Amy L. Johnson, PhD

So honored to have received this award!

Plain cruelty. Abject animus. These are life saving measures that are not really expensive by any stretch of the imagination when one considers the lives it saves

Next week (6-7th) is our @wellcometrust.bsky.social supported symposium on #suicidecultures and the #sociology of suicide! We've got a diverse and exciting programme of speakers & roundtable discussions. We'll be providing remote access to many of the talks 👇
events.bookitbee.com/suicide-cult...

any social scientists out there teaching/writing about MAHA? I have nebulous little thoughts and would love to see what others are working on.

congrats!! I loved this paper!

now available online in Sociological Perspectives, a paper out of my dissertation work using topic modeling to show how mental illness is increasingly linked to deviance and violence in the news media.

doi.org/10.1177/0731...

Figure 1. Trends in Biannual US Infant Mortality Rates, 2012-2023

🧵 US states that implemented abortion bans saw higher than expected infant mortality rates, with larger increases among Black infants and those in southern states, according to this analysis of US national vital statistics data from 2012–2023.

ja.ma/4aVchPn

#MedSky

Announcing the Data.gov Archive | Library Innovation Lab Today we released our archive of data.gov on Source Cooperative. The 16TB collection includes over 311,000 datasets harvested during 2024 and 2025, a complet...

We just launched a 16TB archive of every dataset that has been available on data.gov since November. This will be updated day by day as new datasets appear. It can be freely copied, and we're sharing the code behind it to help others make their own archives of data they depend on.

In This Brave New World, Does Scholarship Still Matter? If the recent past is no longer a useful guide to seeking change in the present, what good is policy-adjacent scholarship?

Thanks to @lpeblog.bsky.social for the invitation to write about what policy scholars should do if "policy" is permanently broken. There are lots of good answers, but we can't afford to ignore the question.

And there's the problem of reinforcing inequality. Because the necessary corollary of the idea that "people should get what they deserve on the basis of their merits" is the idea that "some people aren't deserving of lives with dignity." Which is how "meritocracy" normalizes an unjust world. 6/

The reality TV roots of the MAGA coalition The cast of characters in the second Trump administration is straight out of reality TV — literally, in some cases. So is the MAGA mindset.

I spoke to the LA Times about the connection between reality TV and MAGA politics. You can check out the piece here!

www.latimes.com/entertainmen...

officially deleted twitter :) when I'm not avoiding social media to prevent doomscrolling you can find me here

after 3 years and so, so many rejections 🫠 my “job market paper” was conditionally accepted!! more soon, can’t wait to share 🥹

Weather deviations linked to undocumented migration and return between Mexico and the United States | PNAS As the world’s climate continues to change, human populations are exposed to increasingly severe and extreme weather conditions that can promote mi...

Important PNAS article on the impact of climate change on migration by Garip et al.
Undocumented migration MX->US increases when communities experience droughts. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...