Today at Brown

As a social demographer, Leah VanWey says her work is motivated by a desire to understand how families, households, and communities can improve their social and economic status. Her research examines migration, land use, and household decisions in developing countries, including Brazil, Mexico, and Thailand.

“I’ve always been interested in the way spatial arrangements structure social life,” she said. “It’s fascinating how we’re able to match people — who are both discreet points in space and move around — with something like land cover, which is continuous across the surface of the earth.”

Since 2003, VanWey and her colleagues have been working at three sites in the Brazilian Amazon, studying household demography and land use. Funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the team uses a combination of qualitative, quantitative and spatial data to analyze the relationships between land use, work, and schooling decisions among rural families. VanWey says for her, the research is about “giving a voice to small farmers and showing they have real agency in the way their lives are run.

“Virtually every family I’ve talked to wants their kids to leave farming because it’s such a hard life,” she said. “So, instead of working to find a future for small farmers and preserve that way of life, we need to talk to people and find out what it is they actually want.”

VanWey received her B.A, master’s, and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. Her list of publications includes nearly two dozen articles and chapters in peer-reviewed journals, including Demography, American Sociological Review, and Global Environmental Change. She’s also delivered more than 30 presentations at research conferences and meetings around the world. VanWey comes to Brown from Indiana University, where she has been an assistant professor of sociology since 2001. Here, she will be an associate professor of sociology, core faculty of the Environmental Change Initiative, and a faculty associate of the Population Studies Training Center.