Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement

The National Park Service (NPS) and the National Park Foundation (NPF) invite scholars who are no more than three years beyond receipt of the doctorate to apply for a two-year National Park Service Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral fellowship, potentially renewable for one additional year. The Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement will begin in September 2018. This fellowship is made possible by support from the National Park Foundation through a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

NPS has followed up the Civil War to Civil Rights commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War with an ongoing national effort to research and commemorate the many struggles for Civil Rights in America, with the intent to provide public opportunities to connect learning about the past to relevant issues today. NPS recognizes that the public humanities can both expand personal and societal knowledge and encourage the creative imagination needed to address social challenges rooted in history. NPS is committed to the transfer of knowledge to many publics through national parks and programs. The agency is also committed to sharing knowledge within the workforce, supporting our mission by providing learning and development for staff. The national park system has expanded significantly with the addition of new park units providing opportunities for NPS to tell more comprehensive national stories of all Americans. The Fellow’s research will assist new national park units, creating connections between them and other cultural and historical national parks to tell national stories more effectively. NPS is committed to developing effective audience-centered interpretation and K-12 educational materials to engage visitors (physical and virtual) in these stories, even when those stories can be contested and uncomfortable.

The Fellow will work with NPS mentors and as a member of a collaborative humanities research team of three Fellows. The Fellow will have a faculty mentor from the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi. There are four project outcomes expected, each determined in consultation between the Fellow and their NPS and academic mentors.

Research. A. Baseline summary: The Fellow will assess and summarize current relevant scholarship, including explanation and assessment of a variety of theoretical orientations and varying perspectives, in order to make recommendations to the NPS about further humanities research that would support stewardship and educational needs pertinent to the theme of the fellowship. B. New or applied research: The Fellow will undertake research relevant to the theme of the fellowship.
Online seminars. The Fellow, as part of the research team, will make presentations to NPS staff service-wide via quarterly online seminars.
Interpretive or Educational products. The Fellow will develop interpretive or educational products based on their scholarly research.
Career-focused research and product. The Fellow will dedicate up to 20 percent of their time to pursue research on a career-centered project.

Applicants must possess US citizenship and have a Ph.D. in the humanities or humanistic social sciences by August 2018 (history, museology, archaeology, philosophy, ethnic studies, women’s studies, American Studies, anthropology, or related disciplines). Applicants must demonstrate comfort with working collaboratively and across disciplinary boundaries; excellent research, writing, and communication skills; flexibility and the capacity to learn quickly; and a strong interest in public scholarship. Selective factors include the merit of scholarship and promise, commitment to the public humanities, and capacity to complete research successfully. Fellowship is contingent upon a successful security background check.

Application: Applications must be submitted in pdf format by email only to CivilRights@nationalparks.org with the subject line: last name, first name – 2018-Legacy of Civil Rights Movement. For best consideration, apply by January 17, 2018.

Include:

cover letter stating interest and vision for the fellowship (letters may include a summary of the dissertation, a statement of personal research interests and plans, discussion of past engagement with public humanities, discussion of willingness to participate fully in NPS research and education programs);
comprehensive curriculum vitae;
writing sample accessible to the general public;
confirmation of Ph.D. award by August 1, 2018; and
three letters of recommendation. The letters of recommendation should be sent directly by the recommender to CivilRights@nationalparks.org with the subject line: LETTER last name, first name – 2018-Legacy of Civil Rights Movement.

The two-year Fellowship begins September 1, 2018 and ends August 30, 2020. The location is Washington, DC. NPS will provide the Fellow with a workstation. Compensation is $60,000 for year one and $61,800 for year two plus an annual $7,000 allowance for health benefits as well as research costs (conferences and publications) of $3,000 per year. One-time moving expenses of $1500 will be provided. Travel funding is provided for three NPS meetings per year and two additional trips to research-associated parks. The Fellowship may not be held concurrently with any other fellowship or grant, or employment (part-time or full-time).

