Many people with disabilities rely on assistive technology—tools like crutches, wheelchairs, and software—to help them with everyday tasks, said guest speaker Amy Hurst, Ph.D., associate professor of human-computer interaction at New York University and director of the NYU Ability Project. 

‘There’s Another Way’ 

The problem is that 30% of assistive technology is abandoned by users, said Hurst at the April 10 event, held at the Lincoln Center campus and livestreamed. These devices, occasionally created without user input, can be designed poorly. It can be difficult to obtain the devices themselves. Sometimes, they just don’t work well. 

“The system is broken,” Hurst said. “[But] maybe there’s another way.” 

What if you could create your own device—in a fast, customizable, affordable, and reproducible way? 

Today’s technology makes it possible for people without special training to obtain free designs and generate their own tools. As long as you—or someone you trust—can access a computer, you can send a design file to a machine that builds a physical tool for you. The final cost? Potentially under $300.

Empowering People with Disabilities 

To figure out how to make this more accessible to clinicians and users, Hurst conducted several projects, including partnering with a physical therapy program to create 3-D printed assistive technology for both simulated and actual clients. 

Two of the biggest roadblocks to accessibility are limited time to work on these devices and the occasional fickleness of the technology itself, said Hurst. But 3-D printing assistive technology also provides an opportunity—the creation of jobs, especially for those who identify as neurodivergent. 

Hurst recalled teaching 3-D printing to young adults with intellectual disabilities, who successfully created models of their own. 

“How can we provide these experiences that can empower people?” she said. “Many people with intellectual disabilities have a really high unemployment rate around 60%. … What else can we do here to show them some different potential?” 

The eighth Distinguished Lecture on Disability was organized by Fordham’s Disability Studies Program and Research Consortium on Disability. The event was co-sponsored by the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, Graduate School of Education, Graduate School of Social Service, Communication and Media Studies Department, and Computer and Information Science Department.

That’s the question recently addressed by a Fordham student’s faculty-mentored research project. While scholars have long suspected that people with disabilities tend to get left behind in schooling, in employment, and in other sectors of life, the research by Emily Lewis, FCRH ’22, found that there is even more of this inequality in richer countries. And it suggests that policies may be needed to ensure growth and development benefit all people in a society.

Disability “tends to be ignored when we speak about inequalities,” said economics professor Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., co-director of the disability studies minor and founding director of Fordham’s Research Consortium on Disability. “And yet, disability is key when it comes to understanding people’s livelihoods, people’s standard of living.”

Mitra was the mentor for Lewis, an economics and philosophy major who spent last summer analyzing international disability data with support from a summer research grant. Such funding for student-faculty research is a priority of the University’s current fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student.

Lewis, Mitra, and economics doctoral candidate Jaclyn Yap are co-authors of the resulting research paper, Do Disability Inequalities Grow with Development? Evidence from 40 Countries, published April 25 in the academic journal Sustainability. The research sprouted from another project led by Mitra that highlights disability inequalities worldwide.

The Disability Data Initiative

Since 2006, more than 180 countries have ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, an agreement to treat them not as objects of charity and medical treatment but rather as contributing members of society.

To support this goal and help policymakers move forward, Mitra spearheaded the Disability Data Initiative, a report on 180 nations’ census and survey findings regarding people with disabilities from 2009 to 2018. She led a team of graduate and undergraduate students, including Lewis.

Presented at a UN conference last June, the report showed that about one-quarter of nations didn’t ask about disability in their national surveys. In those that did, the data showed major gaps in the areas of education, health, employment, and standard of living between people with disabilities and those without them.

The database opened the possibility of doing an extensive study across countries to see if these gaps increased with development—something that had been long hypothesized but not tested on a large scale.

Eager to explore this question, Lewis made it her summer project. Her interest in the disability gap had been sparked during one of Mitra’s classes, at a time when she was looking for a way to get involved in undergraduate research.

