Bridget Goosby: Biosocial pathways to health inequities: How racial discrimination matters

Date: 

Thursday, March 1, 2018, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies 9 Bow Street

Social Demography Seminar (SDS) presentaion by Bridget Goosby, PhD, Happold Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

 

Abstract: Racial and ethnic inequities in morbidity and mortality are long-standing and remain striking in the United States. While the processes from which these disparities arise are multifaceted, they are rooted in the ongoing historical legacy of racism that has been woven into the fabric of life in the U.S. Within this racialized social system, race specific stress can act on the minds and bodies of targeted groups causing physiologic wear and tear. A salient dimension of race specific stress is daily exposures to racism and discrimination, both interpersonally and vicariously, which can ‘get under the skin’ to increase the risk of stress related morbidity. In this talk I discuss 1) the social and theoretical foundations supporting the urgency for addressing these biosocial pathways for health inequities; 2) the downstream consequences of inequality generally and discrimination specifically; and finally, 3) new results from our lab leveraging innovative technologies and methods for measuring discrimination exposure and physiologic stress responding in-real time. Implications for understanding the process by which individuals adapt to stress physiologically and the implications for morbidity at the individual level and upstream at the population level will also be discussed.