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Gender and Sexuality Equality

The National Park Service (NPS) and the National Park Foundation (NPF) invite scholars who are no more than three years beyond receipt of the doctorate to apply for a two-year National Park Service Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral fellowship, potentially renewable for one additional year. The Postdoctoral Fellowship in Gender and Sexuality Equality will begin in September 2018. This fellowship is made possible by support from the National Park Foundation through a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

NPS is forming a community of practice for Women’s History and is organizing for the commemoration of the 100th anniversary in 2020 of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, which states that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” In October 2016, NPS also released “LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History,” demonstrating further a commitment to tell the stories of gender and sexual minorities and supplying a national context to begin to frame work at more local levels. The NPS realizes that the public humanities can both expand personal and societal knowledge and encourage the creative imagination needed to address social challenges rooted in history. The NPS is committed to the transfer of knowledge to many publics through national parks and programs and to providing public opportunities to connect learning about the past to relevant issues today. The agency is also committed to sharing knowledge within the workforce, supporting our mission by providing learning and development for staff. The national park system has expanded significantly with the addition of new park units providing opportunities for NPS to tell more comprehensive national stories of all Americans. The Fellow’s research will assist new national park units, creating connections between them and other cultural and historical national parks to tell national stories more effectively. NPS is committed to developing effective audience-centered interpretation and K-12 educational materials to engage visitors (physical and virtual) in these stories even when those stories can be contested and uncomfortable.

The Fellow will work with NPS mentors and as a member of a collaborative humanities research team of three Fellows. The Fellow will have a faculty mentor from the Department of History at Morgan State University. The Fellow will be instrumental in steering the work of the community of practice leading up to the national commemoration of the 2020 anniversary. While a major milestone is the anniversary, any commemoration of the struggles for Women’s Equality must be intersectional. There are four project outcomes expected, each determined in consultation between the Fellow and their NPS and academic mentors.

Research. A. Baseline summary: The Fellow will assess and summarize current relevant scholarship, including explanation and assessment of a variety of theoretical orientations and varying perspectives, in order to make recommendations to the NPS about further humanities research that would support stewardship and educational needs pertinent to the theme of the fellowship. B. New or applied research: The Fellow will undertake research relevant to the theme of the fellowship.
Online seminars. The Fellow, as part of the research team, will make presentations to NPS staff service-wide via quarterly online seminars.
Interpretive or Educational products. The Fellow will develop interpretive or educational products based on their scholarly research.
Career-focused research and product. The Fellow will dedicate up to 20 percent of their time to pursue research on a career-centered project.

Application: Applications must be submitted in pdf format by email only to GenderSexuality@nationalparks.org with the subject line: last name, first name – 2018-Gender. For best consideration, apply by January 17, 2018.

Include:

cover letter stating interest and vision for the fellowship (letters may include a summary of the dissertation, a statement of personal research interests and plans, discussion of past engagement with public humanities, discussion of willingness to participate fully in NPS research and education programs);
comprehensive curriculum vitae;
writing sample accessible to the general public;
confirmation of Ph.D. award by August 1, 2018; and
three letters of recommendation. The letters of recommendation should be sent directly by the recommender to GenderSexuality@nationalparks.org with the subject line: LETTER last name, first name – 2018-Gender.

The two-year Fellowship begins September 1, 2018 and ends August 30, 2020. The location is Philadelphia, PA. NPS will provide the Fellow with a workstation. Compensation is $60,000 for year one and $61,800 for year two plus an annual $7,000 allowance for health benefits as well as research costs (conferences and publications) of $3,000 per year. One-time moving expenses of $1500 will be provided. Travel funding is provided for three NPS meetings per year and two additional trips to research-associated parks. The Fellowship may not be held concurrently with any other fellowship or grant, or employment (part-time or full-time).

Who Can Live Life Like a Start-up? A Conversation About Opportunity and Inequality with Scott Allard and Arthur Brooks

Join Evans School Professor Scott Allard and American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks in a conversation about how individuals can be entrepreneurial: who can live like a start-up, and who gets left behind? Light refreshments provided.

Audience members must register to be guaranteed a seat.

Dissertation Fellowships

CSSS Seminar: Record Linkage and Population Size Estimation for Counting Human Rights Violations

Mauricio Sadinle, Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics

In the context of a civil war, it is common for multiple organizations to maintain registries of human rights violations reports. These registries can, in principle, be used to address the common question of how many violations (have) occurred due to the war. While not all violations are reported, obtaining the number of single violations reported across organizations provides us with a lower bound on the total. This is often a nontrivial task, since violation reports typically lack unique identifiers and have name misspellings, typing errors, missingness, and other data quality issues. Probabilistic record linkage is used to identify coreferent reports and provide a probabilistic quantification of the uncertainty in the linkage process. Under additional assumptions, capture-recapture or multiple-systems estimation can be used to provide an estimate of the total number of violations using the results of the linkage step. In this talk we review record linkage and capture-recapture models, and present a Bayesian approach to incorporate the linkage uncertainty into the estimation of the total number of violations. We present a case study where our goal is to estimate the number of civilian casualties from the civil war of El Salvador.

