New
research initiatives
CSDA
has been pursuing several new initiatives designed to take advantage of
specific multidisciplinary strengths at the University at Albany. These
include the Urban China Research Network, the Health Disparities initiative,
the Population/Environment initiative, the Census RDC initiative, and the
Critical Demography project.
The Urban
China Network has been in operation for three years, and in several
respects it provides a model for other initiatives. Network members
are at work on research projects ranging from urban morphology to the
dynamics of rural-urban migration to issues concerning housing, crime
and changing family structure within China. Its leadership and membership
are explicitly interdisciplinary and include junior and senior scholars.
Administered from the University at Albany, the Network's steering committee
includes Logan (sociology), Christopher Smith (geography), Rudolph (historian),
Liang (sociology), Huang (geography), and Messner (sociology). An international
advisory board, currently including 26 scholars from around the world,
is instrumental in the long-term planning of future Network projects,
including conferences, workshops and large-scale collaborative research
proposals. The Network has established two working groups for scholars
with related interests: 1) the Spatial Restructuring, Urban Planning
and Politics working group, and 2) the Urban Transformation in China
and Reorganization of the State in an Era of Globalization working group.
These working groups hold workshops, conduct exploratory studies, and
develop larger scale collaborative research projects. This activity
has support through 2005 from the Mellon Foundation and is expected
to be self-sufficient after that time.
Two other
initiatives grow out of recent developments within the university, with
clear leadership and potential for expansion. As part of the Centers
for Disease Control's Prevention Research Centers Program, the Prevention
Research Center has been created to promote community-based interventions
to prevent chronic disease by emphasizing the importance of community-based
characteristics affecting the health of residents. The PRC investigators
are faculty in the University at Albany's School of Public Health and
include three of our associates: Strogatz, Dewar, and Gallant. Many
faculty are also employed by the New York State Department of Health,
provided a very deep pool of community health expertise. Our health
disparities initiative is designed to draw together these strengths
with that of population researchers in the College of Arts and Sciences,
to focus especially on issues of socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, and neighborhood
disparities in health outcomes. This is a natural choice given our twin
themes of Spatial Inequalities and Vulnerable Populations, and it coincides
with the NIH strategic initiative in health disparities.
The population/environment
initiative has emerged since spring 2003, quickly taking shape. It builds
upon the creation of an Institute for Watershed Studies, directed by
biologist Chris D'Elia and including researchers from the Departments
of Biology, Geography and Planning, Atmospheric Sciences, and Sociology.
Additional technical capacity is provided by a partnership formalized
in a recent Memorandum of Understanding with the U.S. Geological Survey
office in Troy, NY. The USGS staff has particular expertise in various
aspects of hydrology, with skills in transport of pesticides and trace
organics, cycling of nitrogen, carbon and mercury in watersheds, aquatic
biology, and forest mapping. We have held four joint planning meetings
to prepare a study of suburban development and its environmental impacts
in the Hudson River watershed. We intend to examine the complex of factors
that make up suburbanization spatial comparisons of contrasting land
covers, infrastructure, and human use, measured over time. D'Elia was
for many years a central figure in multidisciplinary studies of the
Chesapeake Bay watershed, which linked environmental degradation in
the Bay to nutrient flows associated with land use changes. Another
model for our work is the Baltimore Long Term Ecological Research project
(LTER) supported by NSF, which focuses on stream nutrient loading as
one of the key aspects of urban ecosystems because streams integrate
many of the complex interactions between biota, physical processes,
socioeconomic factors, and infrastructure. The first speaker in our
joint colloquium series (October 2003) was Peter Groffman of the Baltimore
LTER. This initiative will utilize both plot-scale and watershed-scale
approaches that incorporate research on specific questions regarding
environmental degradation from suburbanization, development of indicators
for linking socio-economic changes to ecological responses, and development
of strategies for assessing regional changes based on site-specific
research activities.
Another
initiative is organized primarily around a data resource, the New York
Census Research Data Center. Joining the RDC is a natural step given our
research foci. Associates Liang and Logan included project proposals in
the successful RDC application to NSF, and Alba and Logan have already
demonstrated the potential importance of using confidential microdata
in their research on ethnic neighborhoods, and there are several researchers
for whom more precise geographic information on where people live or work
and/or the ability to link information across different census data sets
will open new research opportunities. More broadly this step also creates
a new mechanism for strengthening collaborative networks among demographers
in upstate New York and New York City.
The Critical Demography
project is the initiative of sociologist Hayward Horton. Critical Demography is a new
approach that makes explicit the manner in which the social structure differentiates
dominant and subordinate populations. Thus, critical demography necessitates discussion
of population control and population power. In this context, one cannot speak of race
and sex without likewise articulating the impact of racism and sexism. In brief, critical
demography reintroduces and articulates the nature of the social structure and how it
impacts upon population phenomena. As such, it represents an attempt to facilitate the
development of concepts, theories, and methods that do not fit easily within the
conventional demographic paradigm. To read more about the Critical Demography project,
see: Critical Demography.