I’m a Canadian graduate student studying sociology. I specialize in demography, the statistical study of human populations. Any time you hear about birth rates, mortality, population forecasting, overpopulation, divorce rate, or population aging, that’s demography. Sometimes we also study migration, disease or health, and other population dynamics or characteristics. It’s what you might call an interdisciplinary field, where there’s significant cross-over between sociology, economics, and geography.
I use this site to write about topics related to demography in particular and social science in general. Sometimes I’ll write about the nature of our scientific enterprise, or about a conversation I had, or something stupid I heard someone say. Sometimes I like to look at issues in a way that might seem silly to my more serious and stuffy colleagues in academia. Or maybe I’ll write about something that is “common knowledge” in the field but I get the sense the general public is wildly misinformed about (ahem, I’m looking at you, overpopulation). I’ll try to keep it casual. Or I could just go off on a tangent from time to time. It doesn’t matter, this blog isn’t peer-reviewed.