“Seeing examples of how different researchers are approaching these questions was really interesting, and got me excited about how I could design this project for myself,” she said.

It was a big project—and a summer research grant gave her the means to spend the required time on it.

Help from a Fordham Benefactor

This and other grants to students were made possible by an alumni benefactor who has long funded undergraduate research—Boniface “Buzz” Zaino, FCRH ’65, whose long career in the investment world exposed him to the joys of researching and learning about new industries. “Once I got into it, it just opened the world, because you do get to explore and focus on areas that become very interesting,” he said.

He has funded students’ research for years, energized by the students’ enthusiasm for their projects, by what their projects have taught him about the world, and by the benefits to the student researchers themselves.

The research process, with its wide reading and focused inquiries, gives students a base for developing their interests and learning about new things over the long term, he said. “The University provides a student with the opportunity to develop a research process, and that’s got to be very helpful for them going forward, no matter what they do in life,” he said.

The Disability and Development Gap

Lewis met weekly with Mitra over the summer to design and carry out the project, examining 40 countries that have comparable data on peoples’ self-reported difficulties with seeing, hearing, walking, cognition, self-care, and communication.

Working on the Disability Data Initiative, they had already gotten glimpses of a wider disability gap in wealthier countries.

For instance, in low-income nation of Cambodia, 75% of adults with any kind of difficulty caused by disability were employed, just shy of the 79% for those without disability. But in economically booming Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, the gulf is far wider, with just 15% employment for those with any difficulty, compared to 56% for those without.

To see if such disparities represented a trend, Lewis crunched a big data set including lots of variables—levels of disability, gender, age, and urban versus rural location, as well as a nation’s place on Human Development Index, or HDI, a UN indicator of nations’ wealth and overall development.

She found that for many standard-of-living indicators, like adequate housing and access to electricity, there was little difference in the disability gap between richer and poorer countries.

But the story was different in three areas: education levels, employment rate, and a multidimensional measure of poverty. Gaps in all three increased as countries’ HDI increased. The results held up when Lewis looked at the data a few different ways, such as focusing on different development measures or population subgroups.

The results, the co-authors wrote, “suggest that as a country develops, policies, specifically in relation to education and employment, need to be implemented to narrow and, eventually, close the gaps between persons with and without disabilities.”

The research shows that while disparities may be greater in wealthier nations, disability inequalities aren’t just a problem in rich countries with older populations, Mitra said. Low-income countries have them too, even if they’re less pronounced.

“Even when almost everyone is poor, well, people with disabilities seem to be even poorer,” she said.

Lewis found it exciting to be involved in the research process and see it through from start to finish—figuring out the approach, changing direction as needed, and working independently. “[It’s] something I consider myself really lucky to have been involved in,” said Lewis, who was planning to work as a project assistant at a New York law firm after graduation to explore her interest in law school.

Mitra said that undergraduate research not only teaches students valuable skills but also gives them an inside look at how knowledge is produced, as well as all the caveats and limitations that come with it—an awareness that will serve them well in whatever field they pursue.

The University’s research grant program for undergraduates is “a unique opportunity for students, but also for as faculty,” Mitra said. “So I hope it does continue to attract the generosity of donors.”

To inquire about giving in support of student-faculty research or another area of the University, please contact Michael Boyd, senior associate vice president for development and university relations, at 212-636-6525 or [email protected]. Learn more about Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, our campaign to reinvest in every aspect of the Fordham student experience.

“His mother’s love opened him up again … and gave his life meaning, purpose, and hope, which I think is probably the best task that churches can do for anybody who lives with a highly stigmatized condition—to offer love and friendship,” said Swinton, in an online lecture on April 8. 

Swinton, the chair of divinity and religious studies and professor of practical theology and pastoral care at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, was the keynote speaker at Fordham’s Spirituality & Disability Symposium, which took place on April 8 and 9. The forum featured scholars who discussed how spirituality and disability intersect in our daily lives. 

