Co-sponsor: West Coast Poverty Center
Brian McCabe, Associate Professor of Sociology, Georgetown University
This week, Brian McCabe discusses the impact of Seattle’s Democracy Voucher program for residents and local elections. The Democracy Voucher program in Seattle was designed to broaden representation in the campaign finance system and expand participation from marginalized communities.
Start: June 11, 2018
End: June 20, 2018
Location: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany
Instructors:
Dr. Alyson van Raalte
Dr. Marília Nepomuceno
Course description
The course will present essential demographic methods for health and mortality research. Participants will develop their skills in applying these methods in R. First, we will introduce the standard life table construction, including additional life table quantities such as the median and modal ages at death, and measures of age-at-death variation. Second, we will present some decomposition methods that will allow us to investigate differences between mortality measures by age, sex, and cause of death.
Organization
09:00-10:00: Orientation Meeting (Only on June 11th )
10:00-12:00: Lecture+ Practical
12:00-13:30: Lunch break
13:30-15:30: Lecture + Practical
15:30-16:00: Coffee break
16:00-17:00: Work on Individual Projects to be presented on June 20th
The course will run over an 8-day period, with computer lab sessions scheduled every day. Students should prepare to work full time (40 hours per week) for the duration of the course.
Schedule (provisional)
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Course prerequisites
Students should be familiar with basic life table construction. Ideally, students should also have a basic understanding of decomposition methods. It is recommended that students read Preston et al. (2001) Chapters 2-4 prior to the commencement of the course (or an equivalent textbook covering life tables and decomposition). A basic command of R, including data handling, for-loops, and writing basic functions, is a prerequisite. If you have never used R in your research work, please make sure you have sufficient knowledge before the course starts, e.g. by attending a free online course such as https://www.coursera.org/course/rprog. Alternatively or additionally you can also use the tutorial website from UCLA (http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/r/) or any other R-tutorial which goes into sufficient detail.
Examination
Students are expected to submit a mini-project upon completion of the course. For the project students can either analyze data related to their own research or they can submit a project based on datasets that are provided by the course instructor. The projects and preliminary results will be presented on the last day of class.
Suggested reading
Further readings with demographic examples and applications will also be provided.
Financial support
There is no tuition fee for this course. Students are expected to pay their own transportation and living costs. However, a limited number of scholarships are available on a competitive basis for outstanding candidates and for those applicants who might otherwise not be able to come, supported by ERC grant # 716323 (PI: van Raalte).
Recruitment of students
How to apply
Climate change is not just an environmental issue — it is an economic, social and moral issue. Adapting to wildfires, flooding, and rising temperatures underscores an urgent need for policies that center communities at the forefront of climate impacts.
Washington has an opportunity to lead on state climate policy. We hope you’ll join us for a robust panel discussion featuring important perspectives from civic leaders as we discuss how we can best address this multi-faceted problem.
Panelists include:
-Jeff Johnson, President of the Washington Chapter of AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the United States
-Rosalinda Guillen, Executive Director of Community to Community Development, the Pacific Northwest’s leader in food justice, immigration reform and farmworker rights
-Daniel Malarkey, Board Member on Washington CleanTech Alliance and previous Deputy Director of Washington’s Department of Commerce
-Nives Dolsak PhD, Associate Director of the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, with a research focus on governing common pool resources, and member of the Puget Sound Partnership’s Science Panel
-Heidi Roop PhD, Communications Director for the Climate Impacts Group
Moderated by:
Dr. Sarah Myhre, UW Oceanography Researcher, Climate Justice Activist and member of the Most Influential Seattleites of 2017.
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Organizations involved include UAW4121, GreenEvans, GPSS Science & Policy Committee, and Program on Values and Society
Neferti Tadiar speaks on race and capitalism as part of “Capitalism and Comparative Racialization,” a 2017-2018 John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is Professor of Women’s Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her work examines the role of cultural practice and social imagination in the production of wealth, power, marginality, and liberatory movements in the context of global relations. Her research focuses on contemporary Philippine and Filipino cultures and their relation to political and economic change, while addressing broader issues of gender, race, and sexuality in the discourses and material practices of nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization.
