Research

A slim and fit old man arrives at the door of the Rui An Senior Center, located in Chinatown, Manhattan. His short, salt-and-pepper hair is trimmed and neatly combed. He wears a navy short sleeve suit with knot buttons in the front and a pair of grey cotton pants. The…...

Sex work, like many forms of labor, has been deeply impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, posing both new challenges and opportunities for workers in industries that are simultaneously characterized by precarity and innovation.  Particularly at the start of the pandemic, the intimate transmissibility of the virus alongside local shelter-in-place orders…...

In the spring of 2020, New York City officials moved 238 unhoused men into the Lucerne Hotel on the Upper West Side. The move was one that benefitted many. In the preceding months, the Lucerne and other hotels had been emptied of their usual clientele—tourists—as a result of the COVID-19…...

During the pandemic we collectively realized the importance of mobility. Central to the concerns of disability advocates for decades, inaccessible public transportation infrastructures are now widely recognized to produce disabling situations and impede the basic right to the city (to borrow an expression from Henri Lefebvre). At the same time,…...

The interview we present here was recorded on May 20, 2021, by Tommaso Bardelli and Zach Gillespie, of NYU Prison Education Program (PEP). It is one of twenty-five interviews that members of PEP Research Collective conducted between September 2020 and July 2021 with people who were incarcerated, or who had…...

This essay originally appeared on Somatosphere, as part of its Dispatches from the Pandemic series. When I ask Willow, an Afro-Puerto Rican young woman in her 20s, if quarantine has helped reduce the stigma of mental illness, she responds: I think it will because now we have something to compare…...

This essay originally appeared on Somatosphere, as part of its Dispatches from the Pandemic series. As a member of NYU’s Disability Equity in the Time of COVID-19 research team during the summer of 2020[1], I had the opportunity to conduct seven virtual interviews by Zoom or phone with autistic adults…...

This essay originally appeared on Somatosphere, as part of its Reworking the Cognitive Bias  series. Scene 1: It’s Sunday afternoon, around one o’clock, and a group of a dozen or so people log onto a video call from their apartments. Occasionally someone’s cat will walk into the frame, obscuring the…...