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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Summer School on Interest Group Politics

The 8th European Consortium for Political Research Summer School on Interest Group Politics will take place between June 29th and July 7th 2017 at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS). The summer school will focus on “Interest Group Politics and Policy-Making in the 21st Century”. Through a variety of courses taught by renowned scholars, PhD and Research Master students will learn about different stages of the lobbying process involving interest group strategies and influence. The courses will provide participants with advanced training in the latest theoretical approaches and in cutting edge methods applied in the study of interest groups. Students will have the opportunity to present and discuss their own research to get feedback from the instructors and other students.

You can find information on the summer school program, the application requirements and the faculty below. The deadline for applications is May 15th 2017. Eligible candidates will be selected on a first-come-first-serve basis. Applicants are therefore encouraged to submit their application as early as possible. Feel free to contact us in case you have any questions – and please pass this email on to anyone who might be interested in the summer school!

Disability Studies Harlan Hahn Endowment Fund

The Disability Studies Program is pleased to announce that the Harlan Hahn Fund call for proposals is now open for Spring Quarter 2017. Current students, faculty, and staff from all three University of Washington campuses are invited to submit a grant proposal. Applications must describe research, writing, or activist projects that are framed within, aligned with, or potentially informed by the academic field of Disability Studies.

The Harlan Hahn Endowment Fund was established by the generous gift of the late Harlan D. Hahn, disability activist, political scientist, and disability studies scholar, to the University of Washington’s Disability Studies Program. The Harlan Hahn awards typically range between $500 and $5,000. The number and amount of the grants awarded depends on the quality of the individual projects and the overall number of eligible proposals received.

Awarded Harlan Hahn funds may be used for:

  • Support of academic research projects, pedagogical research, or writing projects in Disability Studies or informed by Disability Studies.
  • Travel to conferences in the field of Disability Studies or related to Disability Studies, to present research or to participate in the Disability Studies academic community.
  • Support for the development of a course with Disability Studies content.
  • Support for disability related activist endeavors (e.g. web development, meeting support) that are aligned with Disability Studies.

Eligibility:

Students:

  • You must be an enrolled University of Washington undergraduate or graduate student at the time of application.
  • Eligible applicants should have a minimum 3.0 GPA in Disability Studies courses or equivalent demonstration of academic excellence in areas related to Disability Studies (e.g. courses completed in related disciplines, courses taught as a graduate teaching assistant, or scholarly work conducted as a research assistant).
  • Eligible applicants may also provide evidence of commitment to issues of social justice related to people with disabilities (e.g. work, volunteer, or activist experiences) and/or Disability Studies scholarship.

Faculty and staff:

  • You must be a University of Washington academic or staff employee with a minimum 50% appointment at the time of application.
  • Eligible applicants should have exhibited and sustained efforts towards incorporating the Disability Studies approach into research and/or teaching and contributing to the knowledge base of Disability Studies.
  • Eligible applicants may also provide evidence of commitment to issues of social justice related to people with disabilities (e.g. work, volunteer, or activist experiences) and/or Disability Studies scholarship.

Injury and Health Equity Across the Lifespan Symposium

You are invited to a public lecture as part of the “Injury and Health Equity Across the Lifespan” (i-Heal) symposium on May 22, 2017 at the University of Washington School of Social Work from 6-7:30pm. Dr. Adil Haider from the Center for Surgery and Public Health, a joint initiative of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, will present. Dr. Haider, an active trauma and critical care surgeon, is credited with uncovering racial disparities after traumatic injury and establishing the field of trauma disparities research.

Please RSVP for the lecture below.

The lecture is supported by the Population Health Initiative, Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center, School of Social Work, and the Institute of Translational Health Sciences.

Call for Papers: Oxford Symposium on Population, Migration, and the Environment

You are invited to participate in in the 5th International Oxford Symposium on Population, Migration, and the Environment. The symposium will be held 3 and 4 August 2017 at St Anne’s College, Oxford, U.K. Alternatively, you may wish to attend the December session. The event will meet on the 7th and 8th at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Consult the site below for abstract submission and registration deadlines.

  • Keynote speaker – David Coleman, Emeritus Professor of Demography; Associate Fellow, Department of Social Policy, University of Oxford.
  • You are invited to present a paper that encourages the exchange of interdisciplinary ideas about the main themes of the conference: world population increase, human migration, and environmental sustainability. Alternatively, you may wish to attend as a panel member.
  • The Symposium seeks to cover a broad agenda that includes disciplines such as economics, education, environmental studies, agriculture, law, political science, religion, and social studies.
  • Topics for presentation may reach beyond these areas, and our website contains an extensive list of suggested topics.
  • Participant abstracts will be published online in the conference proceedings. Papers presented at the meeting will be subsequently peer-reviewed by external readers for possible inclusion in Symposium Books or sponsored academic journals.

Email  contact@oxford-population-and-environment-symposium.com if you have questions.

Population Research Discovery Seminar: Robert Plotnick, Scott Allard, Marieka Klawitter, and Jennifer Romich

Population Dynamics, Poverty, and Policy

Co-Sponsor: West Coast Poverty Center

Please join CSDE and the WCPC for this special panel reflecting on the past, present and future of the field of population and poverty research. In honor of Professor Robert Plotnick’s long and distinguished career as a leader in this field, he and three esteemed UW poverty researchers will highlight the overarching issues that demographers have grappled with in poverty and policy research, as well as current research in the areas of poverty and geography, financial inclusion and asset building, and income supports for populations experiencing poverty.

