But Crisanti knew she needed to move to the United States to finish her research.

“I was this Italian scholar in Italy studying the impact of Americanization on Italy during the Cold War. I realized there was no better way to complete my studies than by coming to the U.S.,” she said.

She came to New York in part to work with Silvana Patriarca, Ph.D., a Fordham history professor who specializes in the socio-cultural history of modern Italy and has written about nationalism, gender, race, and the making of national identities.

“I knew and appreciated her work, but most of all, I liked the idea that her specific area of expertise was close to mine, but not equal,” Grisanti said.

“To me, this meant that she could be an ideal mentor, but also leave space for my personal initiatives and ideas, which she did wonderfully.”

‘Europeans are Lovin’ It?’

Crisanti’s final dissertation is titled “Europeans Are Lovin’ It? Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and the Challenges to American Global Businesses in Italy and France, 1886 – 2015.” The goal of the paper, for which she was advised by Patriarca and Christopher Dietrich, Ph.D., is to refute widely held assumptions that American corporations have succeeded because they promote uniquely “American” products around the world.

Backed by archival sources spanning three languages and two continents, Crisanti makes the case that companies such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola were themselves changed as much as they changed the local culture where they established subsidiaries.

“In a context in which more and more, we tend to associate globalization with enduring American hegemony and enduring forms of American imperialism, what is American globalization actually?” she asked in an interview.

Influence Goes Both Ways

In fact, Crisanti makes the case that the soda, hamburgers, and French Fries associated with the two companies are not exclusively American, due to the influence of Europeans on their development.

The success of these firms rests on being “glocal,” she said, which is why a McDonald’s in Rome is technically an Italian company that caters to the local population by offering a McCrunchy Bread with Nutella for dessert.
Crisanti argues that a better alternative to this kind of globalization is embodied in groups such as the anti-globalization movement spearheaded by French farmer José Bové and Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food movement, which are rooted in—and support—local culture but also “glocal.”

She has worked with groups like these that she says “valorize” cultural traditions and hopes her research will support them further.

“The dissertation became an opportunity to study not just the reaction against Americanization, but also the reaction against globalization and the role played by major multinational corporations,” said Crisanti, who is currently interviewing for post-doctoral opportunities in Italy and the U.S. and hopes to get a position combining research and teaching.

Learning from the Past

Dietrich said what made Crisanti’s research so exciting is it tells a new story about not only the influence of American businesses in Europe in the 21st century but also the influence of European governments and societies on those American businesses and their adaptability.

“We all know the classic stories of Coca-Cola being associated with U.S. soldiers in World War II, but to see how McDonald’s met building codes to fit into Italian town life and hear how Coca Cola bottlers worked to develop their networks and made arguments for Coca Cola being part of those cultures, it’s really quite interesting,” he said.

“Today, we’re so caught up with and passionate about politics, and that extends to our understanding of corporations and their place in society, and I think it’s important for us to take a step back for a moment. Studying the diplomacy of business helps us understand that there are a lot of different factors at play in major decisions, and I don’t think we can get today right unless we have some distance from it.” By going all the way back to 1886 and the beginnings of Coca-Cola, he said, “she reminds us to take that distance.”

Crisanti said she knew moving to New York City would take her out of her comfort zone but ultimately found it to be an experience for growth. A big reason for this, she said, was that the history department at Fordham values cooperation over competitiveness.

“I believe that any program should first encourage students to cooperate and improve, and Fordham does that,” she said. “The human aspect is as valued as the academic/scholar aspect.”

“You would have people handing you fliers (on the street) about church services, all-night prayer vigils, and all kinds of things having to do with religion,” said Casteline, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies. “Half the day Saturday is filled up with televised sermons. A little stand selling food would have a name like ‘23rd Psalm Snacks.’”

“Religion is very much a part of the public sphere. It’s a part of the common discourse through mass media,” she said. “Literally, you see it everywhere.”

Such practices offer one example of how global Christianity is being reshaped by people from the developing world who are actively using mass communication tools to build their churches in their home countries and abroad, said Casteline.

Casteline’s trip to Ghana was part of her dissertation research into media use by Ghanaian Pentecostals in diaspora—in particular, those in Aurora, Colorado. One pastor, for instance, used cable access television to film his weekly service and send it to stations around the country, complete with subtitles and his web address scrolling at the bottom of the screen.

He also ran a radio show and a toll-free prayer line that fielded calls from as far away as Toronto. His congregation, meanwhile, numbered only about 50.

“You don’t see a church of 50 members doing anything like that” in America, Casteline said. “Most small churches have maybe a website that might get updated … every blue moon, once a year, but for the most part, American churches are not very media savvy.”

She’s seen Ghanaian Pentecostals using a variety of media in America. Pastors she has interviewed reach out to her regularly via text message and voice mail. Young Pentecostals in the Bronx started a Pinterest page that reflects the “Afropolitan” experience of Africans who have lived in diaspora for years, she said. Others are promoting their message through Facebook pages, tweets, and online videos.