Swinton’s research and teaching are largely inspired by his eclectic background in health care and religion. For 16 years, he worked as a nurse for people with mental health challenges and learning disabilities; he also worked as a hospital chaplain. He currently serves as an ordained minister of the Church of Scotland. 

In his presentation “Spirituality and Disability: What Do We Mean and Why Does It Matter?” Swinton explained how society can use spirituality as a lens for a better life, especially people who live with disabilities. 

A Reimagined Jesus With Down Syndrome

Everyone has their own idea of what God looks like. Our imagination is deeply influenced by the culture in which we live, Swinton said, citing the work of theologian Karl Barth. He showed the audience a modern version of the Last Supper painting, where Jesus and his disciples all have Down syndrome. It’s a powerful image because it reminds us that both God and our society are diverse, he said.  

“Paul talks about the body of Christ … the place where we see, feel, live out that image. And the thing that marks the body of Christ is not homogeneity, but diversity … And so when we recognize all the different aspects of the image of God as it’s revealed in all of the different bodily and psychological conditions that we go through, we begin to understand what it means to be in God’s image,” said Swinton. “It’s together that we live in the image of God.”

Finding Strength in Meaning and Connection

Another important aspect of spirituality is our need for connection, Swinton said. Humans evolved to become spiritual beings because of their deep desire to relate to something beyond themselves, he said, citing a theory from David Hay, a zoologist who wrote a book about spirituality. 

“The one thread that runs through all definitions of spirituality is this idea of relationality—that somehow we need to be in a relationship,” Swinton said. “Spirituality has to do with being in a relationship. Maybe with God … with others … with your community, but it’s always there.” 

However, people with disabilities are often shunned by society, he said. 

“The problem is that we have a pathogenic culture—an individual culture that tends to stigmatize and alienate people who are different,” Swinton said. “Stigma is a deeply spiritual problem. It shrinks your world, takes away the possibilities. And unless somebody can rescue you, that can be your life—stuck in that meaningless place, where your diagnosis takes away everything.”

Swinton said that excluding people with disabilities is the opposite of what God calls us to do—“to respect diversity, to recognize the image of God in each one of us, and to come together.” 

“We need to shift and change and take spirituality seriously if we’re going to have the kind of community where each one of us has a space, place, and voice,” Swinton said.  

A Q&A session following Swinton’s presentation was moderated by Francis X. McAloon, S.J., Ph.D., associate professor of Christian spirituality and Ignatian studies at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education. The symposium was co-sponsored by GRE and Fordham’s Research Consortium on Disability. 

“It still gives me chills to think about what a moment that was. It was … taking ownership of this term, rather than it being used to demean or marginalize her, that gave people a framework to understand her. And so she shifted from being somebody that was enigmatic or strange to somebody who was a person with autism who wasn’t ashamed of having autism,” he said on April 4 in an online lecture.

Grinker, an award-winning professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University and an expert on autism and mental illness, was the main speaker at the 2021/2022 Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disability. His book Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism (Basic Books, 2008), inspired by Isabel, won the 2008 National Alliance on Mental Illness KEN award. 

In his speech, he shared the most critical findings from his newest book, Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness (W.W. Norton, 2021). He argues that the main cause of stigmatization against those with mental illnesses and disabilities is something that we don’t often consider—the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which we live. 

‘The Ideal Person’: How American Society Became Divided

Over the past two decades, disabilities have been increasingly embraced as part of being human, rather than something shameful and frightening, said Grinker. He said he witnessed this transformation in Isabel, who is now 30, as well as his students. On the first day of class in front of nearly 300 peers, a student announced that he had Tourette syndrome, Grinker recalled, because he wanted his peers to understand the reason behind his unusual behavior. 

Grinker said that society is becoming less judgmental. Increasing education and public awareness have contributed to this, he said, but what primarily shapes our stigmas against those who are “different” are the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which we live.

Capitalism, for example, created conditions that led to stigmatization. The ideal American possessed two traits that were central to capitalism: independence and autonomy. Those who lacked those traits—or were unable to possess them—were viewed as “abnormal,” he said.  

