“It’ll be the first time that my husband and I are bringing our daughter to the Fordham campus,” she said of Jubilee Weekend, to be held May 31 to June 2. The couple were married in the University Church in 2015 and welcomed a baby girl this spring. They’re among hundreds of alumni planning to return to campus for the festivities.

“I’m really looking forward to meeting up with some friends who also have kids—who will be bringing them to Fordham for the first time—because it’s just such a special place for us and we’re really looking forward to introducing them to it,” said Schwall-Pecci, a 2009 Fordham College at Rose Hill graduate.

Building a Skillset

Meeting her husband, Robert Pecci, GABELLI ’08, on campus isn’t the only reason Fordham holds a special place in the Long Island native’s heart. Rose Hill is also where she found faculty mentors. She majored in biology and minored in chemistry and sociology, which helped her build both the hard and soft skills needed to launch a successful career in health care communications, she said.

Working closely with professor Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., during her sophomore year, Schwall-Pecci researched nanotubes and protein hormones with the potential to advance drug delivery and the treatment of diabetes. She later earned a Clare Boothe Luce fellowship, which enabled her to conduct research in Germany the summer before her senior year. And after graduating from Fordham, she earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry.

A Sense of Belonging

She also found that Fordham’s Jesuit identity instilled in her—and other students—“a sense of belonging and wanting to give back, and feeling like you’re a part of a community that is responsible for helping better the world around you.”

That commitment to giving back is why she’s chosen a career path that enables her to promote better public health. As a senior vice president at BGB Group, she works to make complex scientific concepts and information accessible for patients. She’s also a longstanding volunteer with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. She first began volunteering with the organization after her father died from cancer when she was a student at Fordham.

When her father was diagnosed, she “was overwhelmed and naive to the fact that anything bad could actually happen to him,” she recently wrote for BGB Group. Her mother felt “numb, in denial, confused, frustrated, overwhelmed, helpless, and hopeless,” Schwall-Pecci shared. It’s an experience that fuels her commitment to helping patients and their families process their diagnoses, ask the right questions, and make informed decisions about their health care.

Staying Connected with Her Fellow Rams

Following graduation, Schwall-Pecci was a member of the Young Alumni Committee, an advisory and programming board for graduates of the past 10 years. She’s past that 10-year cap now, but she’s stayed connected to Fordham however she can—participating in panels, mentoring students, and speaking at events. And her first impression of the Rose Hill campus still rings true.

“I just felt like the people who were going there, who had chosen to go to Fordham, had a similar kind of mindset and values as I had and were the kind of people that I wanted to surround myself with,” she said.

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
Health education and access to quality medical care and information. Medicine is inherently defined by specialized language that may not be the easiest to digest, especially when you are newly diagnosed. I want everyone to feel empowered to make decisions with their care providers and ask informed questions.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Take what you do seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously! It’s all about enjoying the journey—be committed to what you are passionate about, but don’t worry about making mistakes or changing your mind along the way.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
This is so hard—how do I choose? In NYC, it is honestly probably the Fordham campus in the Bronx, as cheesy as that sounds. That is where I met my husband and we got married, so it will always be one of my happy places. And in the world, it is likely Abisko, in the very north of Sweden, where I saw the northern lights!

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
Probably The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It is a fascinating look at the evolution of our approach to understanding and treating cancer. It appeals to me both professionally and also personally, as I lost my dad to leukemia when I was a student at Fordham.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
There are too many to name, but Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., in the chemistry department was my research mentor while at Fordham. She is so passionate about the research she conducts and the students she mentors, which inspired me to commit myself to my own work and always put forward 110% in my studies.

Interested in hearing more of Schwall-Pecci’s story? Listen to her episode of the Fordham Footsteps podcast.

That’s why Michelle Rufrano, an adjunct sociology professor, decided to plan her upcoming course a little differently this time—by using a new AI tool.

Rufrano is the CEO of CShell Health, a media technology company that aims to curate health information and use it to help create social change. She worked with her business partner, Jean-Ezra Yeung, a data scientist with a master’s in public health, to develop an augmented intelligence tool that can sift through hundreds of thousands of articles of research and synthesize them into various themes.

Rufrano recently used the tool to plan her Coming of Age: Adulthood course at Fordham, sourcing readings from scholarly articles available on PubMed, an online biomedical literature database. The tool organized those articles into knowledge graphs—or geometric visualizations that map out correlations and topics that are most present in the research, without a professor having to manually sort through article titles and abstracts.