These and other practices are an outgrowth of the “heavily mediated environment” in Ghana, she said.

“Ghanaian Pentecostals in diaspora are replicating practices found in the homeland, and … they are also going beyond what’s done in the homeland in order to take advantage of resources found in North America (and) Europe,” Casteline said. “As these populations increase in North America and in Europe, and as they gain access to more and more resources … we will see a change in North American Christianity as a whole. That change is already being felt in Europe, in that more African Christians are going to church and more are participating in the Christian life than are the European natives,” she said.

One reason African Pentecostals are at the leading edge of this proselytizing is the example set by televangelists, mainly Pentecostal, who came to West Africa in the 1970s, Casteline said. African pastors adopted this Western model, turning to television, printed brochures, and eventually other types of media.

Casteline plans to further study those Ghanaian Pentecostal communities abroad that not only use media well but also show a strong international bent.

“A lot of times they’ll start the church in their living room with friends and family, and friends of friends,” she said, “Then they [create]these ties with other churches around the world.” Sometimes the new networks will play host to each other’s pastors, she said.

“The churches have this way of worshiping and way of practicing Christianity that is just very different from traditional Western ways,” she said. “Even a storefront church will be called something like ‘World Tabernacle’ or ‘International House of Prayer.’ And literally, it’s 50 people. It’s a completely different mindset.”

Over the summer she visited churches in London and the Netherlands and interviewed pastors. Next year she’ll go to Padua, Italy, where Pentecostals are already making their mark in the public sphere via billboards and public advertisements.

“It’s very interesting, because it’s in the heart of Catholicism,” she said.

Ironically, by forming their own churches Africans are carrying out a kind of “reverse” missionary activity in Western countries, she said—in part because they see Western Christianity as lax.

“The pastors tell me, ‘We want to reach the world, and I know God has brought us here because the West has lost its way,’” Casteline said. “‘Yes, the West brought us Christianity, but now we’re bringing it back to them.’”

What’s the biggest misconception about the Ebola virus?
In New York, the biggest misconception is that we’re likely to have an epidemic of Ebola here, or that you can catch it easily. People worry about Ebola because it has a very high case fatality rate. If you catch it, the chances of you dying are about 50 percent. That makes it pretty terrifying. The fact that it spread rapidly in West Africa also makes people think it could spread anywhere. It just isn’t the right kind of virus to do that. It’s actually not very contagious at all. It isn’t spread in an airborne mechanism, like flu. You really need contact with bodily fluids containing the virus.

This outbreak has been confined to Africa and is not expected to present a threat to U.S. citizens. Why should Americans pay attention?

This is killing a lot of people, but it is also destroying health systems. Which means that many more people are going to die of things other than Ebola. If we can’t contain a disease like Ebola, which isn’t that contagious, then it shows how hard it might be to contain something like flu. And if we were talking about flu, I would be saying that New Yorkers should be worried.

Why was it a greater threat to the populations of places like Sierra Leone to begin with, as opposed to the United States?
We’re talking about some of the poorest countries in the world. They’re different from America in almost every way. Many people can’t read and are poorly educated about health. There are a number of other cultural practices that are not helpful. One is the cultural practice of making contact with, and washing, the dead bodies; this sort of thing spreads disease.
Then there are the measures needed to control Ebola, like contact tracing. If we know you’ve got Ebola, we need to get in touch with everyone you’ve been in touch with. In New York, that’s pretty easy. But in West Africa it’s much, much harder. People are afraid of the health services. And many don’t have addresses and don’t have phones.

Does globalization make us more vulnerable to viral outbreaks?
Globalization is an important part of this conversation. We take more planes, there are higher densities of populations, and people move around more. But globalization is also one of the forces in which certain parts of the world have been excluded. We think of globalization as a force for good, and that as certain countries have become richer a rising tide has lifted all boats. In fact, in West Africa that has not been true. There hasn’t been consistent economic growth there for many decades. What we’re seeing now is a disease that’s really a hallmark of poverty and neglect.

Do you think this will serve as a wakeup call for the international community to provide more resources to prevention measures?
This will be a wakeup call in the short term, but the international community has a real problem when it comes to epidemic prevention, because no one ever won a medal for preventing an epidemic. You lose your job if you’re in the business of epidemic prevention, because people say well, there are no epidemics; we don’t need you.

How are relief agencies coping with the different crises around the world, such as Gaza, Syria, the Sudan, Ukraine, and now this?
The timing of the Ebola epidemic is really bad because ordinarily this would have been in the headlines months ago. When people started to say to the media that they’ve been reporting on this very poorly, they could for once reasonably say, ‘Look, there have been other things that have been really important. There are wars in Gaza, South Sudan, Syria,’ on and on it goes….

Is there room for optimism about these subjects?
The good news from the Ebola epidemic is that there is an incentive to develop vaccines and treatments, which in the long term will help—I don’t think we’re going to see a useful vaccine in this epidemic though, which I think will run for several months.

