Xavier St-Denis

I've found one of the hardest thinking habits to cultivate is the distinction between "everything is ideological" and "everything is bullshit"

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Starting a thread about the books I’ve read in 2025, focusing on novels

Feel free to comment with recommendations on what to read next!

#books #booksky

Here's how I understand eugenics, as a demographer who studies reproduction: Eugenics is the idea that science can tell us two things: (1) which population(s) are best and (2) how to manipulate birth, migration, and death to achieve a desirable population.

Unions reduce sexism.

Just over a week left for applications for this role. Would suit an earlyish career demographer or demography-adjacent statistician who wants to live and work in the Pacific!

🏅 Bravo à Béatrice Morselli pour sa mention d'honneur lors du Colloque Excellence en Relève @ciqss-qicss.bsky.social !

Sa présentation portait sur son mémoire « Residential Proximity of Canadian Siblings in Adulthood », dirigé par les professeur.e.s Solène Lardoux et @xavierst-denis.bsky.social

⭐🎓The Department of Sociology in Vienna @univie.ac.at‬ invites applications for a Tenure Track Professor in Sociology with focus on Quantitative Social Science Research Methods | #Sociology | quant methods

Apply here (17 Sept 25): jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Tenure-T...

Some people have wondered why the hell a political scientist (me) is writing a book about the sociodemographic data collected on things like death certificates, census forms, and health surveys. THIS IS WHY.

We’re lighting the I-35W bridge green tonight and tomorrow in honor of Melissa Hortman, who found joy and peace in trees and gardens 🌳

Which occupations carry the highest risk of sexual harassment—and who is doing the harassing?

Our new study finds two distinct patterns depending on whether harassment comes from inside or outside the workplace.

CEPR WP: cepr.org/publications...
Ungated: drive.google.com/file/d/1jPOV...

🧵 1/

LLM adoption boosts the quantity of scientific papers that researchers write by 25.7-89.3%, with the strongest quantity effects for East Asian scholars and in the social sciences.

But the papers are worse. Another quantity-quality tradeoff!

yianyin.net/index.html

NEW ARTICLE: CREST Sociology's @scoavoux.bsky.social, @eollion.bsky.social, and @ppraeg.bsky.social's Machine Bias in Sociological Methods & Research, on why we can't use LLMs to generate meaningful survey data

Link: doi.org/10.1177/0049...
Preprint at @socarxiv.bsky.social: doi.org/10.31235/osf...

New paper out at @sociologicalsci.bsky.social! Using an audit study design, we show that in non-tech occupations, job hoppers receive fewer callbacks than those with résumés showing stable careers. For tech occupations, we find the opposite pattern: job hopping increases the probability of callback!

The biggest project I've worked on for the last chunk of years was just published. It asks, how big are US Black-white lifespan differences?

This might seem like a narrow question. I hope to convince you by the end that there are answers you didn't anticipate. And I hope some of them will move you.

"A new dataset, visualized as maps, reveals the extent to which African workers are indirectly employed in the tech sector, doing content moderation, customer service, and data annotation for AI models, among other jobs." restofworld.org/2025/big-tec...

This paper is studying economic inequality in the very long term (thousands of years) "using Gini coefficients calculated on total house area including storage." Really interesting analysis of inequality using archeological data!

Some cool German/Swiss postdoc opportunities for a quantitative sociologist or similar in this thread:

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🚨 Come research singlehood with me! I’m hiring a 3-year Postdoc w/interest in Family Demography to start this Fall. Please share!

📍 Barcelona (@cedemografia.bsky.social)
🔎 ERC-funded project 'SINGLE'
📅 Deadline – April 24, 2025
🔗 More info: shorturl.at/400eo
#Postdoc #Demography

Should pregnant people evacuate L.A. to escape the smoke? Los Angeles' smoke levels pose unique risks to pregnant people and their fetuses. Here's what expectant parents should do to stay safe.

Pregnancy is a particularly sensitive period, & exposure to wildfire smoke may lead to smaller than average babies. Smoke isn’t the only concern, stress alone can alter physiological processes during pregnancy.

www.latimes.com/lifestyle/st...

The immigration–crime link Nearly two centuries of data show that immigrants commit fewer crimes than US-born citizens.

Throughout American history, immigrants have consistently had similar or lower incarceration rates than US-born citizens, say researchers at Stanford, Princeton, Northwestern, and UC Davis. #econsky www.aeaweb.org/research/cha...

Canada halts new parent immigration sponsorships, keeping families apart While some western cultures identify the family unit as couples and their children, many other cultures see older parents as an integral part of the family.

The Canadian government recently announced it is indefinitely pausing new permanent residency sponsorship applications for parents and grandparents. I wrote an op-ed to discuss what this pause means for thousands of immigrant families. theconversation.com/canada-halts... @ubcmigration.bsky.social

In a new paper just published in Demographic Research, we demonstrate how administrative data (Canadian tax data) open possibilities for studying partnership histories, income, and family dynamics of people across sexual minority status. Read here! www.demographic-research.org/articles/vol...

Great things (and major challenges) in the Canadian admin data space too, if you're interested

I made a Starter Pack!

But I got tired after 70 names. Intended to be inclusive of the #work-family adjacent and interdisciplinary

Reply if you'd like to be added and please RT

@wfrn.bsky.social @cwfjournal.bsky.social

go.bsky.app/63Jq944

#Sociology #Demography #hdfs #PoliSky #academicsky

This is a good time to share my starter pack filled with researchers in the areas of Stratification, Education, and Labor Market. Mostly sociology, a little on the economics side because that's who I know. Feel free to share; any omissions are accidents.

go.bsky.app/PeigPc9