Date:
Location:
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacted a historic toll on Americans’ health and longevity. It has also shaped socioeconomic inequalities along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, and class in America. The effects of COVID-19 are evident in the stratified experiences of Americans in work, unemployment, and unpaid labor; in stark inequalities in wealth and income; in the historic expansions and retrenchments in social welfare spending; and in the increase in violence and changes in the criminal justice system. A special issue of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, edited by Steven Raphael and Daniel Schneider, has pulled together research on the varied social and economic consequences of COVID-19. To mark the publication of this issue, Schneider will moderate a panel discussion featuring authors of three of the issue’s chapters: Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach will discuss “Suffering, the Safety Net, and Disparities During COVID-19,” Rocío Calvo and Mary C. Waters will discuss “The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Older Latino Immigrants,” and Peter Hepburn will discuss “Protecting the Most Vulnerable: Policy Response and Eviction Filing Patterns During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
This panel discussion is part of the Stone Inequality Book Talk Series hosted by the Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy at HKS.
Moderator:
Daniel Schneider is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Sociology at FAS. Professor Schneider completed his B.A. in Public Policy at Brown University in 2003 and earned his PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University in 2012. Prior to joining Harvard, he was a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar in Health Policy Research at Berkeley/UCSF. Professor Schneider’s research interests are focused on social demography, inequality, and the family. He has written on class inequality in parenting, the role of economic resources in marriage, divorce, and fertility, the effects of the Great Recession, and the scope of household financial fragility. As Co-Director of The Shift Project, his current research focuses on how precarious and unpredictable work schedules affects household economic security and worker and family health and wellbeing.
Panelists:
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach is an economist who studies policies aimed at improving the lives of children in poverty, including education, health, and income support policies. Her work traces the impact of major public policies such as the Food Stamp Program, school finance reform, and early childhood education on children’s long-term outcomes. She is the Margaret Walker Alexander Professor in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University.
Rocío Calvo is Associate Professor of Global Practice at the Boston College School of Social Work. She is also the Founding Director of the Latinx Leadership Initiative, and co-leads the Grand Challenge Initiative Achieve Equal Opportunity for All of the American Academy of Social Work & Social Welfare. Her work focuses on the role of public services on the integration of immigrants and their children. She also studies how socioeconomic and cultural factors optimize or jeopardize the life satisfaction of immigrants throughout their immigration careers.
Mary C. Waters is the PVK Professor of Arts and Sciences and the John L. Loeb Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Her work has focused on the integration of immigrants and their children; the transition to adulthood for the children of immigrants; intergroup relations; the measurement and meaning of racial and ethnic identity; and the social, demographic, and psychological impact of natural disasters. The author or co-author of 11 books and over 75 articles, she is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Peter Hepburn is an assistant professor of Sociology at Rutgers University-Newark whose research examines how changes to three core social institutions—work, criminal justice, and housing—serve to produce and perpetuate inequality. He uses a variety of quantitative methods and data sources to demonstrate and analyze disparities in exposure to precarious work, the criminal justice system, and housing instability. Throughout his research, he develops measures and models that allow for new insight into the variability of lived experience for disadvantaged populations and the transmission of inequality across generations.
