About the talk:

A basic demographic fact about the United States is that, on average, White people live longer than Black people. But what, concretely, does this fact mean? This talk argues that social science has three families of strategy for making sense of the size of mortality disparities — distribution-based, action-based, and meaning-based measures — and provides new empirical results in each vein that collectively aim to put demographic measurement onto a more human footing.

About the speaker:

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota and Associate Director of the Minnesota Population Center. 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.