Laura Sochas: “Critical and quantitative? Squaring the circle in health and population studies”

Abstract:While qualitative research presents obvious strengths for critical population studies, quantification is also essential to critical social science’s emancipatory aim. In this talk, I take feminist critiques of demography and public health seriously, to demonstrate how we can include social structure, better model distributions and heterogeneity, and use critical theory to shape research questions, within quantitative population research. Focusing on my work explaining health and reproductive inequalities, I aim to showcase how a critical quantitative approach can add to our understanding of the dynamics between power processes, institutions, social policies and population outcomes.

Bio: My research focuses on how power, institutions, and social policies affect health inequalities, using mixed methods. I am currently leading a project exploring how migration and family policies in Europe affect parents’ rights to have children and to parent with dignity, and how this affects their health, formulating a quantitative approach to Reproductive Justice. I obtained my PhD in Demography from the Department of Social Policy at LSE (2020), before doing a postdoc at the University of Oxford, in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (2020-2023). Prior to my PhD, I worked as a consultant on public health programmes in African and South Asian countries, for clients such as UKAID, the Gates Foundation, WHO and UNFPA.