Speakers Bios & Abstracts
Keynote Speakers
Inequality as an Analytical Lens: How Should We Think About Inequality in Our Scholarship?
How should we think inequality in our scholarship?
The problem of inequality has come to the forefront of global public consciousness. For scholars in the humanities, social and population sciences, this attention and interest presents opportunities. Within our disciplines, there are significant traditions for the study of inequality—how it works, whom it affects, how it is reproduced. It is also the case, however, that inequality is frequently treated as contextual backdrop or mere empirical phenomenon without being the center of critical analytic attention. Scholars can still do more to develop and enhance understandings about contemporary conditions of inequality. In this lecture, I explore the question of how scholarship can better center inequality as a critical, analytical lens; what happens to knowledge production when we do so; and what is at stake when we neglect to. On subjects that matter particularly to demographers—family formation and dissolution, fertility, migration, health, ageing—I hope to open up conversation about how research could take different forms and directions when inequality is a central analytic lens.
Associate Professor & Provost’s Chair in Sociology, Nanyang Technological University
Assoc Prof Teo You Yenn
A/P Teo You Yenn is an Associate Professor and Provost’s Chair in Sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research focuses on poverty and inequality, governance and policy, gender and class inequalities. Her ongoing projects focus on care/welfare regimes and minimum income standards, examining the questions of what basic needs are in contemporary Singapore and what incomes people need to meet basic standards of living. She is also the author of Neoliberal Morality in Singapore: How family policies make state and society (Routledge, 2011) and This is What Inequality Looks Like (Ethos Books, 2018). She is a founding editor of AcademiaSG, which promotes Singapore studies and encourage critical public discourse about the state of intellectual life in Singapore. More information about her work at: https://teoyouyenn.sg
Measurement Complexities Facing Demographers Studying Inequality
While many population scientists are interested in studying unequal patterns and outcomes in fertility, mortality, migration, and beyond, a set of thorny measurement problems can create challenges. This talk will discuss examples of longstanding and contemporary challenges to conducting comparisons across socially relevant groups to map and explain differences and inequities.
Some challenges face those interested in comparison across contexts and/or over historical time in the availability and comparability of measures of sociodemographic factors such as educational attainment or self-assessed overall health. Data quality differences across contexts can also lead to unexpected and unrealistic findings. Demographers interested in a life course approach may face challenges collecting earlier life data retrospectively if there are variations between more and less advantaged groups in complexities of past histories, cognitive function in later life, and other factors. Challenges to collecting demographic data and sociodemographic identity measures continue to evolve.
This discussion can help to begin a conversation on how we may collectively begin to address such challenges as populations scientists focused on inequality and its potential reduction.
Professor Sarah Burgard
Professor of Sociology, Epidemiology and Public Policy
Sarah Burgard is Professor of Sociology and by courtesy, Epidemiology and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. She is also a Research Professor and Director of the Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. She conducts research on the social stratification of aging and health with population-based survey data, and has published extensively on the social factors underlying health disparities by socioeconomic status, gender, and race/ethnicity across the life course. Burgard leads U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) training grants for doctoral student and postdoctoral trainees at the PSC and a program for mentoring junior faculty in the population sciences, as well as co-leading an NIH funded-network on Life Course Health Dynamics and Disparities in 21st Century America. She is the current president of the Association of Population Centers and Vice-President Elect of the Population Association of America.
Director, Population Studies Center
Research Professor, Population Studies Center, University of Michigan