According to Rufrano, this method allowed her to plan her curriculum and readings much more efficiently.

“It cuts the research time in half,” Rufrano said. “That kind of document review would usually take me about four months of looking through all of that data. It’s down to about two weeks.”

Rufrano’s course explores the life course theory, which aims to analyze the structural, social, and cultural contexts that shape human behavior from birth to death. As a relatively unique field, Rufrano said it can be challenging to find materials, particularly those that include the most recent research. She said their AI tool is uniquely suited to solve this problem.

“I would have never found some of these studies that came up in the knowledge graphs, because they were published last month, and just would have probably escaped the regular search engines,” Rufrano said. “You would have had to put in some very specific language that you wouldn’t have necessarily known to use.”

Rufrano said it is crucial that students are exposed to a mix of current research in addition to classical works when preparing to enter careers in the field.

“That is so valuable for students who are going into a very volatile workforce. They need to have this very up-to-date information,” she said

Future Uses for the AI Tool

Rufrano and Yeung met while studying for a master’s in public health, and went on to form CShell Health, which uses augmented intelligence to reframe consumer health information and make it more accessible. The course planning model was an early experiment in what they hope will be a total reimagining of public health literacy.

“We can address really salient issues like how institutional discrimination is embedded in language,” Rufrano said. “If we can see the vulnerabilities in the data, then we can correct for the bias in the research. That’s my dream for the company.”

“They’re writing for the academic audience, but what about us high school students?” asked Suvanni Oates, a high schooler from Bronxdale High School who is an intern for the project. “What about us students who can’t receive that message that they’re trying to send in that way?” 

From June 14 through 16, Fordham welcomed 12 scholar-authors from multiple universities alongside local New York City high school students and Fordham undergraduates for a writing workshop where they could all learn from each other. 

Creating New Articles—and TikTok Videos

“High school students were introduced to undergraduates [and they are]working with linguistic anthropologists, our authors. We prepared student teams to each read one author’s paper and give feedback on what they understood, what they didn’t understand, what spoke to them,” said Ayala Fader, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Fordham and founding director of both the Demystifying Language Project and Fordham’s New York Center for Public Anthropology, which is launching next year. 

During the workshop, held at the Lincoln Center campus, teams of undergrads and high school students worked with their author to “transpose” previously published articles into two-page digital pieces in language teens can understand. Students even spent a day making TikToks that conveyed the main messages of the articles.

“To hear [the authors’]perspective and actually work with them in person, that was the cool part,” said one of the Bronxdale high schoolers, Athalia McCormack.

The resulting 12 papers will be published as a multimedia open educational resource on the website for Fordham’s New York Center for Public Anthropology.

“Our long-term goals include housing these 12 digital pieces on an interactive website that will be free to use,” said Fader. “We hope that this is going to be a resource for high school teachers to use in existing curricula and also for high school students to experiment with social science, especially linguistic anthropology, which is not part of most curricula in NYC public schools.” 

Fordham Students See the Impact

Sitara Vaidy, who graduated from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in May with a psychology and sociology major, was one of the Fordham students working on the project. She said the workshop “allowed the high school students to better understand the significance of fields such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics, etc., and the interesting and important work that they produce.”

Theater and anthropology major Ashira Fischer-Wachspress, FCLC ’23, who also worked with the teams, said she appreciated the justice aspect of the work.

“I am very grateful for the opportunity to have met so many fascinating, driven people working for social justice,” she said. 

Expanding into Communities

The DLP is also planning to use the short articles in a summer institute for high school students, where they will study language and power in their own communities. The following summer they plan to host a teacher-training institute. 

“By demystifying students’ own experiences with language, the DLP strives to create a grounded, hands-on, potentially life-changing set of social justice tools for high school students and teachers and the faculty and undergraduates who collaborate with them,” Fader said.  

The DLP has been externally supported by a Spencer Conference Grant and a Wenner-Gren Workshop Grant. Internal support comes from an Arts and Sciences Dean’s Challenge Grant and Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, who hosted the pilot project in 2019, and will be collaborating on future programs. Fordham members of the organizing committee include Johanna Quinn, Ph.D. (sociology); Britta Ingebretson, Ph.D. (MLL); and Crystal Colombini, Ph.D. (the Writing Center), who were joined by Mike Mena, Ph.D. (Brooklyn College); Justin Coles, Ph.D. (UMass); Lynnette Arnold, Ph.D. (UMass); Bambi Schieffelin, Ph.D. (NYU), and high school teacher Scott Storm (Harvest Collegiate). 

