Elizabeth Wrigley-Field has been awarded a MidCareer Faculty Research Award from the College of Liberal Arts at UMN. The MidCareer Faculty Research Awards represent a critical investment in the future of the College of Liberal Arts. With this fund, the College recognizes and invests in the next generation of faculty who are poised to lead CLA as it pursues greater heights of excellence and who are engaging in new lines of research and creative activity that will shape their fields and the intersection of fields.
Dr. Wrigley-Field is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Sociology and 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. She is also a demographic methodologist, developing models designed to clarify relationships between micro and macro perspectives on population processes.
The MidCareer Faculty Research Award will fund Dr. Wrigley-Field's proposed project, described below.
How Demography Constrains and Enables Ideational Persistence and Change: I propose to develop rigorous models of experience and historical memory as they are carried through family ties, and use them to develop novel hypotheses about how demography has constrained and enabled political and cultural change. I will develop these ideas initially in the context of the Black freedom struggles in the United States, although the models are more general. This project will develop a framework that describes individuals’ closest genealogical ties to foundational moments, and that analyzes how the population’s distribution of those ties changes as individuals are born, die, and migrate—offering a distinctive portrait of a population’s distance from historical events at a given moment in chronological time. These tools can aid a new research program to understand how demography enables or constrains political possibilities by creating a demographic context that creates greater or lesser possibility for historical events to be made salient by political actors.