Human Health and Wellbeing in an Era of Climate Change and Socio-political Instability

Seminar Critical Development Studies, Fall 2024

Abstract

This talk will present preliminary evidence from an ongoing project examining the effects of climatic variability and armed conflict on human health in Africa. This project combines georeferenced data on conflict events and climate shocks with records of child and maternal health from the Demographic and Health Survey, and aims to measure the independent and compounding effects of climate and conflict exposures on salient health outcomes. In addition to presenting these preliminary results, the talk with outline the limitations to the current empirical approach and possible alternative strategies for conceptualizing and measuring the complex relationships between climate, conflict, and health.

About the speaker

Brian Thiede is an associate professor of rural sociology, sociology, and demography at The Pennsylvania State University. At Penn State, he is the director of graduate studies in rural sociology and leads the computational and spatial analysis core and climate change and health initiative at the Population Research Institute. His research examines the demographic and health effects of environmental and social change, as well as the causes and consequences of rural poverty and inequality. Thiede is currently the editor-in-chief of the journal Population and Environment.

About the series

The Critical Development Studies Seminar Series is a graduate student-led effort that aims to provide space for junior scholars to share innovative research and discuss emergent debates within critical development studies.

Invited speakers cover a range of geographical areas, disciplinary backgrounds, and research topics. Examples of potential topics include agroecology and food justice issues, state-building, land and labor, extractivist politics, the gendered and racial dynamics of ongoing capitalist development, and the political ecological histories of the global development project. The target audience for the series is graduate students and faculty interested in critical development studies both within the Cornell community as well as external scholars. 

Seminar organizers for 2024-25 are Natalia Correa Sanchez, Kyunghee Kang, Jenny Goldstein, and Mariah Doyle-Stephenson.