Sociology is “unrecognized in its potential,” said Josephine Ruggiero, Ph.D., GSAS ’70, ’73, professor emerita of sociology at Providence College. It presents rich possibilities for cross-disciplinary research, as shown by an online journal she founded. And, she said, it often refutes widely accepted notions about societal problems.

“One of the things sociologists have done more and more … is to test out ‘common sense’ notions against real data and to see whether they are supported,” she said. “Many times, in fact, they’re not.”

To invest in its next generation of practitioners, Ruggiero is creating a Fordham scholarship—via a bequest—for undergraduate students majoring in sociology who are aiming for public service or social justice-related careers.

She spent her career helping sociology students grow as researchers and get professional experience. In the classroom, she taught research methods and statistics, as well as introduction to sociology—a class she thinks everyone should take.

“Sociology was the first great love of my life,” she said, “because it really helps you to understand not only yourself and the life circumstances from which you come and the situations into which you move, but also the bigger picture of how other people operate.”

Refuting Stereotypes

Ruggiero discovered sociology as an undergraduate at Albertus Magnus College before earning master’s and doctoral degrees in the field at Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she specialized in urban sociology, research methods, and social statistics.

Rigorous sociological research “grounded in data” often contradicts so-called common knowledge, she said. For instance, past studies have shown that, contrary to the stereotype of being “lazy and looking for a handout,” nearly all welfare recipients are elderly, mentally ill, physically challenged, or children of mothers who have few skills, she said.

Also, studies have shown that rape is most often a learned behavior, rather than something driven by mental illness, she noted. Another study found that children who have no siblings, far from being more spoiled and selfish, tend to be more mature and socially adept than those who do.

Ruggiero taught sociology at Providence College for 41 years and founded the New England Undergraduate Research Conference in Sociology, which ran at the college for 20 years, through spring 1995. In the 1980s, she offered an applied sociology course with an internship component. She later developed two internship courses that placed sociology and women’s studies students in government agencies, the public defenders’ office, and various nonprofits and human service agencies.

Today she serves as editor in chief of an online journal, Sociology Between the Gaps: Forgotten and Neglected Topics, featuring research in sociology but also in global studies, political science, health services, and other areas.

Ruggiero founded it in 2014—the year she retired from teaching—to show students the growing importance of sociology. “The more complex the world gets,” she said, “the more it matters.”

Scholarship gifts support advance Fordham’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. Learn more about the campaign and make a gift.

In her novel, Garcia tells the intertwined, intergenerational stories of a group of women, starting in 1866 with María Isabel, a cigar factory worker affected by the bloody stirrings of Cuban nationalists’ fight for independence from Spain, and ending with two of María Isabel’s descendants whose fates converge with those of a Salvadoran mother and daughter in present-day Miami.

As the women’s stories progress, Garcia, who studied sociology and communications at Fordham College at Rose Hill, tackles opioid addiction, migrant women in detention, and the stories told and untold that shape their lives and legacies.

Hispanic Women uses both social science and literature to examine the changing roles of Latina women in society with regard to Latino men, motherhood, the labor force, sexual awareness, media, political and economic power, and women’s liberation. Using literature as a lens, students in Rodríguez’s course examine the structural position and changing concepts of Hispanic women in the Americas.

And visiting authors like Garcia help with this exploration. A few weeks before her visit, students also heard from Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, the author of Daughters of the Stone and Woman of Endurance.

During November’s hourlong Zoom session, Garcia, who has her own fond memories of taking a class with Rodríguez before graduating in 2007, shared how Fordham helped shape who she is today, her favorite part of the writing process, and why women figure so prominently in her work.

She also delved into the meaning of “salt” in the novel’s title. Though she was drawn to the word’s versatility and varied connotations, Garcia said she “looked at elements that kept coming up multiple times [as she was writing the novel], and salt was one of those. And it can mean so many things,” from the salt of the ocean and sweat and tears to biblical references.

Liliana Gutierrez, a senior in the Fordham Theatre program, asked Garcia about the nature of history and why she adopted a nonlinear, vignette style for the novel.