Katie Baird Explores How Number of Ballot Drop Boxes Influences Voting Behavior in Washington

Affiliate Katie Bird, Associate Professor of Politics, Philosophy and Economics at UW Tacoma, co-authored a study that explores whether people will vote more with the addition of more ballot drop boxes, which is required by a new state law in Washington. The study —which Baird and her coauthors presented to the State Government, Elections, and IT Committee on October 27— compared voting behavior in 2015 to that in 2016, when the number of drop boxes increased from 10 to 43. The outcomes suggest that while there may be an increase in voter turnout with the addition of more boxes, it is not likely to be driven by typically low-turnout groups. The study is a product of Project Vote Washington, a team of five economists and political scientists—of which Baird is a member—that examines voting outcomes to inform Washington voting policy. In a recent HeraldNet article that discusses the study, Baird said, “What we know is drop boxes are incredibly popular among voters. We found the low voting groups did not seem to be as influenced by boxes.” A draft of the full study is available below.

Emily Williams Investigates Pharmaceutical Alcohol Use Disorder Treatments in VA Primary Care Clinics

Affiliate Emily Williams, Associate Professor of Health Services, co-authored a recent article that examines factors that pose challenges for or aid in prescribing medications for alcohol use disorders (AUD), and beliefs among providers of primary care depending on their willingness to prescribe these medications. For this qualitative study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, the authors interviewed 24 providers from five different Veterans Affairs clinics. Their findings indicate that lack of knowledge and experience, stigma around alcohol, and skepticism about using medications rather than addiction treatment are barriers to prescribing medications for AUD. On the other hand, support for prescribing AUD medications, training, and the presence of behavioral staff to aid in the follow-up process facilitated prescription. Moreover, outcomes suggest that depending on their willingness to prescribe AUD medications, primary care providers have divergent attitudes regarding their role in prescribing for AUD and the effectiveness of medications for treating AUD. The full study is available below.

Scott Allard Addresses Myth About Poverty in Cities and Suburbs

Affiliate Scott Allard was quoted in a recent Chicago Tribune article that addresses myths about housing-related issues, including gentrification, low-income housing, and poverty. In response to the misconception that poverty is greater in cities than it is in suburbs, Allard—Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance—contends that poverty has in fact been shifting to the latter. “The number of poor persons in suburban Chicago eclipsed the number in the City of Chicago in the last decade, and there are no signs of this trend reversing anytime soon. Seven of every ten suburban municipalities outside Chicago saw the number of poor residents at least double from 1990 to 2014,” he said. Allard addresses the issue of rising suburban poverty in greater detail in his book, Places in Need: The Changing Geography of Poverty, published in June. The full article is available below.

Adrian Dobra, Tyler McCormick, Katherine Stovel, and Nathalie Williams Awarded NSF and NIH Grants

Affiliates Adrian Dobra, Tyler McCormick, Katherine Stovel, and Nathalie Williams—also affiliates at the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences—were recently awarded grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

Dobra—Associate Professor of Nursing and Statistics—and Williams—Associate Professor of International Studies and Sociology—were awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant titled “ATD: Geospatial Graphic Models of Human Response to Emergencies,” for a three year-project that will examine human behavior response patterns to emergencies using machine learning tools.
Stovel, Professor of Sociology,—along with Assistant Professor Jevin West at the Information School—received a two-year grant from the NSF titled “Echo Chambers in Science? The Impact of Academic Recommender Systems on the Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge.” Stovel and West will explore how new search technologies affect scholars’ range of exposure to academic literature, and whether they have broadening or narrowing effects.
McCormick, Associate Professor of Statistics and Sociology, was awarded a five-year subcontract on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant “Verbal Autopsy: Reimagining Data & Automated Cause Assignment (using ALPHA Network data).” The project will focus on developing methods to assign causes to and describe the distribution of death using verbal autopsy methods.

Introduction to Graphics in R

Instructor: Cori Mar

Tuesday, November 14
1:00-3:30 PM
Savery 121

This is an introduction to the basic graphics package in the statistical programming language R. It will demonstrate how to customize a scatterplot and a barplot as well as create multiple plots on a single page and multiple page pdfs using a loop.

Prerequisite: Experience with R