“Our judgments about mental illnesses come from our definitions of what, at different times and places, people consider the ideal society—the ideal person,” Grinker said, adding that we are now moving away from the definition of an ideal person as defined by capitalism. 

He also drew attention to a phenomenon that helped to destigmatize mental illness and disabilities: war.

During World War II, an unprecedented number of people suffered from mental illness. In response, U.S. President Harry Truman established the National Institute of Mental Health and ordered the military to create a manual used for the diagnosis of mental disorders.

To Be Normal Is To Be ‘Boring’ 

Many people aspire to be “normal,” but this mindset is actually a damaging illusion, said Grinker. He recalled a 1951 research study conducted by his father and grandfather, who were both psychiatrists. They studied a group of men who they divided into two groups: those who screened positive for mental illness and those who were “normal.” They found that the latter lacked ambition and creativity. As Grinker put it, they were “boring.”

“What my grandfather and my father were suggesting was that normality was crippling—that some degree of mental illness, some degree of mental difference might be necessary for humanity to remain vibrant, creative, and diverse,” Grinker said. 

Humanity’s stigmas can never be completely eradicated—but that doesn’t mean we can’t resist them, he said. 

“We only need to look at the kinds of examples that I gave you earlier, whether it’s my daughter, Isabel, or my students, to give us hope,” Grinker said. 

The sixth Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disability was co-organized by the Disability Studies Program and the Research Consortium on Disability and co-sponsored by the Conference of Arts & Science Deans and the Office of Research. The Q&A following the lecture was co-moderated by Sarah Macy, FCLC ’22, a psychology major and disability studies minor who identifies as an autistic woman, and Micki McGee, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology at Fordham and the parent of a neurologically divergent young adult.

Watch a full recording of the lecture below: 

These are some of the key findings from a new report and database called “The Disability Data Initiative,” released in June at the United Nations’ 14th Conference of the States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The project was spearheaded by Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., professor of economics, co-director of the disability studies minor, and founding director of the Research Consortium on Disability, together with a team of seven undergraduate and graduate students. The initiative was supported by Fordham University, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, and the World Bank’s Trust Fund for Statistical Capacity Building.

The Disability Data Initiative is one of the first of its kind to review and analyze comparable data on disability and inequalities across countries, Mitra said.

The idea for the project stemmed from the fact that more than 180 countries ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities since 2006, but there has been scattered and incomplete data around those with disabilities, which “prevents the development of appropriate and effective disability-inclusive policy,” according to the report.

Lack of Disability Data

Mitra and her team of students reviewed census and survey data from 2009 to 2018 for 180 countries across the world. They found that disability-related questions were missing from 24% of countries.

“It was quite shocking to see that one in four countries do not have disability questions of any kind in their censuses or national surveys,” Mitra said. “In many countries, people with disabilities continue to be invisible. We have no way of figuring out how they are doing from national statistics.”

If people with disabilities aren’t accounted for, their needs are easier to ignore, Mitra said.

“If they’re not captured, they definitely get less attention … and it’s going to be very hard for them to argue that their situation needs improvement,” Mitra said. “Policymakers can say, ‘well, they’re such a small minority, we have other groups to worry about.’”

Their analysis found that people with disabilities are a sizable group as people in “more than one in four households have a functional difficulty,” such as difficulty seeing or walking, Mitra said.

The main question related to disabilities that the team found on many censuses and surveys was “Do you have a disability?” which doesn’t allow for clear and comparable data, according to Sophia Pirozzi, FCRH ’21, who was an undergraduate student on the initiative and was responsible for collecting data from more than 1,000 surveys in 180 countries.

“Disability itself is a concept that only recently has been embraced as a socio-political [notion], as opposed to a medical deficit,” Pirozzi said. “So if we’re looking at international comparisons, a lot of the time the way the disability is defined varies greatly.”

