“A congregation can go through that same kind of movement of being afraid,” said Gaventa, a longtime expert in disabilities and spirituality, who spoke at the Fordham symposium “Tikkun Olam: Spirituality, Intellectual Disabilities, and Wholeness” on March 17. “What you will hear from me this afternoon are some reflections that come from years of trying to be a bridge between the world of spirituality and faith, on the one hand, and the worlds of secular and public services, private services, and advocacy on the other—trying to find ways for those two communities to talk with each other and to work together for the sake of people with disabilities and the quality of their lives.”

Spirituality can be an essential part of a person’s identity. This is the realm where people try to discover and make meaning for their lives and learn to cope with personal crises, including the diagnosis of a disability, said Gaventa. 

Many people in the disabled community are spiritual, but their spiritual needs are often mishandled by the professionals who are responsible for their well-being, he said. A person’s spirituality is often viewed as a private matter, and the people surrounding them—disability service providers and faith communities, including churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples—frequently don’t know how to communicate to each other about their clients’ spiritual needs, Gaventa explained.  

People with disabilities and their families want congregations to offer a welcoming and positive attitude, to create an accessible environment, and to give them opportunities to serve their community, according to research Gaventa cited from longtime expert Erik W. Carter, a professor of special education at Vanderbilt University.

In order for this to happen, there needs to be education and training for staff and parishioners, said Gaventa, who founded a summer institute that provides spiritual support for people with disabilities and their families. Perhaps most importantly, people from both parties need to listen to each other’s needs and develop authentic relationships, said Gaventa. 

“At the heart of this, it’s about not programs or worship service … it’s about relationships,” Gaventa said. “How do we help people build relationships beyond the circle of relationships that they [already]have?” 

People with disabilities and their congregations can teach and learn from each other, said Gaventa, including families with children who have autism. 

“If somebody [with autism]has grown up in that faith community, and people have gotten to know them and got to know the person behind those behaviors and what people are trying to do both at school and at the faith community, then you can work on ways [to help them],” Gaventa said. “One, help the individual learn the kinds of things that are typical to learn and show them how to do it and provide multiple opportunities for them to practice. And on the other hand, help the community learn that [there are]some things people can change, and some things they cannot.”

One good example is the Archdiocese of Newark, which collaborated with Caldwell College to teach children with autism and other disabilities to attend Mass, Gaventa said. 

“If you told me 20 years ago that we were going to marry applied behavioral analysis with CCD [religious education classes], I would have said there was no way because they don’t talk the same language,” Gaventa said. “People can begin to change.” 

Gaventa recalled a story from a Methodist church in South Jersey, where a visiting clergy member asked a mother with a disruptive child with disabilities to leave. 

“The mother was just heartbroken by that and really hurt. The regular pastor found out about that, and finally said to the mom, ‘Come back, come back.’ Her son started to [become disruptive]again, and the mom started to get up and leave. And the pastor said from the pulpit, ‘Stop right there—he is part of our community. We’ll figure this out.’” 

The virtual symposium was co-sponsored by Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education and the Fordham Research Consortium on Disability. A full recording of the event will be posted here.

“Disabilities are often perceived as a small minority issue—something that affects a mere 1%. That’s not the case,” said Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., co-director of the minor program, founding director of the Research Consortium on Disability, and professor of economics.”

Around one billion people worldwide live with a disability, according to the United Nations, including one in four adults in the U.S. alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Since the minor started in January 2019, students in the program have learned how disability and normality are understood and represented in different contexts, from literature to architecture to fashion. The curriculum also helps bring awareness to issues of access on Fordham’s campus and beyond.

“Our minor program gets students to think about what it means to have a disability and what the consequences of having a disability might be in society,” Mitra said. “It’s an essential part of thinking about inclusion and what it means to be an inclusive society—and yet, it’s a dimension of inclusion that we sometimes forget about.” 

The program is designed to show undergraduates how to create more accessible physical and social environments and help them pursue careers in a range of fields, including human rights, medicine and allied health, psychology, public policy, education, social work, and law. 

