Seminar Series

This paper aims to unite three distinct literatures in considering how siblings may exacerbate life course disparities. First, recent calls to expand the one-parent one-offspring model of intergenerational inequality have been met primarily by extending analyses vertically, to a three-generation model that incorporates grandparents. To more fully understand how complex intra-familial dynamics contribute to the transmission of (dis)advantage, however, a nascent literature suggests that we must incorporate siblings into the theoretical and analytic framework. Second, Torche (2015, p. 346) laments that existing literature reveals “very little about causal processes and mechanisms for the persistence of advantage” and urges researchers to start “moving beyond these specific factors to assess how institutional contexts shape intergenerational opportunity”. A robust collection of research illuminates the consequences of criminal justice contact for youth, but has developed largely independently of the scholarship on intergenerational transmission. And third, a spirited literature in cultural sociology investigates children’s own expectations and aspirations for the future—yet little contemporary work scrutinizes parents’ expectations and aspirations for their children. Therefore, in this work in progress, I expand the familial transmission of inequality model to consider how sibling criminal justice system impact children both directly and indirectly (via their influence on parent expectations and aspirations). Using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), my initial results suggest fairly large deleterious effects of sibling troubles on parent expectations and aspirations, and these effects seem to be concentrated primarily among focal children who have higher levels of behavioral issues.

How many calories do you burn each day? How does our daily energy expenditure change with age and exercise? In this talk, we’ll discuss new research investigating human metabolism. Dr. Pontzer will present work with hunter-gatherers and other small-scale subsistence populations around the globe, exploring the way our bodies use energy in different settings and across the life course. We will discuss how our evolved metabolic physiology shapes our lives and our health today.

Jail leasing is the practice by which states enter into contractual agreements with local governments and rent beds in jails to house individuals who would normally be confined in state-operated prisons. In this paper, I examine differences in mortality risk for individuals experiencing incarceration in jails as the result of a leasing agreement compared to the broader jail and prison populations. I do so by describing the deaths of individuals from the jail, prison and leasing population in the US between 2013 and 2019, and calculating the crude and standardized mortality rates for these populations. I find a lower mortality risk for the leasing population compared to the prison population and the general jail population, largely driven by the fact that individuals subjected to leasing agreements are simultaneously insulated from the long sentences experienced by the prison population and from the deaths of despair experienced by the unconvicted jail population.

Mass incarceration is a term that describes a historically, comparatively, and demographically unique situation in the United States. It is historically unique because the incarceration rate—especially the prison incarceration rate—grew fourfold in just 30 years, after a long period of relative stability. It is comparatively unique because the U.S. leads the world in incarcerating its citizens. And it is demographically unique because the burden of incarceration is borne disproportionately by men of color. The objective of this study is to document the ways that the experience of incarceration reverberates across many life course domains: employment, education, marriage, fertility, mortality, and health.

The geroscience hypothesis posits that common biological mechanisms of aging drive susceptibility of aged individuals to functional decline, multi-morbidity, and death. This seminar will review how we are creating new translational frameworks to test the geroscience hypothesis. Specific examples will include evaluating biomarkers and interventions on cellular senescence, developing aging outcomes and feasible biomarker strategies for clinical trials testing pharmacologic and lifestyle interventions, and re-envisioning existing translational resources to accelerate the pace of geroscience.

The combination of extra-carceral surveillance by the US criminal legal system and the US immigration system may have unique consequences for Latina women in the United States. Rates of community supervision by the criminal legal system (through probation or parole) have grown disproportionately among women and Latinx people in recent decades, and rates of community supervision by the US immigration system (through mechanisms like Alternative to Detention programs)—which have always targeted Latinas—have grown exponentially since the mid-2000s. These forms of community supervision may have distinct and significant consequences for the health and health care of Latinas in the US as they face varying concerns about their immigration status and criminal legal status.

Qualitative research suggests that mothers play a critical role in supporting adult children both during and after experiences of incarceration, yet the implications of incarceration for the parents of incarcerated individuals have been relatively unexplored in existing research. Wealth research has also largely overlooked questions of how adult children influence parental wealth, tending to instead focus on downward intergenerational processes and transfers from older generations to younger generations. Using mother-child linked data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the NLSY79 Child and Young Adult cohort, we investigate whether child incarceration appears to influence maternal wealth, what mechanisms play the largest role in driving this relationship, and, finally, whether accounting for child incarceration history helps to explain the racial wealth gap among American women.

Ten Years in Balaka outlines the main contours of population change in Balaka, Malawi between 2009-2019. This includes rapid population growth, urbanisation, the introduction and proliferation of mobile phones, educational expansion, the arrival of new technologies for treating HIV and a series of three distinct policies for rationing treatment in an environment of high-demand and limited resources. This is a decade of significant social transformation and uncertainty is a predictable accompaniment of change. Dr Jenny Trinitapoli will introduce the Tsogolo La Thanzi (TLT) study, describing its origins, design, procedures, epistemological underpinnings and limitations.

In this presentation, I will discuss my efforts to connect evolutionary medicine and global health through research in Madagascar. Working with Malagasy partners, we are investigating human and animal health in a rural village in northeastern Madagascar. I will discuss two major groups of projects. One set of projects considers how Malagasy lifestyles – and the ways these lifestyles are changing – influences health and disease. The other projects consider how human land use influences human-animal interactions and zoonotic disease risk.