Mitra said there is often stigma attached to the question, so people don’t always answer honestly.

“They may only think of very severe situations to qualify under the word disability,” she said. “If disability in general is stigmatized in society, they think that, ‘well, perhaps I do have a disability, but I don’t feel comfortable answering yes.’ It doesn’t produce useful data—it produces very small prevalence rates, and only captures the most extreme disabilities.”

Disparities for People with Disabilities

The team closely analyzed data from 41 countries who had comparable questions, usually based on questions from the Washington Group Short Set (WGSS) that have become the “gold standard” of surveying people about their level of disability. The questions cover topics such as mobility, seeing, hearing, communication, and cognition, and allow people to respond with a range of answers. Mitra and her team said that they would like the WGSS to be adopted and used by more countries.

“A lot of these were where we were able to compare persons who said, ‘I have no difficulty,’ or ‘I have a lot of difficulty,’ or a little bit. And that’s really useful information for us,” said Pirozzi, an English major and disabilities studies and sociology minor, who is currently interning at the United Nations in the department of economic and social affairs.

Mitra noted that this was “one of the first international efforts to document functional difficulty prevalence and education, work, health, standard of living and multidimensional poverty indicators for adults with and without functional difficulties.”

The analysis found that there was “a disability gap” in terms of quality of life between people with disabilities and those without This was true across countries in areas including educational attainment, literacy, food insecurity, and health expenditures.

For example, in Indonesia, 93% of respondents with no difficulties said that they had attended school, compared to 74% of those with some difficulty, and just 57% of those with a lot of difficulty. In South Africa, 45% of people with no difficulties reported being employed, compared to 40% of those with some difficulty, and 18% of those with a lot of difficulty.

Mitra said that this gradient of disparities from those with no difficulty to those with a lot of difficulty was one of their biggest findings.

“The degree of functional difficulties is associated with the degree of disadvantage, at least in education, in employment, and in some of these standard of living indicators, so that’s an important finding,” Mitra said. “That hasn’t been shown before.”

She said that this gradient shows the importance of not asking a “yes or no” question when it comes to disabilities.

“It implies that it’s important to measure inequalities for people on the spectrum [of disability],” she said.

Jaclyn Yap, a doctoral student in economics, who served as the data analyst for the initiative, said that understanding the varying needs of people with different levels of disabilities could help inform policy and resource decisions. The focus has always been on people with “a lot” of disability, she said, and while they study found that those people are struggling more, people with moderate disabilities still need services.

“They shouldn’t be taken for granted,” she said.

Putting the Work into Action

Mitra and her students said that they hope their work can be used by policymakers, researchers, and advocates to provide more resources and support for people with disabilities.

“We wanted it to be useful outside academia. And although we wanted it to be rigorous and scientific, we also took into consideration the general readers, which we’re hoping will advocate for persons with disability,” Yap said. “And also policymakers—they could use this as a means to help push for either laws or more budget for persons with disabilities.”

Funding for the project runs at least for another year, so Mitra said that they will include a new comparative analysis next year with different countries, including the United States.

“I’m hoping this will grow, because I’m hoping the data sets will become better and better, especially with the round of 2020 censuses,” Mitra said. “It’s starting with myself and seven students, and I hope it will grow into an international partnership among multiple universities.”

The Disability Data Initiative can be found at disabilitydata.ace.fordham.edu.

“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.

“We wanted to get into quality education, the ability to move around the city in our communities, the ability to get jobs, get paid, live in the community, get married, have children. And I think … we realized we could make a difference if we did it ourselves.”

These words come from Judith “Judy” Heumann, a 72-year-old pioneer of the disability rights movement recently featured in TIME’s list of the most influential women of the past century. Heumann reflected on her life of activism at Fordham’s fifth annual Distinguished Lecture on Disability, “The Disability Rights Movement: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, and Where We Need to Go,” in a Zoom webinar on Oct. 14. 

