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We look forward to bringing you a more complete site soon.
Center for the Study of Social Inequalities and Health
The Center for the Study of Social Inequalities and Health (Inequalities Center) at Columbia University is a multidisciplinary collaboration of researchers dedicated to understanding and addressing connections between social inequalities and health.
Directed by Drs. Bruce Link and Jo Phelan, the Inequalities Center is supported by the Mailman School of Public Health and its Departments of Sociomedical Sciences and Epidemiology.
Mission
The mission of the Inequalities Center is to produce understanding about the inequalities that both divide us and influence our chances for a healthy life. The Center has been established in the midst of national circumstances riven by divisions - rich and poor, black and white, male and female, gay and straight, immigrant and old order -- "us" and "them," again and again.
The Center is also established in a time when the some of the diseases that afflict us form the basis of still other divisions as when people with HIV, mental illness or physical disabilities are put aside, cast as the "other," and discriminated against.
Established in these circumstances we are dedicated to uncovering and bringing to light the processes connecting social inequalities and health conditions.
We seek this understanding for three principal reasons.
First, misunderstandings are often used to justify the inequalities we seek to reduce and are also an ongoing burden for those who are subjected to them.
Second, understanding inequalities may also embolden efforts to reduce them - when the sources of inequalities become transparent, it becomes harder to stand idly by.
Third, the actions of policy makers and citizens are less likely to reflect these misconceptions when knowledge is available
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Goals
In light of our mission and its rationale, the Inequalities Center is dedicated to pursuing the following goals:
- To produce knowledge about inequalities and health through research that bears a strong theoretical foundation and a high degree of empirical rigor
- To contribute to the dissemination of knowledge about inequality and health locally, nationally and across international borders
- To train and mentor a new generation of scholars who have the capacity to conduct research on inequality and its relation to health
- To promote racial, ethnic, gender and socioeconomic diversity in the faculty, staff and student body of the Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia University and to increase awareness of diversity issues among faculty and administration.
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