Michael H. Esposito

Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

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About Michael

Esposito's research focuses on the structural determinants of population health disparities. Overarching themes in Esposito's writings include: (1) examining how the actions of race-cognizant institutions (like law enforcement agencies) contribute to health disparities; (2) studying how multiple racialized systems interact to gate access to critical health contexts; and (3) examining how structural racism enters into and distorts social processes that are foundational to well-being (e.g., the association among education and health).

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Publications

"Linking History to Contemporary State-Sanctioned Slow Violence through Cultural and Structural Racism" (with Margaret T. Hicken, Lewis Miles, and Solome Haile). The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 694, no. 1 (2021): 48–58.

Discusses the meaning of cultural racism as it pertains to the hierarchy of groups of people whose lives are valued unequally and its link to structural racism. Offers in order to remedy this environmental racial violence, we propose shifts in the empirical research on environmental inequities that are built upon, either implicitly or explicitly, the interconnected concepts of cultural and structural racism that link historical to contemporary forms of racial violence.