“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.”

Eli Clare acknowledged during his 2019 Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disability that these and other difficult questions he raised in his talk come without easy answers.

During his wide-ranging lecture, Claire analyzed what it means to restore something to its natural state. He also identified examples in which the paradigm of restoration falls short—as in instances of disability at birth when there never was a “before” that could be restored.

A writer, activist, and teacher, Clare wrestled with the notion of cure. Not entirely against it nor entirely for it, he embraced the ambiguities and contradictions of this “messy middle,” yielding no tidy solutions, but rather providing attendees with a starting point for vital, challenging conversations about disability and environmental destruction.

His talk, titled “Notes on Cure, Disability & Natural Worlds,” explored the meanings of words like restoration, natural, and normal, contextualizing the ideologies and assumptions that underlie their use, and considering what this language reveals about our culture and thinking.

The lecture built upon concepts explored in Clare’s latest book, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure.

Clare’s writings “challenge us to think deeply about the ways that racism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia shape our perceptions of what constitutes a ‘normal’ body-mind or a valuable life,” Interim Provost Jonathan Crystal said while introducing the lecture.

(Clare utilizes the term body-mind “to resist the white, Western impulse” to conceive of the body and mind as distinct systems. “They are one tangled, complicated, complex, ambiguous, contradictory entity,” he said.)

In his lecture, Clare called for a “broad-based grappling” with “the ideology of cure”—a way of thinking that has subtly permeated our culture. Cure, by its very definition, Clare explained, carries with it the notion of restoration—of something damaged in need of fixing.

Clare reflected on his own interactions with strangers, who often respond to his cerebral palsy by offering unsolicited platitudes, prayers, crystals, or vitamins. “Even if there were a cure for brain cells that died at birth, I’d refuse,” he said. “I have no idea who I’d be without my tremoring and tense muscles, slurring tongue. They assume me unnatural, want to make me normal, take for granted the need and desire for cure.”

“How would I, or the medical-industrial complex, go about restoring my body-mind?” Clare continued.

“The vision of me without tremoring hands and slurred speech, with more balance and coordination, doesn’t originate from my visceral history,” he said. “Rather it arises from an imagination of what I should be like, from some definition of normal and natural.”

By engaging with topics ranging from the pernicious assumptions about disability embedded in a Sierra Club antipollution advertising campaign to the work of environmentalists striving to transform a former agribusiness cornfield back to tallgrass prairie, Clare also explored connections between environmental loss and body-mind loss.

Through his interrogation of the concept of restoration, as applied to both people and ecological systems, Clare ultimately laid bare an essential question: “How do we witness, name, and resist the injustices that reshape and damage all kinds of body-minds—plant and animal, organic and inorganic, non-human and human—while not equating disability with injustice?”

Bella Eitner, a sophomore at the Rose Hill campus who is pursuing a minor in disability studies, said she found valuable lessons in Clare’s writing and activism. “I think getting into advocacy is really important, and a lot of the things that he says about it are very useful, especially coming from someone with a disability himself,” Eitner said.

The annual Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disability, now in its fourth year, is organized by the Faculty Working Group on Disability and co-sponsored by the Provost’s Office and the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer.

–Michael Garofalo

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.