The Leonard and Gretchan Broom Center for Demography was established in October 2011 as an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with generous funding from Leonard and Gretchan Broom. Leonard Broom was a distinguished professor of sociology in a career spanning seven decades, with appointments at UCLA, UT Austin, the Australian National University and most recently at UCSB. He served as editor of the American Sociological Review (1955-57) and co-authored (with Philip Selznick, UC Berkeley) one of the first and most successful textbooks in sociology. Broom’s early research on the effects of US internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII made him an early critic of that policy and shaped his life-long interest in social inequality and discrimination against minority and marginalized populations.
The Broom Center is directed by Susie Cassels, Professor of Geography at UCSB, in consultation with an advisory committee of UCSB faculty consisting of Erica Arenas (Sociology), Maria Charles (Sociology), Michael Gurven (Anthropology), Shelly Lundberg (Economics), and Heather Royer (Economics), plus two ex officio members: the director of ISBER and the Dean of Social Sciences. The Broom Center is housed within the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research, ISBER. The Broom Center is a member of the Association of Population Centers (APC).
The following Broom Center Annual Reports are available for viewing:
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