Emily Klancher Merchant
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About Emily
Merchant's research focuses on the history of the social sciences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Merchant has written extensively on the history of population science and behavior genetics, and how these intersect with U.S. and global history and politics. Merchant teaches courses on gender and science, health and medical technologies, and data analysis and visualization at the University of California, Davis.
Contributions
Hold Science to Higher Standards on Racism
In the News
Publications
Examines how human population growth became a subject of scientific expertise and an object of governmental and philanthropic intervention in the twentieth century.
Explores the observed and expected demographic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on the core demographic processes: fertility, mortality, and migration. Examines how the impacts of the pandemic on data collection may make these consequences difficult to measure.
Discusses why DNA is No Key to Social Equality; this is a long-form critical review (published in the LA Review) of the recent book "The Genetic Lottery" by Kathryn Paige Harden.
Uses computational text analysis to examine the influence of philanthropic funders on the content of demographic research in the second half of the twentieth century.
Uses historical data from the U.S. Census and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to explore how and why living arrangements changed for middle-aged white women in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century.