Garcia explained that such a structure ensures that the book has “that feeling of stories.”

“When I think about history, I think it’s important to always realize that we’re talking about a story. It’s in the word,” she said. “I knew that I didn’t want to write a sweeping saga that went into all the details of these past characters fully: I wanted glimpses,” like those you have of your own history.

Hannah Berggren, a sophomore majoring in urban studies and sociology, wondered how extensive the research process was for the novel, particularly regarding the intimate details that emerge regarding migrant detention centers and the experiences of the women held there. Garcia drew from her own experiences to fuel those passages, she said: Prior to enrolling in an MFA program in creative writing at Purdue University, she did some organizing work with women in deportation and detention centers.

Rodríguez said she felt that the “section on detention was one of the best” in the book “because you see this coverage in the media where people, or politicians essentially” drop in with platitudes, “but it’s only when you read your descriptions from the women’s perspective that you really get the full picture,” she told Garcia and the class.

Garcia, who also writes poetry and short stories, is at work on her next novel. Though it’s early stages yet, and she’s “still figuring out the meat of it,” she knows one thing for sure: It will center on women characters.

America, as Seen on TV: How Television Shapes Immigrant Expectations Around the Globe

In her latest book, Clara Rodríguez examines the “soft power” of American television in projecting U.S.-centric views around the globe. She analyzes the strong influence TV exercises on both young Americans and recent immigrants with regard to consumer behavior and their views on race, class, ethnicity, and gender.

The book is based on two studies: one focused on 71 immigrant adults over 18 who had watched U.S. TV in their home country, and one focused on 171 U.S.-born undergraduates from the Northeast. Many in the foreign-born group were surprised to find that their experience of the U.S. proved more racially and economically diverse than the mostly white, middle-class depictions of American life that they had seen back home on TV. And substantial majorities of both groups shared the sense that American TV is flawed in that it “does not accurately represent or reflect racial and ethnic relations in the United States.”

Still, Rodríguez notes, TV is “a medium in flux; it has changed greatly in the past decade, and the only thing we can be certain about is that it will continue to change.”

Back from the Brink: Saving Animals from Extinction by Nancy F. Castaldo, MC ’84 (Cornell University Press)

In Back from the Brink, Nancy Castaldo recounts the survival stories of seven species—whooping cranes, alligators, giant tortoises, bald eagles, gray wolves, condors, and bison.

“All of these animal populations plummeted,” she writes, “and yet, all of them survive today.”

She describes how each species got in trouble; relates the often controversial restoration efforts and their results; explains the need for apex predators; offers calls to action for young readers; and pays tribute to a group of “eco-heroes” (including President Richard Nixon, who in 1973 signed the Endangered Species Act) who “look out for the needs of creatures that cohabit this planet, even when these needs may conflict with our short-term economic goals.”

Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family by Kirsten Swinth, Ph.D., associate professor of history and American studies at Fordham (Harvard University Press)

From failed promises of women “having it all” to the contemporary struggle for equal wages for equal work, Kirsten Swinth exposes how government policies often undermined tenets of second-wave feminism during the 1960s and 1970s.

She argues that second-wave feminists did not fail to deliver on their promises; rather, a conformist society pushed back against far-reaching changes sought by these activists.

“My focus is on the story of a broad feminist vision that wasn’t fully realized,” Swinth notes. “There were a lot of gains generally, but the movement also generated an antifeminist backlash so that most of the aspirations, like a sane and sustainable balance for work and family, were defeated.”

She examines activists’ campaigns and draws from them “a set of lessons that we need to inspire us” to continue the fight “with a new energy.”

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll, Ph.D., professor of history at Fordham (Hill and Wang)

To better understand the history of the United States, one should include the people who were displaced from lands they once called home, argues Steven Stoll. That story includes not only Native American tribes evicted by English and later American settlers but also poor whites who once called the mountains of Appalachia home.

In Ramp Hollow, he visits an area just outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, to explore how the people who once lived there were pushed out and forced to surrender a self-sustaining, agrarian life in exchange for a wage-based living tied to coal mining companies and lumber mills.

Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983 by Larry Racioppo, FCRH ’72 (Cornell University Press)

New York City photographer Larry Racioppo honed his art and craft during the 1970s by taking pictures of family, friends, and kids in his working-class South Brooklyn neighborhood.

