2023-2024 IHDSC Seed Award Recipients

IHDSC Seed Awards enable faculty to engage in research projects with a demonstrated commitment to interdisciplinary perspectives that seek to dismantle inequality, expand opportunities, and increase social impact. We continue to prioritize proposals that center the voices and knowledge of community stakeholders; feature research teams that include early-career investigators, BIPOC investigators, and/or investigators new to IHDSC or NYU; and integrate collaboration and partnership. Our 2023-2024 awardees, their research teams, and project summaries are listed below.

BRinging the Diabetes Prevention Program to GEriatric Populations in Spanish (BRIDGE-S)

The BRIDGE-S project focuses on reducing the high burden of prediabetes among older (≥65 years) Hispanic individuals in the United States. Currently, evidence-based interventions such as the CDC’s National Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) lack cultural tailoring for this population, leading to limited engagement. Challenges to engagement with the DPP represents a critical gap in prevention for older Hispanic adults, a demographic projected to comprise 18% of people aged 65 and older by 2050. The team’s approach is to culturally adapt an NIH-funded DPP that has been tailored for older adults (BRinging the Diabetes Prevention Program to GEriatric Populations (BRIDGE)) for use with Spanish-speaking participants using the CDC’s Map of the Adaptation Process (MAP) guidance.

The project, which will be conducted in NYU Langone Health's Family Health Centers, involves understanding the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of older Hispanic adults, determining adaptable components of the BRIDGE intervention, and assessing the acceptability of culturally adapted materials using key informant interviews, cross-sectional surveys and focus groups with prospective participants. The study aims to identify factors enhancing engagement among older Hispanic adults to reduce diabetes disparities. Findings will guide the adaptation of BRIDGE intervention sessions and tools through focus groups, leading to a study to assess feasibility in the Spanish-speaking older adult population. These findings will ultimately contribute to the implementation of BRIDGE across varied community settings in New York City.

PI: Dr. Jeannette Beasley, Associate Professor, Nutrition and Food Studies, Steinhardt

Co-PI: Dr. Elaine De Leon, Assistant Professor, Department of Population Health, Grossman School of Medicine

Partner: NYU Langone Health's Family Health Centers

Ethical Learning through Math Teachers’ On-the-Job Collaboration

This project examines math teachers’ ethical learning through their on-the-job collaboration with their colleagues as they work toward equity in math education. Although math teachers’ on-the-job collaboration has been shown to affect their learning of ambitious and equitable math instruction, reform, and anti-racism, ethical learning has not yet been studied despite the significant ethical implications of their instructional choices. To investigate what and how math teachers learn about ethics through on-the-job collaboration, we will ethnographically observe and audiorecord the weekly math department and grade-level planning meetings at a local public middle school where teachers experience internal and external pressure to produce racially equitable outcomes. We will use methods of discourse analysis to identify what ethical learning teachers engage in through these meetings and also what conceptual resources they draw on in their learning.

From our analysis, we will develop a framework for understanding teachers’ ethical learning. This framework will provide the conceptual foundation for future research, including studies that will co-design opportunities for ethical learning with equity-oriented math teachers. By documenting the resources that teachers leverage for ethical learning, this project will also contribute practical insights into how teachers’ ethical learning can be supported, which can inform both pre-service teacher education and the coaching or professional development of in-service teachers.

