Baruch College Professors Win Seed Grants for Black Race and Ethnic Studies Research Projects

Baruch College Professors Win Seed Grants for Black Race and Ethnic Studies Research Projects

August 6, 2024

Elizabeth Heath and Nicholas Sibrava, professors at Baruch College's Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, are among 32 researchers who will receive seed grant funding through The City University of New York's Black Race and Ethnic Studies (BRES) PhD program.

The BRES Collaboration Hub is an intellectual home for convening faculty and doctoral students interested in interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research across CUNY. The Hub is a component of BRESI-a CUNY-wide initiative that aims to reimagine and transform University programs in Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies.

Since 2022, BRESI has awarded $1.9 million in grant funding to support and seed promising work to advance its mission across the University.

Elizabeth Heath, PhD: A Focus on Economic Refugees

Dr. Elizabeth Heath, an associate professor in the Department of History, will use the grant funding to work on a third book project looking to answer the question: "Why is economic impoverishment not a basis for refugee status?"

According to Heath, economic refugees are "persons whose economic prospects have been devastated in their country of origin and who are motivated by oppressive poverty to move another place where they have a chance to earn a livelihood."

Heath will be taking a historical approach to understand the origins of the United Nations (UN) refugee policy, and the conditions under which economic refugees were excluded from protection and the right to asylum.

She will explore the ways France and Britain, founding members of the U.N. Security Council, the organization's refugee policy, and how their agenda was supported by the United States, which practiced segregationist polices at home.

Heath wants to understand how racialized stereotypes about the work ethos of colonial subjects and denials of colonial poverty that had coalesced over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries played a significant role in shaping UN decisions to omit economic refugees from international asylum policy. As a result of this exclusion, Heath argues that the 1951 Refugee Convention became a powerful mechanism for imperial (soon to be post-imperial) powers to structure the global flow of labor particularly from former colonies to former metropoles.

Real-World Applications

She states, "The stakes for understanding the origins of this absence are significant given that the Convention created an enduring legal structure with real world implications for populations that move not voluntarily, but out of extreme want and need. The economic impoverishment they flee is often human-made, the result of extractive economies that have laid to waste environmental resources, rendered landscapes uninhabitable, and otherwise eliminated economic opportunities."

Heath adds, "These conditions will become even more dire in future years with the advance of climate change; thus, this research is timely."

Heath hopes her research will contribute to policy changes that will lead to a more equitable asylum policy as well as foster greater cooperative action to combat climate change and environmental racism on a global scale.

Nicholas Sibrava, PhD: Smartphone App for Study on Daily Experiences with Discrimination Affect African Americans

For Dr. Nicholas Sibrava, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, the BRES Faculty Fellowship will support his previous work exploring the nature and course of anxiety and related mental health challenges in individuals from underrepresented backgrounds.

Sibrava is examining the interactions between key sociocultural variables in African Americans (such as cultural identity, experiences with discrimination) and the regulation of stress and risk for anxiety. He wants to understand how their daily experiences with discrimination impacts mood and stress levels, and how they cope with and respond to these negative experiences in their daily lives.

His study will use a smartphone app to track individuals' daily experiences and mental and emotional wellness over two weeks.

According to Sibrava, one of the most common ways to understand the factors that may contribute to mental health is simply asking people to tell us about their experiences retrospectively - in other words, to think back and try to remember what they experienced, how they felt, and how they coped with those feelings.

"But these retrospective studies all suffer from a fundamental limitation - namely, that our memories for looking back on how we felt and behaved in situations that may have happened a long time ago are not as good as we would like to believe that they are (for example, do you remember what you ate for lunch on a Tuesday afternoon three months ago? Or what you wore on June 13?), and therefore it can be really difficult to get good details using retrospective methods," Dr. Sibrava says.

That is why using smartphones to track participants' experiences in near real-time to collect detailed data on the types of encounters they have, their emotional reactions to them, and the coping strategies they used to manage them will help analyze their overall mental health, he explains.

"This information may provide us with concrete knowledge about how people are (or are not) effectively coping with discrimination in their daily lives and what factors convey resilience, which is invaluable information that can be directly translated to our mental health interventions for people from underrepresented backgrounds who may encounter these negative experiences in their daily lives."

Real-World Applications

"This research applies to the real world in several ways. First, it is taking research out of the lab and conducting it directly in the real world - participants will be living their real, everyday lives, and our study will allow us to peek into their experiences throughout the day to see what they are actually experiencing in the moment.

"Secondly, this information may provide us with concrete knowledge about how people are (or are not) effectively coping with discrimination in their daily lives and what factors convey resilience, which is invaluable information that can be directly translated to our mental health interventions for people from underrepresented backgrounds who may encounter these negative experiences in their daily lives."

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