Mike Esposito
Co-investigator, structural racism
What is your area of research or expertise that you bring to the Landscapes collaboration?
What I’d say I bring to Landscapes is a sociological perspective on the production and reproduction of health disparities, particularly between Black Americans and White Americans—those health and wellness gaps that we see reproduced over time. So, I bring some of the more critical, sociological perspectives to unpacking the inequality that we’ve consistently seen.
Also, I’d say I contribute to some of the trouble-making towards our methodological approaches—essentially challenging and refining our methods. The thing is, I’m not particularly good at methods myself, but my role involves constantly examining the methods we use and asking questions like, “Is this exactly what we want to do here?” or “Are we honoring some of these more critical ideas when we approach answering questions in a specific way?”
So, I’m not bringing new competencies, right? A group like Landscapes is already flush with people that have expertise in some of those areas. But, then, I add to the ideas of other people doing excellent work on those dimensions.
What do you find challenging or exciting about interdisciplinary collaboration?
There’re many things, but there are two that I’ll name. One that’s on a heady theoretical side or conceptual side, and one that’s just more practical. As a sociologist, it’s fantastic to work with people like epidemiologists, critical scholars—so many different folks. Landscapes is so nice because we experts share some of the same intellectual starting points, but there are points where we run up to differences in decisions being made in the analysis.
For example, epidemiology—at least as it is right now—trains a lot of folks who are very concerned with causal evidence and causal identification in ways that as a sociologist I look at sometimes and say, “Wait, well, you’re contorting this kind of data in a way that conceptually achieves the causality you’re going for on a really technical level, but I feel like we learned less about the world when we kind of contort in that way.
And then meanwhile, having the epidemiologists respond, “Yeah, but you gotta do science, right?” At Landscapes, this isn’t just about looking at some data and feeling ways about it, right? So, when we come to those points, it’s not conflict; it’s really rich. Landscapes is particularly good because it allows us to see those conflicts and come up with a middle ground between these disciplines. It allows us to discuss how we can make research palpable to mainstream social science audiences, thinking about the power of descriptive work and other things of that sort.
Those sorts of ideas come out of the tensions of working with people who are very different from you disciplinary-wise. It’s both a challenge and a blessing on the substantive side. But then, on the practical side, getting published is a bit of a challenge with an interdisciplinary group like Landscapes. Some publishers understand that Landscapes is an unorthodox collection of experts, so the articles we write might look different from the standard.
Often, when trying to write a sociology article with a public health expert, we exceed the typical public health page limit just by writing the front end. Then, journals might ask, “What are you doing? People won’t want to read this because it’s so long.” And vice versa, other journals might say, “No, you have to write more.”
So, figuring out that tension and how we produce the actual material things that come with being an academic gets a little bit tricky. I do wish that we, as a field, had a little more room to produce interdisciplinary work more easily.
What’s one common misconception about your area of research that you’d like to dispel?
I feel like sometimes people see quantitative methods and immediately think, “I’m going to put you in this box where what you do is figure out some fancy algorithm and just slap it onto a question that we may already kind of know.”
But then also I think that people who work on the quantitative study of population health disparities get coded as methodologists.
But first, this greatly reduces the value of methodology, and second, it’s not the right way I’d like us to conceptualize what we’re doing as social scientists. We are examining some of these population processes through novel methods and approaches, right? The purpose isn’t to “stats” our way to answers by any means necessary. It’s more about taking into account what we’re actually doing, how we’re going about estimating things, and questioning some of those old modes of “knowing” in quantitative population health studies.
From there, we can see where there’s room for innovation and where innovation isn’t really needed. To summarize, the project of Landscapes—especially on the quantitative side—isn’t just about finding some new measure or method to reveal a pattern that nobody in the world could’ve seen before. It’s more like, okay, we have data, we have these critical ideas, so where can we push the boundaries to better link these critical ideas to data? Where are we doing a good enough job, and where can we find old methods that would make sense here?
That being the core project of Landscapes sometimes gets a little lost in the sauce when people think about what exactly we’re trying to do in contemporary, quantitative, population health science.
That makes a lot of sense thinking about a lot of the projects we work on here at Landscapes.
For sure. I think what Landscapes does is a subtle inversion of the norm, but it’s an inversion that it does very well. Typically, the big question is why we see a health disparity, and then the methods flow from there, rather than the methods informing the questions we ask. What we at Landscapes do is question first, which is something that we’re all taught to do, but given the reward system of academia, it can be easy to lose sight of that and go the other way around. However, I’m very excited that Landscapes is sticking firmly to this questions-first approach.
How did you become interested in structural racism and health?
It’s a combination of things, including my lived experience—being Black and seeing massive health disparities and the impacts of poor health playing out in real time on the people I know and love. I would hear how some person died far sooner than anyone else I know, in addition to seeing how other people haven’t had to experience premature death or illness of family members in the same way as many Black Americans. From a social position, it’s hard to not become inquisitive about why this is happening, asking if this is a common experience, and if so like what the heck is going on.
And then, just being interested in social science generally moved me towards studying structural racism and health. When you look at racial health disparities in particular, it’s remarkable that Black-White health gaps across many metrics have been closing over the course of US history, yet they’re still there! Health inequity has been a consistent feature of the state since we began measuring population health outcomes.
Purely ignoring my lived experience and the actual people affected by this in a real way, it’s just astonishing that over the past 120-130 years, during which we’ve been systematically monitoring health, Black Americans still experience worse health outcomes. Despite everything we’ve done in the past 120 years—like the invention of airplanes and the internet—public health is still undergoing radical transformations.
It’s a completely different world, yet health inequity—although improving—remains a consistent feature in the US. How the heck is that possible, right? On top of actually seeing these disparities play out in real life, thinking about the persistence of health disparities through this time of advancement also made me interested in studying it.
What is the academic path that brought you to where you are now?
I followed a pretty straightforward path. As an undergraduate, I remember signing up for a sociology class because my older sister had started at Mizzou just a year before I did, and she was like, “I really like this sociology class from this guy, Wayne Brekhus. You should take it.” And I was like, “Okay, I don’t know, I’ll do that.” So, I took it, really liked it, and decided to major in sociology. Later, I applied to grad schools and got into the University of Washington in Seattle. I enjoyed that very much, so I ended up coming to the Social Environment and Health program (SEH) as a postdoc, and then did tenure-track jobs. Now, I’m here at the University of Minnesota. Nothing really unusual—I kind of just went straight through.