Dear RSF:
Please join us next Wednesday, April 30th at 11 in the library and on Zoom for a presentation by Visiting Scholar Gerard Torrats-Espinosa.
Torrats-Espinosa is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University where he has been since 2020. He holds a PhD In Sociology from New York University, a MA in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School and a BS in Building Engineering from Polytechnic University of Catalonia. He is a member of the Data Science Institute and an affiliate member of the Population Research Center.
His research draws from the literatures on urban sociology, stratification, and criminology, and it focuses on understanding how the spatial organization of the American stratification system creates and reproduces inequality. Torrats-Espinosa’s current research agenda investigates (1) how the neighborhood context, particularly the experience of community violence, determine the life chances of children; (2) how social capital and social organization emerge and evolve in spatial contexts; and (3) how place and geography structure educational and economic opportunity in America and elsewhere. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the American Sociological Review, Child Development, Demography, Housing Policy Debate, the Journal of Housing Economics, the Journal of Urban Economics, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Torrats-Espinosa’s RSF project examines how workplace and residential environments influence racial disparities in policing. He is using large-scale administrative data from several police departments across the U.S. to generate evidence on the sources of police violence and its impact on racial and ethnic minorities.