Conferences and Workshops

Based on the award-winning monograph Relational Inequalities (Oxford 2019), this talk is an introduction to relational inequality theory (RIT). RIT makes the following claims: Resources, like money, jobs and dignity, are generated and distributed relationally in organizations. Actors makes claims on those resources. Some people are denied access to organizational resources through processes of inclusionary and exclusionary closure. Others appropriate resources based on their ability to exploit weaker actors in interactional and exchange relationships. Actors are more or less powerful in these claims making processes and this relational power tends to be associated with categorical distinctions such as class, occupation, gender, education, citizenship, race, and the like. Institutions and organizational fields influence, but do not determine action and opportunities. Rather actors, use cultural and other tools to devise local strategies of action. Introducing both a theoretical tool kit and a broad set of research exemplars Relational Inequalities is intended to challenge both more macro and micro sociological approaches to inequality.

Over the past decade, birth rates have fallen in the United States, reaching lows not seen since the 1970s. When birth rates first fell, many expected fertility to rebound as the U.S. recovered from the Great Recession. Instead, fertility continued to fall, and the U.S. now joins other industrialized countries with consistently low fertility, sparking concern over population decline and negative economic impacts. The Center for Family and Demographic Research will host three leading fertility scholars who will share their insights into the causes of today’s low birth rates, their predictions for likely trends in the future, and the implications of sustained low fertility. The symposium is free, but pre-registration is required. Please contact the CFDR office to register.

This talk discusses the culture of control that marginalizes Black and Latinx youth.  Drawing on the findings of a recent two-year ethnographic study, Rios shows that institutional figures, like educators and police officers, impact the cultural frames and resources used by marginalized students. Rios argues that top-down reform measures are often ineffective in urban high schools and police departments.  He proposes culturally responsive and culturally anchored programs, policies, and practices for reversing the youth control complex and the school-to-prison pipeline.

DuPRI will be hosting an Introduction to R virtual workshop. This 4-hour training (one morning and one afternoon session) will introduce you to the R environment for statistical computing. The class is suitable for beginners who have never used R and is geared toward users of Stata/SAS/SPSS. Session Details Date: Thursday, December 3 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM: Getting started with R, creating and manipulating objects, loading and working with data 12:00 PM – 12:30 PM: Break 12:30 PM – 2:30 PM: Regression, graphics, basic programming

Children’s chances of earning more than their parents have fallen from 90 percent to 50 percent over the past half century in America. How can we restore the American Dream of upward mobility for our children? In this talk, Raj Chetty will discuss recent work that he and his colleagues at Opportunity Insights have done to study this question. Among other topics, the talk will show how children’s chances of climbing the income ladder vary across neighborhoods, analyze the sources of racial disparities in intergenerational mobility, and discuss the role of higher education in creating greater income mobility. The talk will conclude by discussing how local policymakers can harness big data to increase opportunity in their own communities and institutions.

This two-day workshop will be focused on analysis of population data and demonstrating how studies using established administrative data resources such as Medicare claims databases combined with complex well-established and innovative analytic approaches (such as partitioning analyses, time-series based methods of projection and forecasting, and stochastic process models) can be used to uncover previously overlooked or understudied aspects in this area of research. increase collaboration and partnership in an interdisciplinary research community focused on analytic methods for large-scale population and clinic-related data construct a bridge between independent research subgroups identify ways to achieve synergistic effects in multidisciplinary research by combining innovative approaches developed across different research groups Ultimately, our long-term goal is to diffuse the active use of advanced analytic methods for analyses of existing big health population datasets in health disparity research.

It is widely recognized that an array of factors ignite and fuel the fire of racial inequality. And, to make matters worse, these factors change markedly over time. We do not know, however, exactly how this happens—how observed symbols become race, how race becomes inequality in social interaction, and how the ensuing wildfire of racial inequality grows to ravage a population for generations. This social science fiction book project pertains to the lived experience of a protagonist in a mechanical world, where individual pattern-recognition machines link up to create massive social machines that collectively mine the environment for resources. The story follows the protagonist as he investigates and builds a simple machine to understand the larger system of racial inequality in his mechanical world. On this journey, he encounters a world characterized by a complex, recursive network of racial inequities connected across countless temporal, social and spatial dimensions. These inequities, however, are much deeper than a nuanced set of outcomes in a statistical model. Rather, they emerge from a shared, zero-sum logic of distributing status that has infected every aspect of mechanical society, and demands a solution beyond a mere redistribution of goods in a few key dimensions. In this talk, Stewart will present a logical synopsis of his book project that imaginatively engages the unique challenges of scholars researching race, as well as those of policy makers and social groups who endeavor to undermine racial inequality.

DuPRI will be hosting a virtual workshop, Collecting Web-based Data using R, on March 24. This 4-hour training (one morning and one afternoon session) provides an introduction to collecting web-based data using R. It will cover making HTTP requests, web scraping, working with structured or scraped web data, interacting with APIs, and obtaining open data. Some prior experience using R is recommended.

Hedwig (Hedy) received her PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009. After receiving her PhD, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Michigan from 2009 to 2011. She holds a courtesy joint appointment at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at WUSTL and is a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is also an Associate Director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity & Equity. She currently serves on the research advisory board for the Vera Institute of Justice and the board for the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science. RESEARCH INTERESTS INCLUDE: Health Disparities | Race and Ethnicity | Gender | Family | Policing and Social Control