Among these students is Sophia Pirozzi, an English major and disability studies minor at Fordham College at Rose Hill. 

“The biggest thing that I’ve taken away is that when minority rights are compromised, so are the majority … And I think when we elevate that voice and that experience, we come a little bit closer to taking into consideration that the only way to help ourselves is to help other people,” said Pirozzi, who has supervised teenagers with intellectual and physical disabilities as head counselor at a summer camp in Rockville, Maryland. After she graduates from Fordham in 2021, she said she wants to become a writer who helps build access for the disability community.

Now, in addition to the minor program, Fordham has a Research Consortium on Disability, a growing team of faculty and graduate students across six schools—the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School of Education, the Graduate School of Social Service, the Gabelli School of Business, the Law School, and the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education—who conduct and coordinate disability-related research at at the University.  

Since this past October, the consortium has created new opportunities to connect faculty and graduate students working on disability-related research across the University and in the broader New York City area, including lunch meetings and new research studies. This month, it launched its new website. The consortium is planning its first symposium on social policy this November and another symposium on disability and spirituality in April 2021. 

The consortium is a “central portal” for interdisciplinary research that can help scholars beyond Fordham, said Falguni Sen, Ph.D., professor and area chair in strategy and statistics, who co-directs the consortium with Rebecca Sanchez, Ph.D., an associate professor in English. That includes research on how accessible New York City hospitals are for people with disabilities, particularly in the COVID-19 pandemic.  

“What has come to light very acutely is the whole notion of how vulnerable populations have been differentially affected in this COVID-19 [pandemic],” Sen said. “The emergency responses to that population have not necessarily been as sensitive or as broad in terms of access as we would like it to be … And we were already thinking about issues of crisis because of what happened in 9/11.” 

The minor and the Research Consortium on Disability build upon the work of the Faculty Working Group on Disability: a university-wide interdisciplinary faculty group that has organized activities and initiatives around disability on campus over the past five years. The group has hosted the annual Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disability and several events, including a 2017 talk by the commissioner for the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities.

“Fordham is known for community-engaged learning and how its work, both the research that we do and others, have relevance directly in people’s lives,” said Sen. “And that’s what we are trying to do.”

A research analyst works to improve the criminal justice system

Whether she’s studying incarcerated people or people with disabilities—or both—Navena Chaitoo tries to shed light on the many dimensions and nuances of large systemic problems.

Chaitoo works as a research analyst in the Center on Sentencing and Corrections at the Vera Institute of Justice, a national nonprofit that seeks to drive change in the justice system. Specifically, she analyzes data and works with prison jurisdictions—at their request—to reduce the use of solitary confinement.

“If you really think about solitary confinement—you’re alone in a cell, you have no access to programming, to other individuals … what does that do to your mental health? When we talk with people who have been through solitary, one of the things that comes out of it is just how deeply traumatic it is,” she says, adding that it does not help rehabilitate prisoners. “What leads to rehabilitation is pro-social behavior.”

That experience led to her work on a research paper that she began at Fordham in which she examined disability and multidimensional poverty in America.

“Currently, poverty is measured by what you have in your pocket—how much income you have … it’s not about your capabilities,” she said. The paper, co-authored with Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., associate professor of economics at Fordham, among others, looked at how a person’s disability might impact their ability to earn a living wage and their access to food, education, and participation in the political process.

While at Fordham, Chaitoo won a highly competitive graduate fellowship award from the National Science Foundation, which fully funded her graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned a master’s degree in public policy and management.

After graduate school, she got a job as a researcher with the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services, where she assisted with the research and development of the Manhattan Supervised Release Program—an alternative to pre-trial detention for those who can’t make bail.

“I ended up loving it, and wanting to get more out of the research behind it. So I transferred to Vera,” Chaitoo says. That concept of more—or magis in Jesuit terms—is one she reflected on in college. “When you really think about living the Fordham mission,” she says, “it’s about how can I do this better, how can I serve people better?”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

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.