Focus Areas
Areas of concentration for the Center for Insecurity and Inequality Research.
Economic Inequality
Economic inequality is the uneven distribution of an economic resource, such as income, among persons or subgroups. Economic inequality is intricately linked with other social indicators including health, poverty, access to affordable energy (i.e. energy security), digital connectivity, and education.
Energy Insecurity
Energy insecurity occurs when a household is unable to adequately meet their basic energy needs. It has direct implications for food insecurity, as energy insecure households often have to decide whether to heat their homes or feed their families. Energy and food insecurity can then contribute to health problems and inequalities.
Environmental Inequality/Injustice
Environmental inequality is the uneven distribution of the benefits of natural and environmental resources and the uneven distribution of harms to the natural environment, such as pollution and contaminants. These inequalities hinder attempts at sustainability. Environmental inequality is related to class, gender, and race, and often co-occurs with economic and health inequality.
Food Insecurity
Food insecurity occurs when individuals and households have constrained access to sufficient safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for active and healthy lifestyles. Food insecurity is growing in both the developed and developing worlds. It is often linked with job insecurity, housing insecurity, and economic and health inequality.
Health Inequality
Health inequality is the systematic difference in physical, mental, and behavioral health outcomes documented across social groups. Health inequalities disparately impact low-income communities, communities of color and LGBTQ+ communities. Unequal health experiences and outcomes often co-occur with food and job insecurity, and economic, social and environmental inequality.
Housing Insecurity
Housing insecurity includes a variety of unstable housing situations including homelessness, residential instability, overcrowding, living in poor quality housing, and living in unsafe areas. It is linked with a variety of intersecting forms of inequality and insecurity, including food insecurity, marginalized and/or stigmatized social statuses, and exposure to violence and victimization.
Job Insecurity
Job insecurity is the threat of job loss in the near future, which researchers have operationalized on the basis of job tenure, the perceived threat of job loss and worrying over the threat of job loss. Research illustrates that perceptions related to job insecurity affect predictors of future unemployment and are negatively related to current physical and mental health.
Social Inequality
Social inequality is the uneven distribution of resources and opportunities (i.e., economic, health, interpersonal) along the lines of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation/identity, as well as other social locations. Inequalities across social realms are also inherently intersectional, as they are impacted by multiple sources of interlocking oppressions including racism, sexism and anti-LGBTQ+ ideologies.