A Five-Year-Old ‘Fire Hazard’ Girl

Heumann became New York City public schools’ first teacher in a wheelchair after winning a landmark court case. She helped spearhead the passage and implementation of federal civil rights legislation for disabled people, including the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504, a federal law that prevents discrimination against individuals with disabilities. She also served in various leadership roles, including the World Bank’s first adviser on disability and development and the first special adviser for international disability rights under the Obama administration. In recent years, she has been working to change the portrayals of disabled people in the media as a senior fellow for the Ford Foundation. 

At the beginning of the webinar, she recalled that when she was a five-year-old girl with polio, the principal of a local school told her she couldn’t attend classes because she was a “fire hazard.”

“As I was getting older and meeting other disabled people, in my special ed classes and then at camp, it was becoming very apparent that we were facing discrimination without any real group of people speaking up against discrimination,” said Heumann, who had joined students earlier that day for a Q&A about the recent film Crip Camp, which featured the stories of disabled teens—including Heumann—at camp in the 1970s and their role in igniting the disabilities civil rights movement.

In that same period, she said, she also saw scores of people on TV standing up for civil and women’s rights across the country. They inspired her to lead demonstrations, start new organizations, and use legislation to fight discrimination directed toward the disability community, all while working closely with the community, religious leaders, and labor unions.

“All [these]types of activities were what enabled congressional representatives and U.S. senators to understand that the discrimination that disabled people were facing was not something that happened once in a while,” Heumann said. “It happened in every community, in every state—and it happened regularly.” 

Ongoing Obstacles for the Disability Community

In the wake of much progress, the disability community continues to struggle, said Heumann. Many Americans don’t realize they have a disability protected by law; others face stigmas and repercussions related to their disability, she said. There is a disproportionate number of disabled individuals in juvenile and adult facilities—people who may not have ended up in prison if they’d received “appropriate services along the way.” There isn’t enough money being dedicated to education for both nondisabled children and disabled children on local, state, and countrywide levels, she said, and many teachers-in-training at colleges and universities are not taught how to teach students in inclusive settings. 

Toward the end of the evening, the moderator of the event, Navena Chaitoo, FCRH ’13, a research manager at New York City mayor’s office of criminal justice, asked Heumann how people could take specific steps to help the disability community. 

“We’re talking about stronger parent training programs. We’re talking about better programs in universities for teachers, principals, and superintendents,” Heumann said. “We’re talking about our local school boards. Who are the people that you’re electing? … Are they fighting for you and your kids with disabilities?” 

“It all gets, to me, back to voting and knowing the people who are running for office and being more demanding and working collaboratively together.”

‘We Need to Normalize This’

In a Q&A, an audience member asked Heumann how society could lower stigmas around “invisible disabilities” like mental illness. 

“You look at Covid right now, and we’re talking about people having increased anxiety, increased depression, other mental health disabilities, and our inability to speak about this is both harmful to the individual person, to the family, and to the community at large. And so I think like with each category of disabled people, we need to normalize this,” Heumann said. She added that that specific movement needs to be led by people who have psychosocial disabilities themselves, like Andrew Imparato, executive director at Disability Rights California, who has openly spoken about his experience with bipolar disorder. She emphasized that we need to listen to people’s experiences and try our best to understand them. Lastly, she noted the importance of advocacy across generations and for youths, including students, to stand up for themselves. 

“Most importantly is allowing people the space and giving people the protections that they need,” Heumann said. “We have 61 million disabled people in the United States. If 5 million of us on a regular basis were speaking up and speaking out, it would have an amazing impact.” 

The live Zoom lecture, which featured two American Sign Language interpreters and live captioning, comes under two key initiatives on disability at Fordham: the disability studies minor and the research consortium on disability. The event was organized by the Faculty Working Group on Disability and co-sponsored by the offices of the provost and chief diversity officer, the Graduate School of Education, the School of Law, the Gabelli School of Business, the Graduate School of Social Service, and the departments of economics and English. 

Watch the full webinar in the video below: 

“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.”