{"id":60244,"date":"2022-03-18T14:36:59","date_gmt":"2022-03-18T18:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/?p=60244"},"modified":"2022-04-08T16:16:37","modified_gmt":"2022-04-08T20:16:37","slug":"learning-about-barriers-to-economic-mobility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/learning-about-barriers-to-economic-mobility\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning About Barriers to Economic Mobility"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Mara Sassoon<\/h6>\n

In late 2019, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the <\/span>Voices for Economic Opportunity Grand Challenge<\/span><\/a>, a call for ideas from individuals and organizations to broaden the national conversation about poverty and economic mobility. <\/span>Nazli Kibria<\/span><\/a>, a professor of sociology at CAS, teamed up with Karen V. Hansen, a professor of sociology at\u00a0<\/span>Brandeis University, to propose the <\/span>Cascading Lives Project<\/span><\/a>, a website and digital learning toolkit that shares people\u2019s life stories and their experiences of downward <\/span>mobility. They were one of 28 groups who received $100,000 grants for their projects.<\/p>\n

The project\u2019s title refers to the concept of cascading events\u2014such as a loss of income or an illness\u2014that often precipitate subsequent declines, whether social, personal, or financial.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen people undergo a personal or economic crisis and don\u2019t have the resources or the safety net to cope with it, there can be this spiraling, or cascading, process,\u201d says Kibria, a professor of sociology and the associate dean of the faculty for the social sciences. <\/span>\u201cIt was important to us to look at people\u2019s entire life stories because we can\u2019t understand the impact of a crisis unless we look at it over the long term.\u201d
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Nazli Kibria, a Professor of Sociology, studies migration, race, family, and childhood with a focus on South Asia and the Asian American experience.. Her work looks broadly at how social inequalities and injustices impact the lives of families and communities.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of the project\u2019s primary goals is to encourage young adults to change public opinions and negative stereotypes about poverty. The digital toolkit is designed to facilitate conversations about economic inequality and mobility in high school and college classrooms.<\/p>\n

Kibria, Hansen, and their research team, including Max Greenberg, a sociology lecturer at CAS, hope the project combats damaging narratives about poverty in the United States by amplifying a diverse set of voices and experiences.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kibria discussed the project with CAS.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

CAS: How did this project come about?<\/b><\/p>\n

Kibria:<\/b> We had originally submitted the proposal before COVID, and then we received news that we got the grant at the start of the pandemic\u2014a collective cascading moment itself. We scrambled to figure out what we could do and couldn\u2019t do to complete the project in this new environment, but it actually worked out really well. We conducted <\/span>life histories<\/span><\/a> with people over Zoom. We interviewed people three separate times over the course of a year to see how they were coping with the pandemic, which has obviously been an economic shock for a lot of people. We decided to narrow our focus to mostly people working in hospitality because that was a sector that was really impacted from the get-go.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, we are working to create an educational resource website, which we\u2019re hoping will be useful for educators in a lot of different places. We focused on high school teachers and developing the materials for them, but we also think the website and the teaching materials and the stories could be used in college courses.<\/span><\/p>\n

What drew you to this project?<\/b><\/p>\n

It felt very personal because I am a parent of a child with special needs. He\u2019s now an adult, but at the time of his diagnosis and all the years of therapy afterwards for severe intellectual disabilities, I felt sort of the spiraling impact because that is a circumstance where it\u2019s very difficult to hold on to other parts of one\u2019s life. One\u2019s career, relationships with family, friends, and their community\u2014everything is threatened. Fortunately, I had a lot of support, but this project felt very real to me. I could understand how one crisis can just kind of spiral and cascade. I felt like I was on the precipice of that myself.<\/span><\/p>\n

How many interviews did you conduct and how did you find and select interviewees?<\/b><\/p>\n

We interviewed more than 30 people, predominantly in Massachusetts and Georgia. Part of understanding how people cope with crises is the kind of structure of institutional support they have\u2014access to health insurance, things like that\u2014and Georgia and Massachusetts have very different profiles. It was a nonrandom selection process. We contacted various hospitality organizations and associations, groups for restaurant workers, hotel workers, and so forth, and tried to deliberately sample so we had a spread of people in different kinds of jobs and at different career levels. We also tried to get a racially diverse sample.<\/span><\/p>\n

We looked for people who were willing to share a lot about their lives, and to do it over the course of a year. Our goal was to get a varied understanding of people\u2019s lives in these circumstances. So, our methodology was very much qualitative and focused on getting the richest information possible.<\/span><\/p>\n

What else do you hope to do with this project beyond the website and learning modules?<\/b><\/p>\n

We are working to publish academic papers about our findings and hope to write a book. We\u2019re still thinking about that. We have thought about writing a book of biographies and related materials specifically geared toward young adult readers.<\/span><\/p>\n

What lessons can these people\u2019s stories teach us about economic inequality and mobility, and the impact of economic crises on families?<\/b><\/p>\n

One basic lesson, which perhaps is not so surprising, is that the ability to cope with an economic crisis really depends on the resources you have, whether it\u2019s savings, family that is able to provide you with a safety net, those kinds of things. But beyond that, what really came through in our interviews was the impact of support from local government, from school systems, and also from community organizations like churches.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A lack of support can really throw someone off. We spoke with one woman, <\/span>Patricia<\/span><\/a>, and hers is a story that I can very much relate to. She worked as a booking receptionist at a major downtown Boston hotel. Before COVID, she had negotiated a schedule that worked for her childcare needs. She needed the daytime schedule because without it, she couldn\u2019t take care of her children when they came home from school. One of her children has special needs and she needed to be home for his appointments with therapists. Then, when COVID hit, she was furloughed. When the hotel was bringing people back, they couldn\u2019t give her the same schedule and she couldn\u2019t go back to work because she was told that she had to work in the afternoon and evening. So you can see how these cascading events play out.<\/span><\/p>\n

These stories show us the resilience of people and how they creatively cope. These stories are not just about hardship and loss, but also about how people deal with it and, in many ways, rise to the occasion.<\/span><\/p>\n

And how do you hope to change societal attitudes towards poverty, whether it’s through this project or in general?<\/b><\/p>\n

That\u2019s an important question. I think because we are educators, our focus has been on getting younger people to think more broadly about poverty and about economic inequality. We\u2019re convinced that if we can get people to look at someone\u2019s life in its entirety, to see their humanity and their life course, that people will develop a different understanding.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So much of what we see is just a single snapshot of people in poverty, one statistic here and there, whether it\u2019s as X percentage or whatever, but there\u2019s always more behind these figures. If we want to develop empathy, which I think is a critical part of shifting the narrative, we need to get people to understand the human dimension and the long term impact of it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Cascading Lives Project tells stories of hospitality workers during the pandemic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16692,"featured_media":60306,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,4,195],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60244"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16692"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60244"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60484,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60244\/revisions\/60484"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}