This collection of his early work highlights families—most of them Italian American, Irish American, and Puerto Rican—as they go about their daily lives, celebrating Catholic sacraments and holidays, playing stickball and congas on the sidewalk, hanging out on stoops and fire escapes, posing with boom boxes in front of graffiti-tagged walls, and taking part in patriotic parades and religious processions.

“I did not know it at the time, but I was recording a part of Brooklyn that would soon be remade by gentrification,” Racioppo writes.

“I can’t think in the face of you telling me who you think I am, with your loud self and your loud eyes and your loud guilt,” she says to Cabell, who is white. “I can’t hear myself think.” She then turns, comes down from the stage, and starts speaking directly to the audience.

It’s a charged moment in the play. And it’s all scripted. What starts out as a sitcom-like family drama becomes an exploration of race and the white gaze. Boateng played Keisha, the youngest member of the Fraser family, who calls out the white audience members for being complicit. “Do I have to keep talking to the white people?” she says, looking to the faces of color in the audience. “Do I have to tell them that I want them to make space for us?”

The monologue was written by Drury, but because Boateng was delivering the lines so frankly every night, she would have to field the audience’s reactions in the moment, from confusion to discomfort to outright anger. She recalls during one performance, when she asked those questions, a white audience member shot back, “Well, why would you want to keep talking to them?” When Boateng didn’t answer him, he said, “Oh, you’re going to keep talking over me. This is a monologue, it’s not a dialogue.” Boateng then went slightly off-script, she says. Without breaking character, she spoke a stern line to the man and continued with her speech.

Her grace under pressure got the attention of artists and critics. In his review for The New York Times, chief theater critic Ben Brantley called the play “dazzling and ruthless,” and wrote, “Ms. Boateng also winds up with the heaviest acting duties, and she executes them with unblinking, confrontational clarity.”

The play’s two-month run ended in August, and since then, Boateng has been keeping busy—shooting a recurring role on a Netflix television show in the city (she can’t say much about it until the show’s premiere in 2019) and finding more stage work.

“I’m the person who always gave myself challenges,” she says over coffee one November afternoon in the lobby cafe at the Signature Theatre, where she was in rehearsal for a revival of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine. (The show runs at the Signature from November 19 to January 6.) Even when she was young, Boateng says, “I would throw myself into the things that scared me.”

It was her bold performance in Fairview that got the attention of Fabulation director, the Obie-winning Lileana Blain-Cruz. “It’s been wonderful working with her,” Blain-Cruz wrote in an email. “She has a joyous spirit and she radiates on stage. Fabulation requires the actors to take on several roles, and MaYaa has done that with specificity and nuance.”

“There’s Room for Us”

With her current projects, like with Fairview, she is pushing herself out of her comfort zone. Which is how she got herself into the arts in the first place.

Boateng grew up in Hyattsville, Maryland, where got her first exposure to performance through stepping. “I joined this Christian performance group with the initiative to give inner-city youth something positive to look forward to, to keep them out of trouble,” she explains. That taste of performance led Boateng to audition for a local performing arts middle school. She got in, and then for high school, she attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Boateng credits the arts for giving her direction and purpose. Growing up in an area where “crime and violence were prevalent,” the world of performance was “a safe home for me,” she explains. Even now, when Boateng goes home to Maryland, she is met with excitement and awe from family and friends. Being a working artist, “it’s unheard of where I’m from,” she says. She tries to go home as much as she can, to show those in her hometown who aren’t always represented in entertainment that “they can do that too. There’s room for us.”

“A Reminder That I Am on the Right Path”

At Fordham, besides majoring in theater, Boateng took classes in sociology and philosophy. She credits the school’s well-rounded core curriculum to making her a “multifaceted artist,” she says. “What I learned is that I can pull from all those experiences and use them for the stage. Being a full person makes you a better artist.” At the start of her senior year, Boateng was named the inaugural recipient of an endowed scholarship established by Fordham alumnus Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, “a reminder,” she says, “that I am on the right path.”

After graduation, Boateng’s first professional gig was in Classical Theatre of Harlem’s July 2013 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was educational because up to that point, she hadn’t done Shakespeare before. Obviously, she had a knack for it. In summer 2017, after earning an M.F.A. in acting at New York University, she played the Soothsayer in Julius Caesar at Shakespeare in the Park, a controversial production in which Caesar was dressed to resemble President Donald Trump.

