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Publication Networks in Action: Three Essays on Social Ties, Health, and Health Inequalities(2024-09) Hong, Chen-ShuoUnder what conditions are social ties salubrious? This dissertation addresses this question by examining three distinct aspects of social relationships and resources embedded in these relationships: social capital over the life course, the racial and gendered adolescent popularity effects on adult body mass index, and the relationship between network spillover and workplace food choice. While network research increasingly demonstrates that social networks manifest themselves in highly context-dependent ways, it is unclear when, where, how, and for whom people's networks become a "resource," "cost," or "nothing at all." Investigating these contexts has practical implications because sociologists and policymakers wish to understand what network interventions might more effectively improve individual well-being and reduce health inequalities. Theoretically, examining these contexts is significant because it may elucidate overlooked mechanisms that underlie the network effects for health and health inequalities. In the second chapter, I demonstrate that in contrast to prior work, which found the stability of social capital, only 16% of individuals maintained social capital throughout their lives, whereas most experienced gains or losses. Life-course social capital matters, as maintaining high or increasing social capital can improve adult general health. Further analyses demonstrate that whether people maintain, increase, decrease, or have mixed life-course social capital depends on the social positions they occupy in multiple stratification systems. In the third chapter, I show that adolescent structural prestige at the ego and structural levels are linearly associated with adult self-reported and measured BMI and waist circumference, even after adjusting for early- and late-life confounders. However, the direction of associations is dependent on the intersections between gender and race, where white women receive benefits, yet women of color receive null or penalties. In the fourth chapter, I demonstrate that when network spillover is present, even 20% of individuals receiving interventions can significantly improve population-level behavior change. However, segregated interactions undermine the effects of network spillover. Ultimately, this dissertation highlights the role of social networks in health and health inequalities and the potential of computational social science in opening up new research on social determinants of health.Publication Motherhood and Inequality: Centering Trans Women in the Fight for Reproductive Justice(2024-09) Siegel, DerekMany scholars affirm the importance of family to everyday survival and how families reflect and reproduce inequalities. My dissertation both extends this literature and addresses its exclusion of transgender women by centering the experiences of trans women who currently parent or want to be parents in the future. I conducted 54 semi-structured interviews with 27 white trans women and 27 trans women of color across North America. Using the concept of reproductive governance, I examine how trans women navigate dominant gender, race, and parenting ideologies as they create and support their families. These ideologies police both the legal and symbolic boundaries of motherhood, providing conditional protections to advantaged white women who fulfill these norms while punishing perceived deviation. However, whereas existing research on trans women often reduces them to victims of violence, my research highlights the families and communities that trans women build despite institutional barriers. My findings also contribute to several debates within gender and family scholarship. The first debate involves the ability of legal protections to minimize intersecting inequalities. My research shows the legal impact of anti-trans discourses that portray trans women—particularly low-income trans women and trans women of color—as “unfit mothers,” whose perceived danger and deceitfulness require intervention to “protect children.” By examining how judges and case workers mobilize these stereotypes, I theorize how anti-trans discourses reinforce the regulation of other communities. The second debate involves the reproduction of inequality via everyday interactions. By looking at how trans women are ascribed or denied motherhood, I argue that when trans people “do gender” they are also being held accountable to dominant racial and class ideologies. A third debate concerns what counts as “family.” Various scholars have argued that trans people form alternate kinship structures as a replacement for the nuclear family. However, I spoke to respondents who have and desire both sets of relationships. I argue that trans women engage is a range of kinship practices that challenge the depiction of motherhood as a “private act” that necessarily maintains the status quo.