What we’re seeing are a group of aid organizations that are struggling to cope, that are poorly funded, and that are increasingly co-opted into political projects. Aid workers have been kidnapped or killed. So humanitarianism as it exists now is in a dangerous position. In the long run, to deal with humanitarian crises will require more training, more professionalism, and more money, and humanitarian organizations [will]require more room to work in a safe way.

Contact: Gina Vergel
(646) 579-9957
[email protected]

“It’s not just about globalization. There are other trends that are as or more important,” said Bruce Greenwald, Ph.D., professor of finance and asset management at Columbia Business School and director of research and senior advisor at First Eagle Funds. Among the trends are “extraordinary improvements in manufacturing productivity” and more demand for services, he said.

Three innovative panelists shared their ideas on the subject at Globalization and the Ecology of Caring: Untold Stories, Unsung Heroes, a forum held on Nov. 10 at Fordham in conjunction with the 2010 Opus Awards celebration.

PBS Newshour journalist and filmmaker Fred de Sam Lazaro, who has reported on poverty from 41 nations, said one of his biggest challenges was to make his reporting relevant to an American audience.

“One approach that has helped us enormously is what I call ‘solution-oriented journalism,’” said de Sam Lazaro, who directs the Project for Under-Told Stories at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn. “We find people at the forefront of a [poverty]problem and who have a bright idea to attack the problem. We have a bar that people have to cross, beyond a good idea—they have to actually be doing something that shows results and good outcomes.”

The journalist shared some Under-Told story video clips that featured such results-oriented unsung heroes:

• the late Thomas Edward Maguire, S.J., fought poverty and hopelessness in a missionary school in the Himalayas by teaching the poorest children in the village to play violins; one girl, Kushmita Biswa Karma, went on to study at the Richard Strauss Conservatory in Munich;

• entrepreneur Bunker Roy, created the Barefoot College in rural India, which trains illiterate middle-aged women, some of whom only speak Arabic, to build, assemble and maintain solar panels within remote communities without electricity; instruction is done through body language and drawings.

“People like to watch success stories, so that’s what we inherently do,” he said.

De Sam Lazaro was joined by Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture firm that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve global poverty; and Lawrence MacDonald, a vice president of the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to reducing global poverty.

Novogratz’s nonprofit fund manages more than $15 million in investments in 50 organizations in South Asia and East Africa, all focused on delivering affordable healthcare, water, housing and energy to the poor.

Acumen Fund’s approach of “patient capital,” Novogratz said, is to invest in small entrepreneurs creating serious and sustainable change in grassroots poor communities—even if it takes 10 or 12 years for projects to pay off.

“I’ve seen the failings of traditional development and traditional charity as well,” said Novogratz, a former international credit banker. “This year alone we will touch 40 million people and create 35,000 jobs in healthcare, housing, water, alterative energy and agriculture. So the model is starting to work.

“[To] see the kind of significant sustainable change that we are beginning to witness, it is a pretty great return on the philanthropic dollar,” she said.

One of Acumen’s success stories is Aravind Eye Care, which was begun in 1976 in a small hospital in south India by Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy. Today, Aravind performs millions of cataract surgeries annually and, according to de Sam Lazaro, is a prime example of how sustainable grassroots projects can successfully grow into large, effective programs.

“This is an organization that grew from a six-bed hospital into the largest eye care provider in the world, one that has an error rate comparable to the Mayo Clinics,” said de Sam Lazaro. “This is how you scale up to have a widespread impact.”

MacDonald, whose organization does research and analysis on ways to reduce global poverty, said that there is great injustice and inequity in the global economic system.
It is time, he said, for citizens of the United States to speak out about unfair trade policies, global warming and immigration reform.

“We should look into ourselves and understand the injustices that we are part of,” MacDonald said. “I know there are people in this country who are out of work and losing their homes, but the difference in per capita income and wealth, as well as our environmental footprint on the planet, is so huge that it is difficult to take that into account (when thinking of global poverty.)”

Many other nations, MacDonald said, provide more foreign aid per capita than the U.S. Those nations, such as Sweden, also show the highest levels of income equality—something that is losing ground in the United States as the richest 1 percent of the nation gets richer at the expense of the poor and middle class.

“As long as the United States has very high and increasing levels of income inequality, I don’t think we are going to be a very generous nation,” he said.

That is where grassroots entrepreneurs and microfinance loans come in, Novogratz said.
“Entrepreneurs can create change where government is unjust,” she said. “That is where we are going to see progress. I think we are capable of ending poverty in the next few generations, and that’s exciting.”

Attending the event were Opus Prize finalists Sister Beatrice Chipeta, director of the Lusubilo Orphan Care Project in Malawi, and John Halligan, S.J., founder and director of the Working Boys’ Center in Quito, Ecuador.

“These are people who are making a difference in the lives of the poorest of the poor, those men and women whom the world would sooner forget,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “These very humble people are saints.”

The event was sponsored by Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture and the Opus Prize Foundation, and moderated by William F. Baker, Ph.D., the Claudio Aquaviva Chair and Journalist in Residence at Fordham.