The show was met by protesters, who occasionally rushed the stage. While it was a scary experience, Boateng says it made her realize she wasn’t going to be satisfied doing work solely within the traditional theatrical paradigm, where the fourth wall can be unyielding and “oppressive,” and audiences have to be quiet. Theatergoers may have been angry at her and her castmates during Julius Caesar and Fairview, but that just meant the work moved them.

“It was exciting to know that this is what theater can do,” she says. “I don’t think people should come to the theater just to watch and go home. If you’re shook a little bit, that’s good.”

“Use Your Experience for Ammunition, and for Empowerment”

The projects that attract Boateng are usually things that are unpredictable. “I want to do work that is exciting,” she says emphatically. “That is bold, that pushes the mold, that doesn’t allow folks to be comfortable, that is about revolution. That gives voice to marginalized folks and says, ‘We exist, we’re here, we’ve been here, and we have stories to tell.’”

And Boateng wants to tell her own story too. She is currently working on a solo show, which recently had a workshop presentation at Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, where she was a resident artist. In the show, she talks about her life in relation to that of singer, actor, and activist Eartha Kitt. She explains that Kitt’s given name was actually Eartha Mae, and the late Kitt considered Mae to be a separate persona.

The notion of masks and different selves fascinates Boateng, whose given name is Yaa, which means “born on Thursday.” As a child in school, she says she felt some shame about her name because her classmates would tease her about it. She wanted to have an American name instead, but her mother, a Ghanaian immigrant, encouraged her to “love the name I was given.”

“She said they can call you Yaa, or MaameYaa, or MaYaa for short, but you are not changing your name,” Boateng recalls. “She taught me the full meaning of my name: MaYaa Amoakowaa Boateng. Amoakowaa can be translated as ‘one who fights,’ and so my mother taught me that I am that little lady born on Thursday who is a fighter.”

Boateng’s solo show, she explains, is about “learning to embrace who I am and where I come from. It’s about coming to a place where you accept the fullness of who you are. And you use your experience for ammunition, and for empowerment.”

So far, part of her experience may have been to make audiences and herself uncomfortable, but through it, Boateng found something valuable: herself.

“When I go into predominantly white spaces, it’s not always that easy to have that voice and to have that command,” she admits. “But I now have courage in my voice as a person of color, saying my voice is important, and I have a lot to offer, I have a lot to say.”

—Diep Tran is the senior editor of American Theatre magazine.

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.

Orlando Rodriguez, a professor of sociology, immigrated to the United States four years before the Cuban revolution began. He says “all in all, it’s a good thing for the Cuban people.

“There will certainly be more economic opportunity for them, although ironically they will most likely lose their privileged status in United States U.S. immigration policy. More than anything, I’m worried about threats to Cuba’s ecology under normal tourism. And like in China, having friendly economic relations doesn’t mean that the benefits spread evenly to the poorest,” Rodriguez says.

(Check out this 2003 piece Rodriguez wrote about sociology in his homeland.)

The new U.S.-Cuba relations has raised research questions for Rose Perez, an assistant professor at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Services, whose work throughout the past few years led her to interview several older Cuban-Americans who left Cuba in the early years following the 1959 revolution.

“Most told me they would only return to Cuba to visit if Cuba returns to a democracy,” she says. “I’ve been wondering all day how they are feeling.”

While interviewing her subjects in 2011, Perez found that many still hold poignant feelings about leaving the island.

“There is a strong attachment to the culture,” Perez said in an interview with Inside Fordham in 2013. “A lot of the participants I interviewed were the ones whose lives were changed by the Cuban revolution [which brought Fidel Castro to power], so they all describe this collective frozen grief about the year 1958 and they remember Cuba as a paradise. For them, it’s like a paradise lost.”

During the interviews, the participants’ grief manifested often. All had Cuban memorabilia in their homes and many of them said they dream of returning to the island one day when Castro’s system of government has ended.

Perez links their homesickness to the theory of ambiguous loss, a kind of loss that can paralyze the grieving process and prevent closure. It signifies that either the lost person, place, or thing is physically absent, but psychologically present—for instance, a mother longing for a missing child; or the lost person, place, or that the thing is physically present, but psychologically absent—for instance, a husband grieving over a wife with dementia.

The first of these definitions applies for Cuban immigrants, said Perez.

