UMN Sociology Workshop Series

Bio: 

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is a professor at the University of Minnesota. A sociologist and demographer, she studies racial inequality in mortality in the historical and contemporary United States, and specializes in finding comparisons and metrics that illuminate the human meaning of mortality disparities. She has extensively researched the Covid-19 pandemic in Minnesota, where she also co-founded an award-winning community vaccination organization (the Seward Vaccine Equity Project). She is also a demographic methodologist, developing models designed to clarify relationships between micro and macro perspectives on population processes. 

Abstract:

How do historical and political events carry forward into the future? This talk develops some initial frameworks for understanding the demography of historical memory, especially with regard to experiences of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. At the narrowest level, the talk will present new empirical results to answer questions such as, how much Civil Rights memory was lost to the Covid-19 pandemic? At the broadest level, the talk will argue that demographic modeling can help us produce alternative "clocks" that (compared with chronological time) might better reflect the social reality underpinning how, for example, one wave of a social movement can create the conditions for subsequent waves.