What We Can Learn From Losses

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is an associate professor and was recently the associate director of the Minnesota Population Center (2023-2025). Her work, focused on the impact of historical events on deaths and longevity, has turned in a new direction: a fellowship from the Russell Sage Foundation to explore historical memory. She speaks on the importance and potential of demography as a field to better understand ourselves.

What has your fellowship allowed you to do?

My fellowship at the Russell Sage Foundation is allowing me to explore how, over time, demographic rates—the rates of new children being born, people dying, and migrants entering and leaving the country—change how many people in the population have experienced significant historical events, and how many people have close kin who did. This work builds on a question I've been pursuing for several years: what are the consequences of unequal death rates in the United States on aspects of life that we don't always think about?

For example, the COVID-19 pandemic, because of its impact on older-age African Americans in New York City, killed many jazz and blues musicians: a loss of musical traditions, networks, and innovation that cannot be recovered. How much memory of the Civil Rights Movement was lost because of the pandemic's inequality? That is one question I am now exploring.

How is your project making a difference in the world?

People often think of demography as a dry, technical subject. It's true that demographers are real nerds about our data and our statistical methodologies; we are technicians who want to get the numbers as right as they can be. But the reason we study death rates is that deaths really matter. Of course they matter most of all for people who die younger than they could have and for their loved ones, but they also matter for our culture and the way our society functions.

I have been exploring consequences of death rates by taking inspiration from memoirs, plays, art exhibitions, historical advice columns, and other sources that are unusual to integrate with demography. Our field has so much potential to speak to some of the questions that are most important to many of us, like: how will my own life matter, what connections can I have with people I love, and what projects can I pursue in the world?

In my new project, I take a different angle on those questions by asking about how demographic structures create (and sometimes limit) the potential for stories and ideas to be passed down through families. When we see our distance from historical events in generational terms rather than chronological ones, we can ask different questions about how far removed we are from major upheavals and turning points in the past, and how those might still influence us today.

What’s next for you?

I'm at a career inflection point because I recently completed several larger projects about how time—how much we all get, how much control we have over it, and how we spend it—is a core aspect of freedom and how structures of racial inequality limit that freedom, especially by limiting lifespans.

The new project about historical memory that I'm pursuing at the Russell Sage Foundation builds on those ideas with a new set of questions that, in turn, require a lot of new careful thinking about how to model the population structure of family lineages and relationships over time.

This story was edited by Rory Schaefer, an undergraduate student in CLA.