“Cuba is physically gone for them but it continues to have a psychological presence, and this important story has yet to be explored in research,” Perez said. “Something I might look at is measuring this experience of loss and its ramifications on well-being in a scientific way….”

Perez has a forthcoming article on this work, which will be published in the Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment in January 2015.

The American Dream of owning a home is suffering a failure to launch for many in Generation X and Y, and it’s not looking promising for the millennials either, according to a new study conducted by Emily Rosenbaum, Ph.D., professor of sociology.

“Since the baby boom generation, young people are far more likely to co-reside in somebody’s household than they are to own or rent,” said Rosenbaum.

The report, “Cohort Trends in Housing and Household Formation Since 1990,” is to be included in a new book published by the Russell Sage Foundation later this year, titled The Lost Decade? Social Change in the U.S. after 2000.

Rosenbaum studied several birth-based cohorts in terms of the housing market, beginning with the Great Depression babies on through to baby boomers, and ending with millennials, whom Rosenbaum refers to as the echo boomers—those born between 1986 and 1995.

“Cohorts matter because as they go through their lifecycles they go through different historical conditions,” said Rosenbaum, citing the Depression and World War II as examples.

Rosenbaum said that the conventional homeownership rate derived from U.S. Census data could produce misleading conclusions because it is based solely on households rather than individuals. Thus, that homeownership rate doesn’t take into consideration young adults who cannot financially strike out on their own who end up living with others.

To address this, Rosenbaum analyzed “headship” patterns, as well as home ownership. In other words, at what point in a person’s life cycle did he or she become the head of an independent household, and then possibly a home owner? When analyzed in this manner, Rosenbaum said, the evidence is overwhelming that recent generational cohorts face great disadvantages and that generational inequalities in home ownership are growing dramatically.

Rosenbaum supplemented her data with surveys from the General Social Survey, which is conducted every other year by the National Opinion Research Center and which asks a range of attitudinal questions.

“I use the survey data to isolate the cohort effect from the effect of the time period and the simple effect of age,” said Rosenbaum.

Rosenbaum noted that baby boomers were the first cohort since the Depression to experience unequal results, with more people competing for less housing. She said the effect has wide-ranging implications.

“Since the baby boomers had a tough time getting housing, they had to accommodate for the situation so they delayed marriage and having children,” she said. “Gen X and Gen Y also have similar problems, but the data I have shows that they exemplify economic insecurity—and the income for the next generation will be even worse off.”

In the concluding remarks of her report, Rosenbaum noted that though the data clearly reflects escalating housing inequality across generations, with recent cohorts (sometimes called Gen Z) doing much worse than their parents, the census doesn’t count people without a fixed residence. Those who hop from the couch of one friend to the couch of another don’t get counted at all, so the true extent of the gap may be hidden. 

That was the conclusion of research by Emily Rosenbaum, Ph.D., professor of sociology, whose report on home ownership was published in March by the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University as part of the US2010 project.

Homeownership, in fact, saw a dramatic decrease for certain groups, between 2001 and 2011, according to Rosenbaum’s report, “Home Ownership’s Wild Ride, 2001-2011.

Between the housing-market collapse and the Great Recession, Rosenbaum found that Generations X and Y are homeowners at a lower rate than their older cohorts were at the same stage of life. In addition, Black households experienced lower rates of homeownership than their White counterparts.

Homeownership among lower income and less educated households also experienced a hit, widening the gap between the high and low socioeconomic households.

“We haven’t seen a drop in the overall home ownership rate this large since the Great Depression,” Rosenbaum wrote. “Losses were particularly large among black households, less-educated households, and households in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution. The unequal pattern of loss considerably widened the ownership gaps between black and white households, highly educated and less-educated, and high- and low-income households.”

It was also noteworthy, Rosenbaum said, that those same groups did not participate in the surge in home ownership during the first half of the decade. Low-income households, black households and non-college-degree households saw “little change” in ownership between 2001 and 2005.

“In contrast, increases of two, three, or four points typified the experience of households headed by college graduates, non-black households, and households in the top 20 percent of the income distribution,” Rosenbaum wrote.

Rosenbaum’s findings are based on six years of data from the March Current Population Survey (CPS; 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, and 2011), capturing the periods immediately before and after the housing bubble’s burst. The full US2010 policy brief can be downloaded here:http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010/Projects/Reports.htm