PI: Dr. Grace Chen, Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow, Teaching and Learning, Steinhardt

Co-PI: Dr. Jasmine Y. Ma, Associate Professor, Teaching and Learning, Steinhardt

Partner: Lower Manhattan Community Middle School

Financing American Apartheid: Leveraging Historical Property Records to Measure the True Impacts of Redlining

This study will assist in positioning the research team to assemble the largest and most comprehensive historical dataset of mortgage lending in the mid-Twentieth Century. For this project, they will focus primarily on proprietary data on historical property transactions in Bexar County, Texas (home to San Antonio) and Franklin County, Ohio (home to Columbus). Although there has been incredible growth in research connecting New Deal housing policies–most notably redlining by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC)–to the rise and intransigence of racial inequality and segregation in the United States, the specific mechanisms connecting HOLC to contemporary outcomes remains obscure. By analyzing the entire universe of property records over several decades (tens of millions of records), they will overcome prior data limitations that have prevented social scientists from fully understanding the contours and impacts of redlining by HOLC and, critically, the much larger Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Specifically, the team will analyze the evolution of HOLC and FHA mortgage lending patterns, comparing them to contemporaneous practices by private lenders, and ask how the practices of HOLC, FHA, and private lenders were both structured by existing residential segregation and contributed to it. This work is critical to understanding the roots of contemporary racial and spatial inequalities in homeownership and neighborhood attainment and informing appropriate policy solutions to the numerous manifestations of structural racism stemming from persistent residential segregation.

PI: Dr. Jacob Faber, Associate Professor, Sociology and Public Service, FAS & Wagner

A Home in the City: The Immigrant Housing Nexus

Two of the greatest challenges facing contemporary cities are (1) surging immigration and (2) soaring housing costs. Yet the interactions between unequal housing systems, migration, and urban outcomes have been largely understudied. In this project Dr. Gonick and her research team will use the case of New York City to examine immigrant housing both historically and contemporarily. Long a city of immigrants, NYC is one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, if not the world. A recent influx of migrants has forced the question of housing to the forefront of policy, activism, and everyday survival. Thus, the research questions guiding this project include: how do migrants secure housing within the city? How do housing choices affect incorporation and modes of belonging? And, finally, how does housing policy respond to immigrant needs? Using the neighborhood of Cypress Hills/East New York as a pilot study, Dr. Gonick will deploy ethnographic and archival methods to uncover everyday experiences of shelter and survival both contemporarily and historically. She hypothesizes that safe and secure housing, relatively under examined in the migration literature, is a key variable for incorporation and inclusion, but is ever more difficult to access contemporarily because of inequities in the housing market. She also postulates that questions of immigrant shelter shape housing policy, even when not specifically addressed to foreign born populations. In so doing, the project will shed light on the complex relationship between housing, migration, and mobility. As such, it will make an interdisciplinary contribution to discussions in sociology, urban studies and planning, geography, and migration and ethnic studies.

PI: Dr. Sophie Gonick, Associate Professor, Social and Cultural Analysis, FAS

Sista Circles and Black Women Science Teachers: Developing Historically Relevant Science Pedagogy

This research project focuses on the legacy, innovation, and healing of Black women science teachers for the purpose of retaining healthy and restored practitioners. This research will focus on the pedagogical practices of Black women science teachers, and how their personal beliefs and formal education/training has informed their teaching philosophy. Through Sista Circles, the project will create spaces to further inspire Black women science teachers to enact liberatory, anti-racist science curriculum to support students to see themselves as scientists and science-knowledge producers. The project centers the legacy of Black teachers in America as a way to cultivate and connect with the genius of Black teachers today who use their science content expertise to help students better connect with the subject and propose innovative ways for science pedagogy to be used for social change.

The project builds upon Dr. Riley’s theory of Historically Relevant Science Pedagogy, a framework that merges and distinguishes three differential anti-racist educational frameworks: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1994), Liberatory Pedagogy (hooks, 2015), and Historically Responsive Literacy (Muhammed, 2020) and uses them in the context of science teaching and learning. Historically Relevant Science Pedagogy is a framework that uplifts the legacy, healing and innovations of Black women science teachers. A core tenet of the framework comes from using a Black Feminist intersectional lens to make sense of how practitioners engage in curriculum redesign and liberatory practices to amplify students and to aid in the fight for science teaching and learning through a social justice lens.

PI: Dr. Alexis Riley, Assistant Professor, Teaching & Learning, Steinhardt