Rebecca Jean Emigh
How States & Societies Count
Censuses in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom
Rebecca Jean Emigh will give a talk on a two-volume work co-authored with Dylan Riley and Patricia Ahmed. The volumes are entitled Antecedents of Censuses From Medieval to Nation States: How Societies and States Count (Volume 1) and Changes in Censuses from Imperialist to Welfare States: How Societies and States Count (Volume 2), Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. The authors explore a society-centered account of census taking in a broad historical and comparative perspective.
Wednesday March 30th, 4:00-5:30 pm
Social Science Matrix, Barrows Hall Room 832
Professor Emigh (UCLA) is a historical and comparative sociologist. She is interested in how cultural, economic, and demographic factors intersect to create processes of social change. This interest is reflected in two large research projects, one on transitions to capitalisms and one on forms of information gathering. In both projects, in different ways, she uses historical perspectives and mixed methods to analyze the similarities and differences in these social phenomena in the past and present. She is especially interested in a "view from below," that is, how ordinary people affect social relations, and thus, the course of history. She is the author of The Undevelopment of Capitalism: Sectors and Markets in Fifteenth Century Tuscany (Temple 2009) as well as numerous articles. She has published in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, and Comparative Studies in Society and History among other venues.This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology and the Department of Demography.