060 - Special Session. How Does Inequality Influence the Body?

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Abstract

Morbidity and mortality are heavily impacted by socioeconomic and racial inequality. As a result, when sociologists study the origins and reproduction of inequality, they simultaneously provide critical evidence about the social patterning of disease and death. This fact has not been lost on scholars inside and outside of sociology whose scholarship is aimed at understanding the psychological and biological processes that link social inequalities to morbidity and mortality. This session will bring sociologists and scientists from other disciplines together to discuss the ways that sociology and other disciplines importantly inform research that is beginning to show how inequality gets under the skin to influence individual and population health.

Sub Unit

• Special Sessions

Session Organizers

• Michelle Frisco, Pennsylvania State University

• Bruce G. Link, Columbia University

Presider

• Michelle Frisco, Pennsylvania State University

Individual Presentations

• Biological Embedding of Early Life Social Class: SES Shapes Young Children's Stress Physiology - Nicki Bush, University of California-San Francisco

• Inflammation at Mid-life: Patterning by Socioeconomic Status and Psychosocial Resources - Elliott Friedman, Purdue University

• Racial Discrimination and Inflammation Among African American Women: Biobehavioral and Psychobiological Pathways for Health Disparities - Amani M. Nuru-Jeter, University of California-Berkeley

• Racial Identity and Allostatic Load: Deepening Our Understanding of the Deleterious Impact of Racism for Blacks - R. Jay Turner, Vanderbilt University; Tony N. Brown, Vanderbilt University

Discussant

• Howard Waitzkin, University of New Mexico