How to measure media freedom using the text of news wire: text analysis and language models

Seminar 3 of Hilary Term’s Sociology Seminar Series

Please join either in person or online. For in-person attendees, the talk will be preceded by a light lunch at 12.15pm.

Please email comms@sociology.ox.ac.uk with any questions or to receive the Microsoft Teams link.

Biography

Kieron Barclay is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Stockholm University, and a Pro Futura Scientia XIV Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. Before returning to Sweden in 2020, Kieron worked at the LSE, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Max Planck Institute of Demographic Research, where he remains a Research Fellow.

Kieron’s research is in the field of social demography. Much of his work has examined how family conditions are related to health and mortality, with a particular focus on the interrelationship between health and fertility. For example, his research has addressed how health affects childbearing, and how an individual’s reproductive history affects their post-reproductive health and mortality.

A primary theme of his work has been to examine the consequences of parental fertility decisions for their children; for example, how parental age at the time of birth, spacing between births, family size, and birth order affects children’s health and mortality at various stages of the life course, as well as their educational and socioeconomic attainment. Kieron is also interested in how health affects partnership formation, and how bereavement affects subsequent mortality (i.e., the widowhood effect).