BUSSW PhD Graduate Receives Ford Fellowship

Boston University congratulates Silvia Dominguez (PhD ’05), the first School of Social Work PhD graduate to receive the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Diversity Fellowship for Achieving Excellence in College and University Teaching. “I could not be any happier,” says Dominguez. “I can’t believe that my project beat so many others.”

In 2005, Silvia Dominguez received her PhD in Sociology and Social Welfare Policy from Boston University’s School of Social Work. Along with 119 outstanding scholars, she is now a proud recipient of the 2009-10 Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship. “Many apply for a few slots,” she says. “I believe its 30 per year…it covers all disciplines in academia. The Ford Foundation is an extremely prestigious foundation….I know that now I will be a Ford Fellow forever and this places me into a network of highly prestigious academics.”

The Ford Diversity Fellowship awardees are selected from a competitive national pool, and are made to those individuals who have shown superior academic achievement, are committed to a career in teaching and research at the college or university level, show promise of future achievement as scholars and teachers, and are well prepared to use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students. Administered by the National Research Council of the National Academies, the Ford Foundation seeks to increase the racial and ethnic diversity of the nation’s college and university faculties, maximize the educational benefits of diversity, and to increase the number of professors who can and will use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students. Dominguez has received the fellowship award to finish work on her book, Social Flow: Immigrants and Social Mobility, a framework describing the way in which Latin American immigrant women get ahead based on three years of ethnographic research in two public housing developments in two neighborhoods in Boston. Says Dominguez, “The framework is applicable to any immigrant population to see how effective it is in helping to promote mobility.” The book will be published by New York University Press.

“I think there is great interest in finding out how Latin Americans are doing because they are the largest minority in the US, and we lack knowledge in terms of finding how they get ahead.” Coming up with a framework helps, she feels, to see how policy can intervene with the potential for social mobility. She adds, “The Latin American population has been arriving in the US since 1965…many of them are living in highly disadvantaged neighborhoods which curtail the social prospects of those living in them. It is important to me to find out what factors allow immigrants to get ahead despite the fact that they are residing in these areas.”

As a graduate of BU’s Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Sociology and Social Work, Dominguez feels the Ph.D. program prepared her well for her career. “I chose BUSSW because they had an interdisciplinary program in social work and sociology…I had a background in social work but wanted the sociological training,” she says. “I was given the opportunity to combine what you could consider to be both macro and micro understandings…individual behavior as well as the structural components that give rise to that behavior.”

She adds, “That was the best part of the program for me…being able to combine an understanding of human behavior with their human environment. By adding in sociological theory to purely social work education, you get a much greater understanding about why and how society behaves the way it does to affect individuals.”

Dominguez’ dissertation was a comparative ethnography of Latin-American immigrant women living in public housing in two different Boston neighborhoods. Her study focused on how racial dynamics affect the social networks and access to neighborhood resources of the women she followed during three years of longitudinal ethnographic interviews and participant observation. Her research stems from her work as a family and neighborhood ethnographer for the Welfare, Children & Families- three city study where she was supervised by Connie Williams and William J. Wilson who head the project in Boston. Silvia has already published some of the results of her research in an article in the Journal of Social Problems. Dissertation funding was awarded to Dominguez from The US Department of Housing and Development, The Woodrow Wilson Foundation, The National Association of Social Workers, and the American Association of University Women.

Says Professor Sara Bachman, the new incoming director of the PhD program at BUSSW, “Sylvia’s enthusiasm for social work values and social justice serve as a model for those of us who were privileged to work with her while she was at Boston University. We look forward to her continued success as a result of the contributions she will make through her Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Diversity Fellowship.”

Currently Assistant Professor of Sociology and Human Services at Northeastern University, Dominguez was born in Chile and came to the United States as a political refugee. Her areas of expertise include immigration, race relations, public housing, and mental health and violence.

Submitted by Farha Sandhu