliate James Young, Director of the Washington Center for Real Estate Research, was recently quoted in two different news stories. With Oregon set to pass rent control legislation, Q13 FOX News featured Young’s response to hopes that a similar measure comes to Washington. According to him, rent control is not the answer since it creates more issues than it fixes, including fewer housing options and poor renter-landlord relationships.
Young was also interview by KUOW in response to real estate firm Redfin’s assessment that the recent cooldown of Seattle’s real estate market may already be over. Young believes it’s still too early to predict whether the market is truly heating up once again, and that it would be necessary to see figures from March and April to better understand the current scenario.
Our final Computational Demography meeting of the quarter is this week! Ian Kennedy, Sociology graduate student, will draw on a few of his research projects to demo and discuss the relationship between text data and demography. The CDWG will meet 12:00-1:30 PM on Thursday, 3/7/2019, in Raitt 114. Food will be provided, and all are welcome! The CDWG is co-sponsored by CSDE and the eScience Institute. For more information about the working group, check out our spiffy new website.
Here’s what Ian shared about the exciting topics he has in store for us:
While demography has often been associated with enumeration, scholars have often recognized the importance of action and perception in the production of population trends. However, whether examining migration patterns or ethnic identification, we often cannot collect good data about those actions and perceptions. Instead, new tools like web scraping and better accessibility to administrative data mean give us a window into action and perception at a large scale, a window paned with text data. If that metaphor feels a bit pained, forgive me, then think about this presentation as simply an introduction to new ways to scrape, process, and analyze text as data to study demographic topics. I’ll briefly cover web scraping and automation using selenium, methods for cleaning, word and document level models for analyzing text, and some gestures towards deep learning possibilities. The data examples come from Craigslist, Twitter, and administrative sources to answer questions about housing dynamics, racist discourse, and evictions.
The next CSDE Biomarker Working Group meeting will be on Wednesday, March 6, 2:30-3:30 PM, in 114 Raitt Hall. We’ll discuss a recent review article relevant to recurring topics of discussion for our group: stress and allostatic load. This discussion was originally scheduled for 2/13, but was postponed due to snow.
This article contrasts the allostatic load model, in which coping with stress has a long-term physical health cost, with the authors’ Adaptive Calibration Model, in which the stress response is an adaptive response with costs and benefits. We’ll use this article as a starting point to talk about how varying models of stress and its role in health may translate into practical approaches to biomarker measures of stress and health outcomes. This will be an informal discussion (with a brief overview of the article and the issues it raises for those who haven’t read it) and all are welcome.
The purpose of the CSDE Biomarker Working Group is to provide a forum for discussions of practical and theoretical issues associated with collecting and using biomarker data in social and behavioral science research. We hope to provide an opportunity for faculty and students with an interest in biomarker methods to meet researchers with similar interests from departments across campus. Please feel free to forward this announcement to colleagues. Those who would like to receive regular meeting announcements by email may subscribe to the mailing list here. If you are interested in joining meetings via video conferencing, please RSVP to Ellie (ebrindle@uw.edu) before each session to receive instructions.
Full citation: Developmental Adaptation to Stress: An Evolutionary Perspective. Bruce J Ellis and Marco Del Giudice Annu Rev Psychol. 2019;70: 111-139
I am teaching Geog 543: Research Seminar: Topics in Immigration, Ethnicity, and Race in Spring 2019. The topic will be (im)migration and labor markets/employment, with most of the readings oriented to the US context.
Likely topics:
- Why people move for work and where they go
- Who moves for work (and who doesn’t) i.e. (im)migration as a selective process
- Spatial divisions of immigrant and US-born labor at destination
- Occupational niching
- Relations between occupational niching and residential clustering/segregation of groups
- Effects of (im)migration on resident populations
- (Im)migration policies and labor markets
- Immigrant dispersion within the US and labor market/industrial restructuring
- Tied to the above, the growth of local and state immigration policies and their effects on new immigrant settlement and the secondary migration of immigrants within the country
There is a rich literature on all of these topics and I intend to have us read some classics and excellent new work in geography, sociology, history and economics. This subject and its literature has been at the core of my research agenda for many years and I keep being drawn back to it even when new projects pull me in different directions. A good deal of the class will examine the above topics from the perspective of immigration but I am a strong believer in the symbiotic relationships between internal and international migration and that it makes sense to conceive of migrant labor in terms of a unified system of labor exchange occuring between AND within states.
The Population Health Initiative is offering a one-credit, credit/no-credit seminar-style course for undergraduate students during spring quarter called, “Disasters: Approaches to Preparation, Response and Recovery.”
Natural and human-made disasters result in enormous human and economic costs, including immediate loss of lives, destruction of infrastructure, food shortages, disease outbreaks and displacement. The appropriate response to these disasters is complex, requiring multi-level, cross-sector coordination and input from a range of disciplines.
This course, GEN ST 297 A (SLN 14645), will offer undergraduate students an overview of the research and service-related activities at the UW that contribute to management of these types of emergencies. The course will meet Tuesdays from 11:30 a.m. to 12:20 p.m. in Mary Gates Hall.
Learn more about Immigration from a panel of local experts, including Dr. Alina Méndez, UW Seattle; Malou Chávez, NW Immigrants Rights Project; Margaret O’Donnell, Global Law Advocates; and Monserrat Padilla, Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network. Find out what actions you can take, while connecting with community over a light brunch. PLUS, catch a sneak peek of Mirror Stage’s upcoming Expand Upon: IMMIGRATION.
In her new book Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US (Stanford 2018), Professor Lan uses parenting as an empirical lens to examine cultural transformation and persisting inequality in the contexts of globalization and immigration. This talk focuses on the distinct strategies of “global parenting” among Taiwanese families across the socioeconomic spectrum. Professional middle-class parents employ divergent educational strategies to pursue cosmopolitan parenting: some arrange international school and bilingual programs to prepare their children for the imminent future of global competition, while some others choose Western-influenced alternative curriculums to escape the tradition of rote learning and academic pressure. Globalization touches the lives of working-class families in very different ways. Taiwanese men, who suffer from rising economic insecurity due to capital outflow and labor inflow, seek wives from China and Southeast Asia. These immigrant mothers’ cultural heritage and transnational connections are hardly recognized as valuable assets until the government encourages investment to Southeast Asia in the recent “New Southbound Policy.”
Pei-Chia Lan is Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Director of Global Asia Research Center, and Associate Dean of the College of Social Sciences at National Taiwan University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, a Fulbright scholar at New York University, and a Yenching-Radcliffe fellow at Harvard University. Her major publications include Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke 2006, ASA Sex and Gender Book Award and ICAS Book Prize) and Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US (Stanford 2018).
Join us for engaging discussions with leaders from business, government, and academia on the latest developments in cybersecurity and technology issues. Enjoy an opportunity to network with speakers and colleagues at the conclusion of each lecture. All are welcome!
This is the second event in a series on Cybersecurity and Technology Futures. This event will focus on the issue of Artificial Intelligence.