She is working on two book projects: Present Senses: Aesthetic Politics and Asia in the Global (with Jonathan L. Beller) and Remaindered Life: Becoming Human in a Time of War. She is the author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004), which was awarded the Philippine National Book Award in Cultural Criticism.
Join the Harry Bridges Center for our annual meet-and-greet dedicated to networking Labor Studies faculty and students at the University of Washington.
Founded in 1992, the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies supports research, teaching and community outreach at the University of Washington in order to promote the study of labor in all of its facets – locally, nationally, and worldwide.
RSVP: RSVPs are not required, but are requested. To RSVP, contact the Bridges Center at 206-543-7946, or e-mail hbcls@uw.edu .
Pop Dynamics and Environmental Change
A monthly seminar series exploring the links between people and their environments, in our fast changing global landscape. Co-sponsored by the Population Council, the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University, the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research (CIDR), and the UN Population Division. This seminar series will feature key experts from the fields of demography, climate and public health sharing insights on their interdisciplinary work to measure and solve climate related challenges.
Join us for our first seminar on Friday February 23, 1:00–2:30 pm
Title: “Lessons from DesInventar: A Critical Look at the Performance of Disaster Databases”
Authors/Presenters: Mark R. Montgomery and Samir Souidi
The need for systematic data for understanding and measuring the social and economic consequences of disasters is a central theme in the Sustainable Development Goals. Since the 1990s, the DesInventar initiative has offered a unique database built primarily on media reports that make it possible to pinpoint exactly when and where disasters occur. Using DesInventar databases from Mexico, Peru, Madagascar, Mozambique, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka, the seminar will take a critical look at the performance of media reports as indicators of four types of local disasters: floods, landslides, drought, and earthquakes.
Population Council
One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
Floor 3
New York, NY 10017
We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies, held 25–26 October 2018 at Marsilius Kolleg, Heidelberg University in Heidelberg, Germany.
We invite proposals for paper presentations, workshops/interactive sessions, posters/exhibits, colloquia, innovation showcases, virtual posters, or virtual lightning talks. The conference features research addressing the annual themes and the 2018 Special Focus: “Mobilities in the Global North and South – Critical Urban and Global Visions.”
Visit the link below to learn more and submit a proposal. Proposals due by March 19, 2018.
OBSSR in collaboration with NHLBI will hold the Eighteenth Annual Summer Institute on Randomized Behavioral Clinical Trials on July 8-19, 2018, in Warrenton, Virginia. The purpose of the multi-day training is to provide a thorough grounding in the conduct of randomized clinical trials to researchers interested in developing competence in the planning, design, and execution of randomized clinical trials involving behavioral interventions. There is no fee to apply.
The deadline for submitting a completed application is February 23, 2018.
CSDE’s Executive Committee is pleased to welcome twelve new faculty affiliates!
Regional or Visiting
These affiliates bring a wealth of knowledge and unique approaches that enhances our community of demographers and collectively advances population science. We look forward to supporting each of them as they pursue their research. You can learn more about their individual research interests by visiting their affiliate pages, linked above.
If you are interested in becoming an affiliate or you know of someone who should become one, you can invite them to do so by directing them to this page. Affiliate applications are reviewed quarterly, by CSDE’s Executive Committee.
A recent CityLab article highlights a study by affiliate Stewart Tolnay, Professor of Sociology, and CSDE Trainee Christine Leibbrand, graduate student in the Department of Sociology—along with colleagues at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan—that assesses the outcomes of the Great Migration for the children of migrants. While there have been a number of studies on the migrants themselves, Tolnay, Leibbrand, and their co-authors turn their attention to how the Great Migration affected the next generation. As the article points out, their study—published in Demography—is the first to explore if improved economic outcomes for migrants benefited their children. The study finds this to be the case for children of African American migrants, who fared better when it came to education, income, and rates of poverty. Outcomes were not the same for the children of white migrants, however, which may have been due to greater labor competition for whites in the north, along with the comparatively vast opportunities for improvement for blacks from their previous conditions in the south. Could these outcomes have led to attitudes of racism and economic anxiety amongst whites? According to Tolnay, “‘[whites] might have perceived that blacks were taking jobs that they thought [whites] should have, but the black labor market was so segregated by race that this’ likely was not the reality.” You can access the full article at the link below.