Scientific Presentations

LabTalks@­SocialDemography

Department Social Demography
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany, July 08, 2025

1:00 PM: Talk with Hampton Gaddy - We are our memory: A flexible framework for quantifying the demographic imprints of the past

Abstract

“Demographic memory” refers to the ways in which past conditions are remembered by contemporary populations because the people who were exposed to the past are still alive, or because the people exposed to past conditions have living kin. It was recently articulated by Denton & Spencer (2021) and Alburez-Gutierrez (2022), and this article works to clarify and further demonstrate the usefulness of the concept. Theoretically, it argues for demographic memory as an idea that unifies and makes quantifiable many of the scattered ideas of historical embeddedness that exist in the social and biological sciences, including in economics, epidemiology, political science, and genetics—and it argues that demographic memory is distinct from existing concepts of demographic metabolism and collective memory. Methodologically, it presents a powerful, broadly applicable formal model of demographic memory defined by cohort survivorship. As a proof of concept, it applies that model to the memory of prime ministers in the United Kingdom and the memory of democratic strength and across the world.

LabTalk, July, 8th from 1 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. (Rostock time)