Jennifer Johnson-Hanks

Biography

Dr. Johnson-Hanks' work focuses on links between population rates and social practice. How are individual actions coordinated into stable population rates? Do population rates have causes? What roles do individual intentions and strategies play in the formation of rates? What is the social structure of intentions? How is this structure transformed by the experience of pervasive uncertainty? She approaches these questions using a combination of ethnographic and demographic methods and informed by the theoretical approaches of Quetelet, Weber, and Bourdieu. The empirical object of her work is kinship, and particularly reproduction: childbearing, contraceptive use, abortion, infertility, and infant mortality. Until recently, all of her work had been in sub-Saharan Africa. She is currently working on reproduction in the United States, inspired by her association with the Explaining Family Change project.

Johnson-Hanks' first book is called Uncertain Honor: Modern Motherhood in an African Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

NIH Biosketch