CSS4P seminar #2: Digital and Computational Demography for Policy Insights

Situated at the intersection of the computational and demographic sciences, digital and computational demography explores how new digital data streams and computational methods advance the understanding of population dynamics, along with the impacts of digital technologies on population outcomes, e.g. linked to health, fertility and migration.

Encompassing the data, methodological and social impacts of digital technologies, Prof. Kashyap will outline key opportunities provided by digital and computational demography for generating policy insights.

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About the speaker

Ridhi Kashyap is Professor of Demography and Computational Social Science at the Nuffield College of the University of Oxford. Her research spans different areas of demography, including questions linked to mortality and population health, gender inequality, marriage and family, and migration and ethnicity.

She has worked on the demographic manifestations and implications of son preference as one of the most striking ways in which gender inequality interacts with demographic behaviours. In the areas of family demography, she has been studying the relationship between educational expansion, gender norms, and marriage and partnership patterns in different contexts. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, she has worked on different aspects of the social and demographic impacts of the pandemic, including topics such as the pandemic’s mortality impacts in cross-national perspective and the role of trust in science for public health.

A central interest of her research has been to leverage computational approaches for demographic research within the growing area of Digital and Computational Demography, and forge links between demography and a growing interdisciplinary community of computational social science. Within the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, she co-leads the strand on Digital and Computational Science.