BUSSW Doctoral Students Research Urban Inequities with ‘Early Stage’ Grant Awards

Thursday, May 30, 2019

This year, two BUSSW doctoral students are receiving Early Stage Research Awards from Initiative on Cities, an urban leadership institute at Boston University that works to advance civic leadership and support cities. The students, Megan Smith and Catalina Tang Yan, will receive seed funding for research that addresses urban inequities.

Smith’s project, titled “Locked Out: Examining the Use of Urban Housing Admissions Policies to Systematically Exclude Poor Renters,” examines the admissions policies of HUD-funded affordable housing providers in all 39 of Rhode Island’s municipalities. A first-year doctoral student and outreach worker for thirteen years, Smith posits that these policies create barriers to housing for individuals with criminal records, poor landlord histories, and poor credit scores. Smith plans to use the study’s findings to reform housing admissions policies and expand access to housing for people who have been systematically excluded.

“I’m thrilled about this project because it allows me to bridge my work as an outreach worker in Rhode Island’s homeless community with my role as a doctoral student at Boston University,” says Smith. “It is particularly exciting that the [funding] will allow us to pay two people with lived experience of homelessness to be part of the research. Their expertise will help ensure that this research remains true to the experience and needs of the community it’s meant to benefit.“

Tang Yan’s research also addresses social inequity, but through a different lens: language. Her project, titled “Partnering with Families with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) to Promote Language Justice and Equity in Education Settings,” will use community-based participatory research approaches to work with families whose first language is not English, community advocates, and interpreters. Through focus groups with LEP families in the Greater Boston, Tang Yan – in collaboration with Associate Professor Linda Sprague Martinez, a Community Advisory Team, and Massachusetts Advocates for Children (MAC) – will explore the cultural and linguistic barriers that these families face in education settings and gather recommendations to achieve language justice and equity.

Including Smith and Tang Yan, the Initiative awarded seed funding to thirteen recipients in 2019. All Boston University faculty and graduate students are eligible to apply for the Early Stage Research Awards, which are selected annually. For information on the other 2019 grant recipients, see the Initiative’s overview here.