Lorraine Torres Colón, a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the Graduate Center, researches gendered violence, mental health outcomes, and economic disparities among colonial migrants in the United States. For her dissertation, she is conducting a spatial analysis of gendered violence and the presence of mood disorders in Puerto Rico, a project that requires her to harmonize different sources of data — including police data for domestic violence reports, orders of protection, and femicides — with census data and other sources of demographic information. Thanks to members of her New York City Reducing Inequality Network (RIN) cohort, she learned about advanced methodology classes at NYU and Columbia that have helped with her analysis.
Torres Colón (second from right) with her RIN cohort at the Inequality by the Numbers 2019 workshop
Torres Colón was the first Graduate Center student to be named a RIN Scholar. The RIN program is led by professors at the Graduate Center, Columbia University, and New York University who have joined together to encourage collaboration and connections among faculty and graduate students in New York City whose research is aimed at reducing inequality. At the Graduate Center, those efforts are led by Professor Leslie McCall, the associate director of the Stone Center. Since its launch four years ago, the program has become an integral part of the Stone Center; five students associated with the center are scholarship recipients.
“The RIN program was the first Stone Center program to focus specifically on supporting graduate students through grants rather than through research assistant positions, and to support students from groups that have been unfairly underrepresented in the academy,” McCall says. “These features were then woven into subsequent student-focused programs, such as the Stone Center Junior Scholars program.”
RIN Scholars receive $5,000 that can be used in the first three years of their doctoral studies to help cover expenses, such as travel to conferences, hiring research assistants, or purchasing equipment or data. As part of the program’s mentorship goals, each student is assigned a committee that may include a faculty member from a university other than their own, increasing their opportunities to develop connections with professors and graduate students across the city. The program is funded by the William T. Grant Foundation and the three universities.
Torres Colón applied some of her scholarship funding to attend the University of Michigan’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) summer program. Before coming to the Graduate Center, she worked in immigration law, but she felt most comfortable in academic environments and wanted to serve her community in a way that best capitalized on her skills. She chose the Graduate Center because of the Sociology department’s history of working on immigration issues and the school’s commitment to engaging with the public. “For me, moving into academia felt like moving away from my community,” she says. “If I was going to do that, I wanted to do that in a place that really promotes the gathering of knowledge for the public good.”
Two years ago, Daniela Adriana Tagtachian was a community lawyer for the University of Miami School of Law Environmental Justice Clinic. Her work often sent her to City Hall, where she tried to get various anti-displacement strategies heard and passed, such as making affordable housing a part of building permits. With community partners, she also designed a displacement vulnerability and mitigation tool aimed at protecting communities that were being upzoned. However, she was told by government officials that this tool wasn’t enough: she needed data to prove that residents were being displaced. “I talked to anybody that would listen at the law school about this,” she says. “And they said, ‘Well, either get a Ph.D. to get the data, or let this go and figure out a different way.’” Tagtachian decided to get a Ph.D.: she is now a second-year sociology student. (Read an interview with Tagtachian here.)
August Smith, a third-year sociology student and RIN Scholar, researches the sociology of emotion, and has recently focused on the roles that empathy and perspective play in racial inequalities in education. “Teachers’ emotions and the ways they are able to empathize with students affects the way that they teach and interact with students,” explains Smith, who is using the New York City School Survey to compare students’ perceptions of their schools with their teachers’. They are drawing on Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racialized Emotion Theory, which argues that emotions are experienced in racialized ways.
The concept is closely tied with reducing inequality. “If we can learn to de-racialize our own emotions, and to start experiencing emotions along with people of other races, then we can reduce inequality,” they say. “And if teachers can find ways to better practice perspective-taking with their students of color, that in turn will help them to provide a better education.” The RIN scholarship allowed Smith to build the computer needed for their quantitative work; like Torres Colón, Smith plans to attend the ICPSR summer program, with the goal of “setting my research a little higher than it might have been.”
The two newest Stone Center RIN scholars started as Ph.D. students this fall. In addition to attending school full time, Sauda Muhammad works full time at the New York Blood Center, where she manages the lab for infectious disease prevention. The lab is responsible for running Covid-19 and HIV vaccine longitudinal studies, clinical trials, and prevention studies, and is also conducting a Covid-19 observational study. Despite the demands on her time, the job and school work well together. “I always knew I wanted to focus on the social determinants of health and data analysis,” Muhammad says. “We do a lot of socio-behavioral studies at the lab, and I’m able to run additional trials for my classes while going to school.” Before starting graduate school, she was the project manager of an HIV longitudinal observational study in Washington, where she learned how to manage critical protocols and to process clinical specimens. She hopes to focus her research on public health and the social determinants of health among Black residents of large urban areas, such as New York, Philadelphia, or Washington.
Suleyma Vergara-Tapia researches deep and extreme poverty, social policies, and income inequality as it relates to women, children, and immigrants. She became interested in these topics after taking a course on women’s labor and the economy, which focused on the different constraints, choices, and economic models used to explain women’s behavior. “After taking this class I realized I wanted to contribute to the discussion around the inequalities experienced by single women and their children,” she says. “Having grown up in an immigrant-headed, single-parent household, I felt I could offer some insights into the types of inequalities experienced by marginalized groups.” Before coming to the Graduate Center, Vergara-Tapia, a first-generation college student, earned a master’s in public policy and worked at the University of the Pacific’s Center for Business and Policy Research, where she researched the transportation needs of the transit-dependent population of the state’s rural counties.
So far, the pandemic has kept Muhammad and Vergara-Tapia from meeting their fellow RIN Scholars in person. However, the three universities hosted a virtual gathering last year in which students presented their research on reducing inequality. “Ahead of the event, faculty provided feedback on the PowerPoint presentations of each student, and this fostered an exchange among faculty and students across the different universities,” McCall says. Looking forward, the network is planning a virtual event for this spring, and it hopes to hold an in-person event in the fall, giving all the RIN Scholars the chance to make the most of their network.