Department of Sociology
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
Telephone: None Given
johnsonhanks
@demog.berkeley.edu
Associate Professor Jennifer Johnson-Hanks earned a BA from UC Berkeley in 1994 and a PhD from Northwestern University in 2000, both in anthropology. In 2000, she returned to Berkeley as a faculty member in the department of demography, and has been joint appointed in the departments of demography and sociology since 2007.
Johnson-Hanks is an ethnographer and demographer who studies family, fertility, and gender. Her research focuses on the relationship between population rates and cultural practices, and on the mediation of that relationship by individual intentions. Thus she asks: how are individual actions coordinated into stable rates, such as birth rates or abortion rates? What roles do individual intentions play in accounting for action, and in the formation of rates? And conversely, how are intentions and demographically relevant actions socially and culturally structured? Papers in Current Anthropology and the American Journal of Sociology explore these theoretical issues.
Her first book , Uncertain Honor, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006. It explores the relationship between population rates and cultural practices through a study of the transition to motherhood among educated women in Southern Cameroon. Integrating demographic and ethnographic evidence and theory, Uncertain Honor argues that the women Johnson-Hanks studies delay motherhood as part of a broader attempt to assert a modern form of honor only recently made possible by formal education, Catholicism, and economic change.
For the last three years, Johnson-Hanks has worked with Phil Morgan, Chris Bachrach, and Hans-Peter Kohler developing a new framework for research on fertility and family as part of the New Approaches to Explaining Family Change and Variation Project. In addition, she is writing a new book, tentatively titled Sex in Public. This book will examine how population facts related to sex, marriage, and reproduction are made, on two levels. First, how do actions experienced by those who commit them as the result of individual choice or personal intention aggregate up into the remarkably stable population rates that we observe? And second, how do social statisticians and their publics make these regularities into population facts? In particular, how have changes in the practice of social statistics been popularized and thereby transformed? Through a discussion of how people have thought about and through population over the past three centuries, Sex in Public will call for a renewed focus on population thought in the making of anthropological and sociological theory.
