At Fordham, the celebration began a day early with an interdisciplinary symposium spotlighting faculty and students research focused on disability. The Dec. 2 event, “Diversity and Disability: A Celebration of Disability Scholarship at Fordham,” also marked the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Matthew Diller, dean of Fordham School of Law and the Paul Fuller Professor of Law, discussed how disability law influences people’s participation in the workforce. This participation, Diller said, is socially as well as economically important, because work signifies social status.

“Work is central to how we think about people, their role in society, and whether they are successful members of that society,” Diller said. “There is a social expectation that you should be in the workforce, and if you’re not, then you’re an underperforming member.”

Not everyone can fulfill that expectation, Diller said, so the law allows for some people to be excused from work owing to certain situations or conditions, such as a disability. Some people, however—including people with disabilities—are excluded from work altogether as the result of prejudice, discrimination, or other barriers that prevent them from fully participating in society.

“If we judge social worth by whether someone works, but then exclude some people from the workforce, then we’re inherently denigrating their social worth,” he said.

The value of the ADA, Diller said, is that it focuses on creating systems that integrate people with disabilities into the workforce, thereby restoring their right to work.

However, there remains room for improvement, Diller said. For instance, up until Congress substantially amended the law in 2008, courts regularly impeded the ADA’s enforcement by making the definition of disability extremely narrow. Many plaintiffs seeking excusal from or accommodations for work lost their cases on the grounds they were not disabled—an approach Diller said was “misguided.”

Christine Fountain, PhD, assistant professor of sociology, and Rebecca Sanchez, PhD, assistant professor of English, also presented.

Fountain is doing research with scientists from Columbia University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the sociological aspects of autism, particularly how a noncontagious illness has reached epidemic proportions and who is being most severely affected by it.

Autism, the group has found, is more prevalent in children of wealthy and well-educated parents, and that wealth and education play a role in how quickly and to what extent an autistic child improves developmentally.

Sanchez discussed her new book Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature (New York University Press, 2015), which argues that “deaf insight,” that is, the “embodied and cultural knowledge of deaf people,” is not an impairment, but an alternative way of thinking and communicating.

She offered the example of Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 silent film Modern Times. Chaplin, Sanchez said, deliberately chose to avoid the new “talkie” technology because silent pictures allowed for “a universal means of expression.” The plot of the film itself, she said, bespeaks the dangers of forcing people to express themselves in homogenized ways.

The event also included poster presentations by two doctoral students, Xiaoming Liu and Rachel Podd, and Navena Chaitoo, FCRH ’13.

Elizabeth Emens, PhD, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, offered the keynote presentation, “Disability Law Futures: Moving Beyond Compliance.”

The event was sponsored by the Office of Research and by the Faculty Working Group on Disability, led by Sophie Mitra, PhD, associate professor of economics. The group connects Fordham faculty who are researching some aspect of disability.

In a sample of nearly 6 million children born in California between 1997 and 2007, Christine Fountain, PhD and researchers from Columbia University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the incidence of autism was twice as high for ART births compared to non-ART births.

Their findings, which were published in the American Journal of Public Health in March, are part of the largest and most diverse study to date exploring the relationship between ART and autism.

“We were interested generally in the social factors behind the increase in autism diagnoses seen over the last decade,” said Fountain, an assistant professor of sociology. “One of the broad factors we looked at was parental age. That is where ART seemed to play a role, because ART allows women to push the upper age limits for childbearing.”

Autism spectrum disorder refers to a serious development disability marked by deficits in communication and social interaction. Currently, about 1 in 68 U.S. children have been diagnosed with a form of autism—a statistic that has increased rapidly over the last decade.

The precise causes and mechanisms of autism remain unclear, but scientists have identified several risk factors, including preterm birth, low birth weight, gestational diabetes, and other complications during pregnancy. The disorder has also been linked to certain parental characteristics, such as older parental age, higher socioeconomic status and education, and white race—characteristics that are also shared by many who use ART to conceive.

The researchers also found that the incidence of autism was much higher in ART children who were part of multiple births—twins, triplets, etc.—as opposed to singleton children. A significant number of ART conceptions result in multiple births because multiple embryos are transferred during the procedure to increase the chances of a successful pregnancy.

“In general, multiple births [whether conceived by ART or not]bring greater risks of complications during pregnancy, such as gestational diabetes, preterm birth, and low birth weight, which are also risks associated with autism,” Fountain said.

Fortunately, the team’s findings suggest a potential point of intervention to help reduce the risk of autism for families who use ART.

“When appropriate, transferring one embryo rather than multiples could be a way to reduce autism risk among ART-conceived children,” Fountain said. “However, we need more research in terms of understanding the actual mechanisms by which ART and autism are linked.”

Fountain’s next research study will be an analysis of ART-born children who have naturally conceived siblings. This, Fountain hopes, could help to isolate the biological factors from social and familial factors.

“Because many ART children come from families that are relatively well-off, it’s not surprising that there would be a higher rate of diagnosis than other children,” she said. “I’m hoping to untangle some of those social factors with this new study.”