Robert D. Plotnick is the Daniel J. Evans Professor of Public Policy and Governance. He joined the School in 1984, after previously serving on the faculties of Bates College (1975-77) and Dartmouth College (1977-84). Plotnick also holds appointments as Adjunct Professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Economics and as a Research Affiliate with UW’s Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology and West Coast Poverty Center, and with the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. He directed the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology from 1997 to 2002 and was Associate Dean of the School from 1990 to 1995 and 2011 to 2016.

Scott W. Allard is a Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. His work focuses on issues of poverty, place, and safety net policy in the US. In addition to his faculty appointment at the University of Washington, Allard is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, co-primary investigator of the Family Self-Sufficiency Data Center at the University of Chicago, and a research affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Marieka M. Klawitter joined the Evans School faculty in 1990. Her research focuses on public policies that affect work and income, including studies of the effects of asset-building policies, welfare policies, intra-household bargaining, and anti-discrimination policies for sexual orientation. She teaches courses on public policy analysis, quantitative methods, program evaluation, asset-building for low income families, and sexual orientation and public policy. Klawitter holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin, and a MPP and AB in Economics from the University of Michigan.

Jennifer Romich is an Associate Professor of Social Welfare at the UW School of Social Work and Director of the West Coast Poverty Center. Romich studies resources and economic in families with a particular emphasis on low income workers, household budgets and families’ interactions with public policy. Her current work focuses on the economic safety net for poor families, the child welfare system, and labor standards policies including the minimum wage and paid leave. She teaches policy and policy practice classes. Romich holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics and earned a doctorate in human development and social policy from Northwestern University.

CSSS Seminar: How Sudden Censorship Can Increase Access to Information

Abstract: Conventional wisdom assumes that increased censorship will strictly decrease access to information. We delineate circumstances when increases in censorship will expand access to information. When governments suddenly impose censorship on previously uncensored information, citizens accustomed to acquiring this information will be incentivized to learn methods of censorship evasion. These tools provide continued access to the newly blocked information and also extend users’ ability to access information that has long been censored. We illustrate this phenomenon using millions of individual-level actions of social media users in China before and after the block of Instagram. We show that the block inspired millions of Chinese users to acquire virtual private networks (VPNs) and join censored websites like Twitter and Facebook. Despite initially being apolitical, these new users began browsing blocked political pages on Wikipedia, following Chinese political activists on Twitter, and discussing highly politicized topics such protests in Hong Kong.

Center for Health Trends and Forecasts at PAA 2017

The Center for Health Trends and Forecasts will be well-represented at the Population Association of America annual meeting in Chicago, IL, April 26 – 29, 2017. You can catch up with CHTF Deputy Director and CSDE Affiliate Haidong Wang, Project Manager Faye Ziegeweid, and affiliates Joe Friedman and Nick Graetz at the following sessions:

  • Using the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) for Research, Wednesday, April 26, 10:00 AM–12:00 PM
    • This workshop will provide background in the GBD measurement philosophy and analytical principles, as well as metrics and mechanics of the study. Components of the training include instruction in the methods behind the GBD approach, key assessment factors for data, the principles underlying the analytic process, and how to interpret results.
  • Introduction to the Global Health Data Exchange and GBD Compare, Wednesday, April 26, 1:00–3:00 PM
    • This workshop will demonstrate how to employ GHDx and GBD Compare to use, critique, and manipulate GBD data and results as well as identify how GBD tools and results can be applied to research health from different perspectives.
  • Poster Session: The Relationship Between Educational Inequality and Health, Thursday, April 27
  • Poster Session: Improving the Comparability of Educational Attainment Estimates: Developing a Method to Reliably Crosswalk Binned Education Data to Single-Year Values, Thursday, April 27
  • Measuring the Geographic Distribution of Maternal Education in Africa, Friday, April 28, 10:55 AM

Or, stop by Exhibit Booth 310 to say hello!

Assistant Professor of Social Work

The Department of Social Work at the University of Michigan-Flint invites applications for a tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level with an interest in teaching any of the following:  substance abuse related courses, social welfare policy and research.  The Social Work program is fully accredited by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) and is experiencing dynamic growth with approximately 300 Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) students and a vibrant on-line Substance Abuse Treatment (SAT) minor.  In the future we intend to extend a major in Substance Abuse Treatment and Interventions.  We seek a colleague whose innovative ideas support our mission of excellence in undergraduate education, who shares our commitment in social justice, and will be integral in growing both our BSW and Substance Abuse Treatment and Interventions curriculum.

Sociology Instructor

Green River College seeks an Instructor of Sociology to teach SOC 215: Survey of Criminology and SOC 271: Sociology of Deviance. The successful candidate will also help to develop curriculum and create new courses in Sociology. Approximately two-thirds of teaching responsibilities will include Sociology survey courses (SOC 101: Introduction to Sociology).  We seek an Instructor who embraces the community and technical college mission and the faculty role of contributing to the general education of students who will apply learning to the world of work and/or transfer their education to a university. We also prioritize the recruitment of an instructor well-versed in the study of social and structural inequities and who can teach criminology and/or deviance from that critical perspective.
Position Responsibilities:

  • Teach transfer-level Sociology and Criminology and/or Deviance courses.
  • Create new curriculum and courses focused on Criminology, Deviance, and other critical sociological content areas.
  • Advise students, serve on committees, and perform other duties as outlined in the negotiated collective bargaining agreement.
  • Participate in college and division professional activities, including (but not limited to) meetings, planning, scheduling, and program assessment.
  • Maintain strong collegial and collaborative relationships within the Sociology Department, the Social Science Division, and the Green River College campus community.

Kam Wing Chan Talks of Immigration with That’s China

Kam Wing Chan, CSDE Affiliate and UW Professor of Geography, was recently interviewed by That’s China magazine for two articles on the hukou, China’s internal passport system. He discusses existing reform attempts, the impact of current policy, and predictions for future changes. You can read the first article below and the second article here.